This interesting ‘The Conversation’ post ‘Nuclear fusion breakthrough: what do new results mean for the future of ‘infinite’ energy?‘ expands on the possibilities of nuclear fusion in view of recent progress. It also quite usefully puts back into perspective the historical growth rates of recent energy sources.
As can be seen on the graph, which includes some possible predictions for fusion, the growth rate of wind and solar has been quite tremendous, in particular for solar.
In the article the same growth rate is anticipated for fusion once the technology becomes operational. This still shows that it will not be really significant before the end of the century.
New emerging energy sources often take some time for maturity. Then then scale and that is the time where we can observe their drawbacks. The same will inevitably happen for fusion as it is not entirely clean either (generating tritium pollution for example). Still, the graph shows how prevalent an energy can become in a few years and decades and puts back the introduction of new sources of energy production in a new perspective.
