E-CAT and oil price

[Ironside]

Seeing the speed at which modern technologies develop one is likely to consider that it may take a lot less time than you predict.

The limiter is scale rather than tech. Replacing oil with say hydrogen, which would probably be the easiest way with this tech. It would require replacing the entire carpark, thousands of electrolysis facilities to produce the hydrogen, thousands of cold fusion plants to produce the eletricity, rebuilding all gas stations, rebuild the entire logistic chain for oil to hydrogen instead. It would also require a lot of rare earth minerals to be mined.

That takes a while.

I thought the issue with ITER was the damage caused by the fusion/stray plasma streams, which caused problems which needed a technological workaround, not the fact it doesn't supply surplus power.

I haven't red about the current issues with ITER, but yeah net gain has been reached years ago. I don't think they can take care of that energy properly and can only run for a very short while atm though.

[Beskar]

I haven't red about the current issues with ITER, but yeah net gain has been reached years ago. I don't think they can take care of that energy properly and can only run for a very short while atm though.

I think it is 1000 seconds or so and they are aiming for a tenfold return. I just did some updating and the one currently in France is going to be the main 'test-bed' replacing JET in the UK. Looking at 2020 for it to be operational, with 2030-40 being commercial application. Biggest issue is the temperature can reach like 33 million degrees.

Having the plasma at far less temperatures (1300'c) as the OP suggests would make the process revolutionary.

[Papewaio]

There are a few caveats with that.

1) We have positive fusion in a lab. We don't have it as a power source (yet). Plenty of things can be created in the lab that do not go on to become commercially viable. So at the moment it's more like we can make an oil lamp, we just cannot harness it into a combustion engine.

2) ITER is still being built and will have to prove its chops.

=][=
However.

Fusion has always been stated as being ready to go "fifty years" from now. If you ever read science reports and they say it will be commercially available in fifty years it means they have no idea the timeline other then a long time. Its the scientific equivalent of the biblical forty days and forty nights.

The promising part is that the over the horizon time line has dropped by over half with the ITER and reached zero with the NIF breakthrough.

So even with the stated caveats and quite a few more as a trend it is looking more and more possible that we will see commercial fusion within fifty years. It does depend on the total energy cost to create the device, fire it, recover the energy and rebuild it. It might be that the current designs are too much like the space shuttle which was supposed to be used multiple times, but in essence was stripped down and rebuilt for each mission.

The world would change dramatically if fusion was achieved at a cheap enough price point. Every oil barrel dictator would suddenly lose their revenue base and would not be able to have hired guns run rough shod over their populace or pay for extremist religious schools or more sinister funding.