(or "points" as there are more than one of them)

1) Fusion has always been a decade or two in the future so, at the moment, it is *not*
a "source of energy that would make coal and natural gas obsolete to make electricity".

2) Until it moves from the indeterminate future into the now, its only function is to provide
yet another excuse to maintain Business As Usual rather than *reducing* energy consumption.

3) The mindset ruling the human civilisation is absurdly immature and totally incapable of
handling "boundless free energy" without accelerating the rate of devastation to the ecosphere.


> Its by product is helium.
> No more coal sludge. No open pit coal mines. Mr. Peabocy's coal train disappears.

In an ideal world, fusion like this is *exactly* what we'd want to power our utopian society
where all people are equal and the environment respected.

In the real world, (of today and the next decade or so at least), boundless energy (clean or
not) has only one purpose: to make the filthy rich even richer at the expense of everyone
and everything else.


> You are wrong on this one.

I wish I were but my eyes watching the events of every passing day tell me otherwise.

> We need better environmental laws. but this has nothing to do with a new source of energy.

The fact that we need "environmental laws" to keep our behaviour under any form of control shows
that we are not yet a mature enough species to have advanced (widespread, cheap) energy sources.

The fact that we need "better environmental laws" just underlines this problem: even the more
mature members of the species are currently (and for the foreseeable future) incapable of restraining
the greedy, exploitative & rapacious members who are in control.


> And these places were created before it existed, so the new energy source isn't relevant to that discussion.

Pedantically no, the places in & like that photograph were created after the "new energy source"
was first being promoted as "the clean energy of the future" - a state that it has remained in ever since.