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Comment by reasonablemann | Hacker News Reader

Would throwing 1000 particle scientists and 20B at fusion speed up it's progress?

I think the issue with fusion is similar to the arguments made by the lady in OP. Yes, fusion is under-funded but partly because people doubt that it's possible at all. OTOH, there are definitely people who have seriously good proposals for further fusion projects e.g. [1].

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

I have never heard that people think fusion is impossible. It looks more like a flight to the moon appeared around 1960. You know it’s possible but there is a lot of engineering needed to make it happen.

The problem is it's not even known whether the engineering problems can be attacked at all, unlike the Apollo program where even though a large amount of work (Breadth rather than depth this time) it was an iterative evolution of past programs.

In 1960 they had no idea how rendezvous in space or a lot of other things would work but they knew they would figure it out with enough time and money . From whatever I have heard about fusion I have never heard about doubts about feasibility. It’s about trying out different things and getting experience since the knowledge in plasma physics is so thin.

We are doing it. Expected cost of cost of building ITER is now well in excess of 20B and keeps rising. It's not speeding anything up; first plasma not expected until 2025.

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