This illustrates the damage that Eco-Greenies have done to the environment as well as science. Ignoring (or just ignorant of) the science of the sun - nuclear energy - they've lined their pockets with billions wasted on wind and other greenwashed boondoggles. Money diverted from real science (nuclear power) and into the feelgood pseudoscience that brought us 'global warming'.
When fusion kicks in a few years from now, billions more will have to be spent to remove windmills and their ilk from the land and seabeds. The pedal-powered cars will be tucked into the closet.
With power as unlimited and plentiful as the sun, Green Luddites will have to endure prosperity across the world instead of their self-hating prison of trickle-up poverty.

No, this illustrates your complete lack of knowledge. IF this theory pans out, and IF in the next twenty years they manage to build one and IF they find a way to contain it and IF they have a solution for the waste, and IF the sites can be secured from terrorist threat, and IF they can be built cheaply enough, then we can relax and enjoy the benefits. Until then the Eco-Greenie scientists can continue to offer clean renewable power that is scalable and is beginning to compete financially with the fossil fuels and to employ tens of thousands of people. :>)

Your both right (Todd & Paul), hopefully nuclear fusion is the future, but it is at least a decade away...more likely 2 decades. We need to have power until that time, so we need to continue investing in other forms of energy capturing/creating methods.

Fusion is a will-o'-the-wisp that helps keep us from using technology that works.

Can we quit repeating the nonsense that "fusion power seeks to harness the very process used by the Sun"? The proton-proton fusion event is very low probability, so that even at the density of the solar core, it produces about as much heat per second per cubic inch as the metabolism of a resting human. The sun is very very big, so that's a lot of heat: but run that process in a power station, and you would not "generate a practically limitless supply" of electricity, clean or otherwise. Earthbound fusion power efforts don't start with protons (hydrogen nuclei). They use deuterium (proton with an added neutron) or tritium (with two), using much higher tempertaures and muchlower densities. They may succeed something good, or they may not, but the sun is not a proof of possibility.

I wonder why people think this will be any safer or less polluting than Fission? Yes, the energy gains would be great but what about waste etc. Our Sun gives off some pretty nasty energies - using the same process even at a reduced scale would give off the same energies wouldn't it? Just spit balling here.

Does Todd Dunning prefer trickle down prosperity for the few at the expense of the many? Or does he think that the general "greenie" efforts are just self-serving and not for the benefit of the earth's long-term habitability? Can we afford nuclear now or maybe just wait for the fusion fantasy to arrive? Looks like his focus is nuclear without regard to many other more realistic and immediate solutions. Is he just another closed minded republicon? Probably.

Practical fusion is probably decades away. Meanwhile, we should look into LENR heat producing reactions such as the one used by Rossi's E-Cat. He is supposed to have a 1 Mw plant completed in the US this year that will be open to public inspection. LENR type reactions in the E-Cat produce low temperature steam (higher temperatures cause instability) but Siemens has taken an interest and is designing a turbine that could be used. If practical LENR devices could be made safe for home use in 5-10 years, then I would like to purchase one.

Solar PV, Wind, and increasingly, the emerging wave or ocean generated power is already very cost effective at almost any scale. Once the hardware is built these systems have long lives and typically few environmental downsides. Earlier attempts sometimes have some issues but the industry has evolved very fast over the last ten years and will continue to improve. The sun gives us more energy in an hour than we consume in ALL forms in a year so it is entirely possible to derive ALL of our energy needs and also a lot of material needs from manipulating solar energy. Batteries are getting better, slowly, but it is happening, there are other energy storage methods, hydrogen, water impoundment, compressed air, bio-mass, etc, all of which will have a useful niche. Collectively these opportunities can reshape industry, our economies, and societies. Unlike Slowburn's clear desire to have everyone using the same coffee can for dinnerware, a personal shower and can-to-take-a-dump-in, mankind can live well and nondestructively at the same time.

I really would like to have a mr.Fusion of my own but they are right the nasty byproducts are quite nasty. We dont even need fusion we already got it (the sun) we havent even been able to properly crack the efficiency/power problem from our only example what makes you think we are capable of earth based fusion that wont kill us all? Read a scifi story when i was a kid about how the first successful attempt at fusion turned earth into a selfconsuming black hole because we didnt know how to handle or use all that power.