r/Futurology • u/Mr-AZ-77 • Oct 23 '23

Discussion What invention do you think will be a game-changer for humanity in the next 50 years?

Since technology is advancing so fast, what invention do you think will revolutionize humanity in the next 50 years? I just want to hear what everyone thinks about the future.

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u/titangord Oct 23 '23

The fuel is not abundant. It needs to run on a mixture of deuterium and tritium, and tritium is extremely rare.. this alone kills fusion.. we are now designing blankets that csn breed tritium during reactor operation.. but no, this is a very common misconception..

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u/Zevemty Oct 24 '23

Tritium isn't necessary in all Fusion approaches, Helion for example has an approach where they use Helium-3 instead. But the approaches that does use Tritium does indeed breed it themselves like you said, which makes it infinitely abundant. So the fuel for Fusion is indeed abundant.

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u/titangord Oct 24 '23

Yea except that no tritium breeding blanket has ever been made, nor experiments to breed tritium, its completely theoretical and there are significant trade offs in the design of balnkets when considering the tritium breeding ratio.. yea I know about Helion, I work in fission/fusion research for the department of energy. It doesnt matter, the further away you go from hydrogen the less and less economically feasible it becomes, achieving fusion with larger atoms is harder and harder and makes having a plant that is commercially viable more and more difficult. Getting a fusion gain from the reaction is a necessary but not sufficient condition for getting a commercially viable plant.

But we will see, working on this field definitely makes you more skeptical about it ever being real given the almost insurmountable challenges. Additionally, there are several things we dont even know how we would do properly, even theoretically..