Quote:
Originally Posted by Rusty
Don't hold your breath on fusion. It won't happened in our life time. Take too much energy to produce it. You put more in then what you get out. My reading on it. They say 2025, then turn around and then say 2030, then 2035. 
Think hydrogen is closer. It's the prefect fuel. Hydrogen and oxygen, and you get water for the by product. The problem now is that it still takes more energy to produce it. They are working on hydrogen generators to produce it cheap enough. The one draw back is when it burns. You can't see the flame. You could walk into it and not know it until you feel the heat and burn. We used it at the power plant to cool the generators. Talk about safety precautions. 
Solar, you HAVE to keep the panels clean. If they are in a dusty area. You will have maintenance people that their only job is to keep the panels clean. Anything on the panels WILL cut down their output a lot. |
My research came to the same conclusions re. hydrogen and fusion. I agree that hydrogen as a viable answer is probably 10-20 years out and is our best bet.
Fusion is going to be essential for Mars and asteroid belt colonization though. We can’t talk about large scale power production in those environments or reliability powering deeper space craft (getting too far from the sun) without it.
Since there are 100s of trillions of dollars to be made in this space, I’m confident the technical hurdles will get cracked.
Never underestimate greed. It’s the not so secret sauce to our (capitalism’s) greatness.