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Comment by chiefalchemist | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is - via a very respected nuclear R&D person - the only thing holding fusion back is money. Any investment in fission seems misguided and wasteful.

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For the last 40 years, fusion has always been one small technical problem away from being solved. Well, 40 years and millions and maybe billions of dollars later, we really are no closer to having solved the fusion puzzle (i.e. containing and sustaining a fusion reaction as to be useful). I personally do not see this being solved before 2100.

Still no reason to give up hope.

This is a conservative estimate:

https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2018/03/09/mit-says-nuc...

Fwiw a couple days after a renown expert said to me (in so many words) "soon...we can so this..." this happened:

https://gizmodo.com/chinese-fusion-test-creates-90-million-f...

We built the bomb.

We put human on the moon.

But we can't do fusion? And it's the one we need most?

To play on Thiel's quote, thank god Twitter doubled their character count. Now that's an amazing advance!!!

One more, from a couple days ago

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/09/nuclear-...

There's reason to think there's a bit more to it than just money. As the small plasmas people the startups (General Fusion, Tri-Alpha, Helion) are working with now scale up there tend to be strange and difficult plasma instabilities that have a long history of rearing their heads. For instance, magnetic mirrors had the leakage out the ends which was fixed with a modification but that led to a show-stopping instability at practical powers. And the really big ITER-style things have scalability problems just from the sheer amount of superconducting magnets and materials they need.

Money = resources.

Resources + time = solve problems

Haha, ok granted. But by that reasoning, can't all problems be solved with more money, at which point there's no point discussing other ways to solve problems? That seems to reduce the argument to be less interesting in my mind.

Technically correct, if the ball of money is large enough.

Specially, any ball larger than 0.05 solar mass will start a self sustaining fusion reaction.

I think that'll depend on the materials. Maybe money is harder to fuse than Hydrogen.

Money is naturally denser, so that helps.

And I'm guessing the trace water content would provide sufficient hydrogen.

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