Life Changing

Here's yet another report on the progress of fusion. To be clear: it's nothing more than another way to boil water to make steam which then spins a turbine connected to a generator which then pushes them wee little electrons down the wire.

It's a long-ish piece, but doesn't (as none that I've seen do) discuss the implications for how we would run a society or economy mostly, if not solely, on wee little electrons in the wire. In particular, the winners, based on current conditions, would be the Europeans (and some Asians) who still have a substantial infrastructure of electric transport. The USofA used to, but as is well known (not propaganda), GM bought up many city light rail systems and sold buses. The argument, then and now, is that buses can easily be re-routed from low ridership to high ridership routes. All well and good. After all, 29% of the USofA's fossil fuel energy consumption is transport. OTOH, as any highway engineer will tell you - once built, a new road (or even, lane) will almost immediately reach its 10 or 20 year design capacity. If you build it, they will come. Come to think of it, rail transport is the perfect way to drive urban design. What a concept.

Another important use of fossil fuels is heating our homes (and workplaces), which comes to 61%. Kinda big. Not surprising, switching building heat (and, you might be surprised, cooling) to 'all electric home' (you may remeber that phrase from decades ago!) requires little work at the infrastructure level. 3-phase transmission lines in housing areas might need a voltage boost to handle the increased load, and of course that oil/gas furnance would needs go away, but that can be viewed as a sociatal cost and mitigated by Uncle Sugar.

The big nut to crack is how to leverage 'nearly free' elecricity (at least at the operating cost level) for transport. Is their enough lithium to be mined to support "a Tesla in every garage"? Not sure. As so often, kinda depends on how you measure. Is lithium re-usable? Sorta. Kinda.

Of course, all that matters more in a car oriented society than a rail transport one. Boston (Charlie of the MTA crowd) once had extensive trackless trolleys, but the last line shutdown last year. Sigh. I suspect baksheesh this time around, too.

So, the moral of the story: They Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. While the direct cost of pushing those wee little electrons in the wire with fusion generation is likely to be quite small, the opportunity to use those wee little electrons is largely a function of USofA's energy infrastructure, and transport habits. Not so much.

This is tokamak.