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What to do after fusion succeeds?


Timothy

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Hello everyone,

I just wanted thoughts on how you think the world should react, post viable fusion.
There will be a huge workforce made redundant. What's the answer?

Mine is re-training and educating for science purposes, but with a crushed economy and no predictable economic future, how would it work?

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Good topic.  Once the world has a safe, clean and endless supply of energy, I have to believe that some of the bright young minds coming along will have an Einstein moment and our paradigms will shift tectonically into some new direction we cannot easily see now.  I suspect it will evolve around AI and post-human intelligence.  Maybe Kurzweil really has glimpsed a part of our future.  The one thing about our species that I doubt will ever change is our desire to explore and to create.

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We will still need technology and 'know how' in order to create, implement, market 'cold fusion'. The economy will simply change from being fossil fuel based to fusion based.

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I'm not sure what you understand by "huge workforce made redundant". The only workforce touched will be the one working for the fossil fuel which isn't too huge globally to begin with. And even then, fossil fuel will still be used in the plastic and herbicide industry, so not everyone in the field will lose their job. Even charcoal are used in BBQ, so there's still a niche market for the industry. Fossil fuel will go through a change akin to the candle market when the electric lighting came to be. We still make candle to this very day.

Also even if the technology is available, it won't be cheap to build the new plants, so fossil fuel will go out slowly. Plus, saving money on the electricity will give people a lot more slack to buy anything else, which would give a boost to the economy in general. It could be a problem regionally, but I don't think it will be something big at the national level, for most countries anyway. 

The worst downside will happen to countries which are highly dependent an fossil fuel for their economy and don't have much other industries to fall back on. That will be a huge geopolitical risk. The Arabian peninsula could well collapse with even more civil wars in the Middle East. On the other end of the spectrum, countries which were highly dependent of fossil fuel imports for their energy will be able to change to a healthier import-export balance.

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What needs to be understood is that in power generation, the fuel is just the beginning.  Following a breakthrough in fusion, even before we look at cold fusion or anything like that we need to look a the next phase of generators, like voltaic cells, energy storage etc, getting the most out of the energy we can create.  

Also bear in mind, with the time it takes to decommission even fossil fuel power plants, let alone fission monsters, you would be looking at implementation over decades.  Economies would have plenty of time to adapt.

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This is the first time I have ever heard that energy from nuclear fusion will be a bad thing. Surely the generation of essentially unlimited supplies of clean electricity can only be a good thing!

Throughout history there have been wars over desirable commodities - land, gold, spices and so on. Oil has been no exception. I am sure we will still find something to fight over - perhaps ridiculous things, like in the satirical Gulliver's Travels in which a war is started over which end an egg should be opened, pointed or rounded - but at least there will be no wars over a commodity that everyone needs - energy.

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3 hours ago, Derek Willis said:

This is the first time I have ever heard that energy from nuclear fusion will be a bad thing. Surely the generation of essentially unlimited supplies of clean electricity can only be a good thing!

Ehh...think of it this way:  Flooding a market with cheap products is never good for the market.

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Throughout history there have been wars over desirable commodities - land, gold, spices and so on. Oil has been no exception. I am sure we will still find something to fight over - perhaps ridiculous things, like in the satirical Gulliver's Travels in which a war is started over which end an egg should be opened, pointed or rounded - but at least there will be no wars over a commodity that everyone needs - energy.

The same wars are going to be fought.  Whether someone has a particular resource is one thing; what really causes wars is access to it.  If someone can't pay, they don't get access, and they have to decide if it is worth fighting to get it.

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12 minutes ago, aquatus1 said:

Ehh...think of it this way:  Flooding a market with cheap products is never good for the market.

It's not a case of flooding the market, it is a case of dramatically bringing the cost down so that globally far more people can have access to large amounts of energy. Surely that is the basis of capitalism. John D. Rockefeller - the most successful of all capitalists - prided himself on the fact that between 1870 and 1900 he reduced the cost of kerosene by a factor of ten, allowing most people in the US to light and heat their homes. Henry Ford did the same with cars; and Steve Jobs with computers. Fusion energy will never be free - such a notion would be ridiculous - but after the initial investments are covered, the amount produced could potentially be enormous, so the cost per kW would drastically fall over time. As for wars, like I said, we will still find something to fight over.

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Yeah, well, it's that initial investment that's the problem, isn't it?  Once you have access, yes, I agree, things are relatively workable, but getting that access is where most of the problems occur.

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1 hour ago, aquatus1 said:

Yeah, well, it's that initial investment that's the problem, isn't it?  Once you have access, yes, I agree, things are relatively workable, but getting that access is where most of the problems occur.

Well, that is the big challenge of this century. Through projects such as ITER, governments are attempting to kick-start the development of viable fusion reactors. Perhaps by the middle of the century private investments will be forthcoming. The kick-start to the fission industry was the unfortunately necessary Manhattan Project. At least this time the motivation is non-military.

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