If you read the article you'd realize they're still late compared to western nuclear technology. It's great that they invest a lot in the technology but that's both wrong and premature to award them any achievement.
If you read the article even closer, you'd see that it's part of an international collaboration that includes nearly all of the advanced industrial nations, including the US. The entire point of ITER is to be a stepping-stone to commercial fusion power in the next few decades. As always it is certainly interesting news when Chinese mega-experiments are on parity with the US or Europe, but so far big fusion reactors are like Top-500 supercomputers in that respect - dual use technologies whose economic value is marginal at best.
Nuclear is dead end tech. Renewables are cheaper than nuclear without the PR problems or risks, and getting cheaper all the time. The future is solar, wind, and hydro with a lot of energy storage and long distance transmission.
Renewables will, at best, allow us to maintain our current energy expenditures in a more sustainable manner. (If that.) But they are incredibly space inefficient. Nuclear is the only avenue for increasing our energy production by an order of magnitude or more. (Not to mention, there is no such thing is a solar powered attack submarine or aircraft carrier.)
I call bullshit. 12 million acres of solar panels could power the whole of the US. We already lease twice that amount to oil and gas and twice that too just growing corn for ethanol. Solar would actually be a more efficient usage of land than the status quo just in terms of energy production.
Fission and fusion have already lost. As Amory Lovins has pointed out, just the non-nuclear part of a fusion power plant would make it too expensive to compete. The reactor itself would have to cost negative dollars for the whole power plant to be competitive, and that's unlikely.
While this seems an unpopular opinion here, it's correct. The economics are such that fission is out of the game, and fusion is out before it even got a chance. Now maybe one day we're using so much land area for solar and wind that it changes the calculus. But at least for this century renewables are going to dominate.
Building a fully electric transportation network, supporting a greater population, advanced weapons like rail guns, etc. You know, progress. The future. Maintaining our technological supremacy.
China, Russia, etc., aren’t going to be reading E.F. Schumacher. Energy production equals economic, military, and political power. Whoever figures out how to break past the fossil fuel bottleneck is going to own the future.
No, fusion could not allow humans to reach Alpha Centauri in a lifetime, unless you mean they flew through the Alpha Centauri system without stopping.
If you want human interstellar travel, that probably means beamed power propulsion. That's a better solution anyway, since it allows higher power density at the vehicle. There is no need for fusion for that.
There is a cap on potential solar power generation. Compare the amount of power generated per square meter for a solar panel versus a nuclear power station. Nuclear reactors can be stacked vertically or located underground. Also it is ugly to have vast areas of the natural landscape covered in panels. Ugly waste of space.
