US as a net oil producer thanks to fracking destroyed the price of oil and took Venezuela’s government with it. Saudi’s oil is still the best quality so they have remained relevant, and Russia’s willingness to say “fuck it this is Russia” means they give zero fucks about pulling it out and selling it to thirsty Europeans. (Until, you know. That thing. Whenever that is over they will be back though.)

We still need oil for plastics, and it would get much much cheaper-meaning that the plastic patch/ocean micro plastics problem is about to get much worse (unless we pass coordinated standards)

But de-wealthified Middle East will lead to instability and power vacuums. A real mess.

Who makes these reactors? Will the technology be open-source? What’s the limiting component in building them? Will they be the size of power stations now or will they be much smaller and decentralized?

Let’s say a company like GE is cranking out a subdivision sized reactor-they make millions of them for sale every year. Electricity is a commodity.

Lithium/cobalt will be much more in demand than they already are. Reactors are great but we gotta have battery packs and carbon fiber still hasn’t delivered. Lithium is decently abundant but messy to extract. Cobalt is less common and prices are rising fast. Guess who has a lot of it? (It’s China)

If we stop making so much carbon we would slowly start to draw down on climate change-but it would take centuries to fix itself naturally. We could use this wonder power to yank some of the carbon out of the air with carbon capture since that is currently a more expensive solution than it it solves-but still will take centuries to fix without a major breakthrough.

That’s my initial thoughts.

They said themselves that the lasers are especially suboptimal for this-they were made in the 1980’s are very inefficient. but your point is true-but assuming this scales easily-perhaps even logarithmically-(it won’t actually be easy) we could end up on the other side of the looking glass.