Chris Wright: nuc-lear fusion will soon power the world. Don’t worry too much about planet-warming emissions, Trump’s dimwitted Energy Secretary says, because within five years AI will have enabled the harnessing of fusion. Scientists believe commercial fusion power plants are still a long way off.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqlz5p314z0o
by mafco
30 comments
1. In the event fusion energy starts to catch on, expect a ton of fear mongering from the fossil fuel companies.
2. We are still vastly underfunding fusion research. I think total US funding is $1.5 billion. In comparison, we spend around $100 billion in military R&D per year. DARPA alone has 3x the budget of all our fusion research.
3. Even if we had working plans today, it would take multiple decades to build up the supply chain and knowledge to build enough plants to matter.
4. There are still a lot of very hard problems to solve with fusion energy. Outside of AI Jesus solving all of them, I don’t see how we can fix them all in five years.
We’ve got a sustained fusion reaction in the sky every day – what if we were to capture that energy Chris? Wouldn’t that be great?
We can take advantage of the maintenance free fusion powered generator conveniently placed only 93 million miles away!
They just make shit up.
I’ve been hearing “don’t worry about climate change, the technology will save us” for the past 50 years and so far nothing has been done.
Vapor ware
This guy has gotten way to many pitches from venture capital people
If we had unlimited fusion and power we would still be heating the earth :all those fusion plants would be creating waste heat heating up the planet. The equivalent amount of diverted sokad
There are multiple comercial fusion plants be constructed right now! What is this bull***t. Look at the unit being built by the TVA or the unit being built for Microsoft’s AI datacenter. The french are building the chinese are building!!!! Why are so many people not paying attention?
The current EPA and doe cabinet members are arguably the least qualified people to ever hold their posts
1 in a million AI shot, for a 1 in a million fusion shot. Sounds like oil company bullshit.
Go ahead and keep smoking cigarettes because in five years AI will cure lung cancer!
Chris Wright has a fundamental misunderstanding about A.I. Artificial Intelligence isn’t actually intelligent. Instead, it’s like combining the works of the kids that sit near the back of class, mixing in a haphazard sampling of works from the smarter kids, and then statistically processing it all to yield an output that appears intelligible. AI is at heart a statistical matching machine with garbage-in garbage-out a serious problem. AI doesn’t understand anything. It doesn’t comprehend. The closest we’ve gotten to a reasoning model is OpenAI’s o3 and o4 models that try to break down reasoning into a series of procedural steps. These models also hallucinate at dramatically higher rates than the previous models and they consume 100x more electricity than generative A.I. does. (In essence an A.I. data center consumes 100x more electricity than an old school data center. A reasoning model AI data center consumes 1000x more.)
Because AI doesn’t actually understand or think, it’s unable to perform ground breaking research. The closest its gotten is to plagiarize other research scientists and pass it off as its own. [https://www.escienceediting.org/journal/view.php?number=352](https://www.escienceediting.org/journal/view.php?number=352)
Chris Wright should stop waiting for AI to solve the world’s energy crisis, made much more extreme by the existence of AI, and instead work to fund basic research, STEM education, and attract foreign researchers to the U.S. …. I’ve just been reminded that he’s actively doing the opposite of all of these …
It’s a lie to distract and delay from the necessity of dramatically reducing fossil fuel consumption. Sadly, this tactic has worked all too well.
Delay in the new denial, folks!
These people are seriously the worst crap ever and everything wrong with humanity.
Fusion has been ten years away for the last sixty years.
What he actually means is ‘Dont spend money on renewables that actually work, because my bosses fossil fuel paymasters are shitting themselves:
Conservatives sure love AI and chatgpt or whatever.
He’s a dimwit.
If fusion becomes viable all of a sudden get ready for the fossil fuel industry to demonize it.
A few years back, the mantra was that new high temp magnets would solve the fusion problem. Now, it’s that AI will solve the fusion problem.
Here is the part I don’t get. There are at least three approaches to fusion: particle beams to slam nuclei together at high speed (Helion), repeated compression pulses to get high temps and pressures (NIF, General Fusion); and continuously hot plasma (Commonwealth).
In all three cases AI (or machine learning) can help optimize designs and control. However, fusion is way more complex than fluids flow and combustion. Those have huge economic bases to apply AI with lots of customers and all that is appearing in the market are incremental engine improvements and faster simulations.
How will AI crack the fusion problem of getting to sustained net energy operation?
We already have a fusion reactor – it’s called the Sun. It produces a ton of energy, it never turns off, and all we have to do is stick some panels out to go capture some of that energy. For some reason though, this idiot administration likes to hold up pie in the sky solutions instead of the ones that are right there and attainable – probably because the solar panel industry didn’t bribe Trump enough.
We should fixing our aging infrastructure, power lines and such. Upgrading and making them more efficient, moving them underground. Our financial priorities are whacked. $170B for Ice, while power outages are still a thing. Our lines leak and are inefficient…
dude is trying eek out what he can from his massive gas and oil investments before they go to zero
Wright will power earth with pedophile power. It’s limitless and infinite. He’s the biggest stable genius of the world…according to all pedophiles
Not that he is correct but there are large scale fusion reactors being built today.
Why use clean free energy sources today when we can pay for oil with subsidies and destroy the climate?
Dang grifters! Always clogging up my feed!
If only we could meet our energy demand with the power of lies. We’d be a type IV civilization!
Like most of Trump’s “Cabinet-level” appointees, he’s not the brightest bulb in the pack.
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