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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

> But sustaining the high temperatures and other unstable conditions necessary is both extremely difficult and prohibitively expensive—the total cost of ITER is estimated at 20 billion euros ($22.5 billion)

Sadly, this maybe 3-5% of the annual US defense budget? Shows where our priorities are that it's considered "prohibitively expensive".

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Check to see if your House rep or either of your senators is on an appropriations committee. If so, tell them how you would like to see the appropriations for the Department of Energy, DoD, and other departments change in Fiscal Year 2020. (The FY 2020 bills could start getting passed in the next couple months.)

Are there examples of direct representation actually working this way? I try not to be too cynical, but I havent seen good examples of a Congress member’s constituency being able to significantly influence their behavior outside of their reelection campaign.

Bang a drum about China over taking the US and making it into a third world country. That's how Nasa got funded.

Yeah, it's pretty sad how even the international community combined can't come up with that money while they piss away multiples of that with weapons purchases and subsidies to already filthy rich companies and people

It is not only sad; it is a political call to arms.

If you want to stop the waste of blood and treasure, actively participate. Complaining is free, yet wildly ineffective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_fusion

Tax payers have paid billions for this over decades and while no doubt physics has benefited there's nothing to show for it in terms of a practical large scale application to generate energy from fusion. Why do you think merely throwing money at this project will do the trick after all this time? Politicians can of course use your argument to score over opponents in the realm where details don't count.

Not all funding is equal. For example compare investments in the Space Launch System vs. Falcon Heavy.

Investments in ITER are also fairly inefficient due to the political strings attached. Countries get concessions in exchange for funding, which makes it logistically far from optimal. It's also a slow-moving behemoth which makes it difficult to incorporate newer technologies as they appear, e.g. improved superconductors.

I think it would at least be a good idea to throw some more money at smaller projects that can iterate faster than ITER.

Also, past funding is not necessarily equal to current-day funding. Materials sciences and computing have advanced, so we can build on technologies that simply didn't exist back then. One example is simulation of plasma instabilities.

There has been a lot of progress. Lots of hurdles were overcome. If you put the chance of success st 5% if we invest another 50 billion, we should do it. In the long run, it will ensure our future.

If da Vinci had 50 billion, he still wouldn’t have achieved flight. There were things he just didn’t know, and until those things were learned, all of his efforts were in vain.

We’re still learning too.. and there’s no telling if we know enough to achieve fusion. It may require physics that we won’t learn for another 100 years. Until it’s invented, we don’t know what’s required.

I wouldn't bet against it, 50 billion in 1500 would be about 50% of the GDP of the largest economy of the time (China). It's Apollo program funding level.

http://www.newgeography.com/content/005050-500-years-gdp-a-t...

>It may require physics that we won’t learn for another 100 years

It may require physics that we won’t learn without another 50 billion

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