What if this fusion power thing actually pans out? The ITER is on track, and the scale model test in China earlier this year looked very promising. If we had access to (what from our perspective seems like) infinite clean energy what could we do with it? Transmute elements? Desalinize seawater? Drive a rotating magnetic field the size of the planet for wireless global electric power? What are the limits?
I think what @wrecker_vs_dracula is being optimistic about is that we’re significantly more advanced along that timeline than I think you realise.
ITER, is a 20 billion dollar massively multinational fusion project that’s been building a fusion power plant since 2006. It’s projected to be 500 MW net positive and scheduled to come online December 2025.
ITER also doesn’t actually require any particularly exotic fuels. It’s powered by the Deuterium-Tritium reaction so they only need Deuterium, which can be distilled from sea or almost any other type of water and Tritium, which the reaction breeds from (comparatively insignificant) quantities of lithium.
You’re almost certainly right about future plants still taking 15-20 years to build but being 20-25 years away from fusion as a primary power source is still extremely cool, and if it probably won’t be in time to significantly slow down global warming, I think it at the very least can give us hope we might be able to unfuck things afterwards.