I still think it’s prudent to build the plants as a backup plan for zero emissions. The best time build a bunch of nuclear plants was 30 years ago, and the second best is now – because 30 years from now, I don’t want us to still be in the same situation of “we should’ve built them years ago”. Fusion has the capacity to be a nearly limitless, clean energy source. Even if we already have zero emissions when we turn them on, they can give us an abundance of energy we’ve never seen before.

Think about the possibilities if energy was free and unlimited. There’s a lot of stuff today that is limited because they’re energy inefficient. That would stop mattering. Clean water can be generated en masse through reverse osmosis. Everything gets easier to build and to operate. The only operating costs of significance would be maintenance. High speed travel hubs could be built anywhere and everywhere. Even the worst quality soil could be made arable. We could constantly monitor a bunch of parameters for the sake of monitoring them – we could determine for instance if we’re depleting seawater by significant levels when we purify it, and we can course correct it then and there. What could be a second climate crisis otherwise would be nipped in the bud since we wouldn’t have to wait so long to see after effects.

I’m talking like a kid at a candy store, but it’s honestly super exciting to think about. This would be the next step for energy after sustainability, and it would completely transform everything for the better.