> “It would be an absurdity to use dirty fission reactors to fuel ‘clean’ fusion reactors,”
This seems like a non-sequitur. If we need to keep around (or even build) a few heavy-water fission plants to enable the fusion industry, what's the problem? The simple phrasing of fission as "dirty" really shows the quotee's biases. You could easily envision a stable energy mix with a few percent of fission, the rest fusion and storage/peaking power, and that would be far, far cleaner than our current GHG/pollutant-heavy mix of fossil fuels.
It seems quite premature to call this a "crisis" since we already have proven ways of manufacturing the required ingredient. I suppose the risk is just that this pushes up the price of fusion in the initial phases of deployment, providing an "activation cost" that delays fusion from taking over, but that's quite a speculative concern at this point.
This seems like a non-sequitur. If we need to keep around (or even build) a few heavy-water fission plants to enable the fusion industry, what's the problem? The simple phrasing of fission as "dirty" really shows the quotee's biases. You could easily envision a stable energy mix with a few percent of fission, the rest fusion and storage/peaking power, and that would be far, far cleaner than our current GHG/pollutant-heavy mix of fossil fuels.
It seems quite premature to call this a "crisis" since we already have proven ways of manufacturing the required ingredient. I suppose the risk is just that this pushes up the price of fusion in the initial phases of deployment, providing an "activation cost" that delays fusion from taking over, but that's quite a speculative concern at this point.