I’m interested, but the bet needs another condition, to exclude toy demonstration projects. The reactor will have to generate at least 100MW (far less than existing coal plants) and be in operation for an integrated time of at least 90 days over the course of any one year on or before 2046. Accept?
100MW seems like a substantial moving of the goalposts, given your earlier statement that "there is no reasonably foreseeable future with fusion as part of the electricity grid" and that I've already cut the timetable by 25 years :) That said, I'll still accept - I'm emailing you at your profile address for the details!
I didn’t mean to move the goalposts. I just want to exclude demonstration projects that might produce some net energy but not be serious commercial sources of electricity. But thanks for accepting anyway.
I've sent an message to the address listed in your profile, it's coming from a nonstandard domain though, so if you don't see it, it may be in spam. Also, I now realize that the longbet page is still under review, so you might not be able to see that either until the staff approve it.
I wonder how many of the bets on the longbets site stem from HN discussions. Probably not a significant number, but it would be deeply interesting to go back and read the discussions that spawned them.
Is that a prescriptive or descriptive statement? I just looked at about 20 and didn't see anything immediately obvious, but that was with in page text search, and not actually paying attention enough to tell whether it's common or encouraged to include a link to online discussions in general (and I would happily search for a data set or scrape the data if I could expect to find it there).
Seems like any profitable plant should count. Some designs work best at smaller scales, but if they worked out they'd be cheap and for more power you just build a lot of them. Even in fission, there's a big push now to build reactors small enough to mass-produce in factories. Maybe say at least 100MW total power?
Energy has the most externalized costs of any industry.
The 5th fleet is in the Gulf to protect the flow of Oil.
The USD is backed to some extent by petrodollar, and that is a geopolitical hammer the Americans like to use at least to some extent.
So what does 'profitable' mean?
If Climate Change gets really problematic quickly, then guess what, all Nuclear Plants become considerably more profitable because the government will socialize the losses in case of catastrophic failure meaning owners don't pay for massive insurance costs which are a problem for profitability today give the possibility of $100B payouts in the case of failure.
I'm wary of the commentator's cynicism. If we can make demo plants operating at some scale, close to break even in 25 years ... then that's a strong hint there's material progress, and that those plants could be breaking even another 25 years later.
It also easily justifies a number of scientists working on it now even if only pans out in 50 years. The long term surpluses are potentially ginormous, like, to the point where they existentially shape the future, much like carbon fuels triggered the industrial revolution.
Yeah maybe leave out "profitable," it's too fuzzy and hard to verify. One of the bettors simply expressed skepticism that there would be "fusion as part of the electricity grid," period, so just leave it at that. At least, that's what I would want if I were betting.
(I do think it's entirely possible that fusion will be solidly profitable, especially with carbon pricing.)
