Do any of their "prototypes" actually produce usable power yet? If the answer is "no", it's a science experiment, not a prototype.

a) the probability energy prices will go up in the next decades is pretty high

Even taking into account the need for additional transmission and storage, the numbers I've seen suggest that electricity prices in mostly-renewable grids will likely be similar to current levels, or come down from Russian-induced peaks in places dependent on imported natural gas. Energy costs will come down because expensive oil will be replaced by cheaper electricity, used more efficiently.

those plants will likely last more than the originally planned 60 years (based on what we expect from existing reactors in operation in the world)

The present value of power generated 60 years or more from now is close to zero applying any sensible discount rate.

Not a power grid engineer but my understanding is that as well as advanced inverters, you can use synchronous condensers to provide inertia in a grid with very high instantaneous renewables penetration. https://new.abb.com/motors-gen...

Let's assume for a minute that ChatGPT's known inability to stop itself BSing when it doesn't know the answer is effectively addressed and it becomes a truly useful answer tool. Now, how are you going to fund it?

My understanding is that each chatGPT answer requires a few cents worth of computation to produce. For somebody who needs multiple answers per day that's going to quickly add up. If there's one thing we've learned from the history of internet businesses, it's that barely usable and cheap almost always wins out over better and expensive.

Maybe there will be a subset of people who will be happy to pay (stock traders who want digestable answers RIGHT NOW come to mind), but it's not at all clear that the mass market would.

So just like real academics, then :)

More seriously, you're completely correct. ChatGPT gets things right a fair proportion of the time but if it doesn't know is often all too happy to generate plausible sounding BS, and there's no way to tell which is which.

Except that ChatGPT will all too often coherently and convincingly provide a wrong answer, and there's no way to tell because it doesn't cite its sources.

Yes, there will be plenty of wrong answers in Google's search results too, but at least you have a chance of judging the credibility of the answer before you use "rm -rf /" to free up disk space.

Ever heard of heel-and-toe downshifts?

Industrial customers whose demand is outside peak times don't pay anything like 40c/Kwh.

School districts aren't going to be paying retail walk-up prices for electricity. They buy in much larger quantities, at predictable times outside peak demand periods.

Can anyone point me to a paper where somebody says "here is a real-world problem with real data. Here is what we can do with a classical computer. Here is how we do better (for our definition of "better") with this quantum algorithm that runs on a quantum computer that actually physically exists"?

Be glad your Pixel 3 still works. Mine exploded (battery puffed up and split the case completely and then popped).

There's also the question of how you turn that heat into electricity.

In many parts of the world, even ones with low-cost coal in places where you can build a power plant next to the mine, new-build coal can't compete with renewable energy. Heck, existing coal plants are closing because they can't compete with renewables. A fusion power plant is a coal power plant with a very complex and expensive heat source replacing the coal burner.

As such, it's extremely difficult to see how fusion could possibly be economically competitive with renewable energy in most of the world. There are exceptions. Japan and Singapore, for instance, have very poor renewable energy resources, very high energy demands, and reasons to be wary of more fission reactors. So you could imagine they might be interested. But for most of the rest of the world it's hard to see a tokamak being economically viable for terrestrial power generation.

Um, no. Non-trace quantities of 80% HEU should not exist outside military control anywhere (the broader question of nuclear disarmament I'll leave to others).

Uranium enriched to 80% or more can be turned into a Hiroshima-style (and scale) nuclear weapon by people with fairly limited facilities and skill levels. No other material on Earth is that dangerous.

The cost of ensuring that the "wrong folks" don't get access to that HEU, to a sufficiently high confidence level, are so high that it's not worth the hassle. Just build renewables, or if you must build nuclear use any of the other viable designs that don't require HEU.

To be fair, one of the reasons why ramping is not commercially viable is that nuclear reactors are very expensive to build, but the fuel is very cheap.

Given that, in a grid where other power is coming from sources that are cheap to build but have expensive or limited supplies of fuel (nuclear, hydro), why would you bother even trying to ramp?