Date: Nov 6th, 2024

If you are a entrepreneur looking to start a company, is fusion a good idea to work on right now?

No, let’s understand why.

In my opinion, building fusion for the purpose of solving for grid scale electricity is not worth it. We can solve for the grid scale electricity needs using natural gas, solar, wind, etc anyways. It just seems like too much work to solve fusion just to power the grid.

So does it mean fusion is useless as a technology? No, hell no.

Fusion should be built so that we can built extremely powerful rocket engines.

Any civilization must build increasingly more powerful engines. A small engine powers a lawn mower, a bigger one can power a car, then a jet plane, and finally rocket engines, which can take us to the moon.

But what if we want to built an engine that is a million times more powerful. A fusion powered engine is the answer. A fusion powered rocket engine could get us to Mars in days (and to the moon in hours), as opposed to 6 months with the current rockets that are powered by hydrocarbon combustion.

However, building fusion for this purpose will require us to miniaturise and reduce the cost of technology massively. This is a much harder problem than just solving for grid scale. In grid scale, a power plant can be big and bulky, and occupy lot’s of land area, and can have a high cost of setup.

So this is my advice to entreprenuers → there are many company that have raised massive amount of capital to solve for fusion. Let them crack it. Once that happens, there will be an opportunity for you to come and copy them, and then get into the race to build a fusion powered rocket engine.

But if you still feel compelled to work on fusion, here’s my advice → use conventional rockets to get to moon, and mine for Helium-3. Then bring it back to earth and use it to power your reactors. It is theorised that getting fusion to work using Helium-3 as fuel would be much easier that the current methods which use Deuterium as fuel.