A joke some friends of mine who study fusion make to this kind of comment; wind and solar are fusion powered.
In a simpler way of looking at it, (1) what is the source of the energy of solar/wind? (2) how much land and materials are required to linearly increase power production?
There is a finite amount of space and resources on the planet to continue to scale power production with humanities consumption.
Fusion, preferably MCF/tokamaks in the style of smaller sized ones like SPARC @ MIT and less like ITER (behemoths that take decades to build and maintain) offer two things (1) the fuel is comprised of the most common elements in the universe, (2) power per square foot is much greater than solar or wind... And bonus (3) once developed it should in theory require less material per watt generated. And less materials mean less processing and fabrication which in turn reduces the environmental impact on the planet.
Excuse my lack of knowledge on the subject, but from a few comments/articles it seemed that although Tritium can be recuperated through contact of the charged neutrons with lithium "blankets" surrounding the enclosure, it is still incredibly hard to achieve self-sustainability, to the point where we might need fission reactors just to produce that isotope. Am I missing something or isn't Tritium not so readily available?
The margins for 'breeding' tritium from lithium are slim, yes. I don't think fission reactors can help in the long term, but right now that is how we get tritium for our experiments.
In a simpler way of looking at it, (1) what is the source of the energy of solar/wind? (2) how much land and materials are required to linearly increase power production?
There is a finite amount of space and resources on the planet to continue to scale power production with humanities consumption.
Fusion, preferably MCF/tokamaks in the style of smaller sized ones like SPARC @ MIT and less like ITER (behemoths that take decades to build and maintain) offer two things (1) the fuel is comprised of the most common elements in the universe, (2) power per square foot is much greater than solar or wind... And bonus (3) once developed it should in theory require less material per watt generated. And less materials mean less processing and fabrication which in turn reduces the environmental impact on the planet.