Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterlk | Hacker News Reader

I think most people (myself included) do not understand how much technological improvement costs.

Anecdote: I once had a conversation with a guy who worked at ITER, and he was pretty bullish (and he had no reason to bullshit me) on the prospect of fusion as a viable energy source, but frustrated with the internal politics of ITER. So I asked, "well, what would it take? If I could call up a bunch of rich people to get funding, how much would it take?" He casually said, "oh, probably 1.2 to 1.5 trillion dollars". And then I understood why it was a multinational conglomerate that was funding it, and not a bunch of rich people.

View on HN

Can anyone actually make an estimate with any reasonable degree of accuracy if the sum they need to estimate is in the trillions of dollars?

For example, it seems that in research usually when people say that something is a decade away what they really mean is that they have no idea. Is there a good reason why that is not the case here and the 1.5 trillion would be well spent?

To put that number into perspective, the 2015 US Military budget was --4 trillion-- 600 billion dollars [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_...

Defense Budget (Billions) 637bn

Total Budget (Trillions) 3.97tn

I think you used the wrong number.

Oops, you are right!

Defense budget is $800 bn now.

Still. 2 years of military spending, in a peaceful world, for near-unlimited free power forever. Kind of puts it in perspective.

Even under the most optimistic estimates, fusion power will be nowhere near free. Those plants will be tremendously expensive to build and operate. Meanwhile solar power + storage gets cheaper every year...

Isn’t that just another way of saying the ITER approach is infeasible? So it’s basically a jobs program

I haven't met a fusion scientist that thinks ITER isn't going to work. Ones that don't like ITER just think there are better ways.

Compared to the world's energy costs, it's small potatoes. Fusion will be ready when the world needs it.

> Fusion will be ready when the world needs it.

50 years ago?

2016 estimation for the project was $20B [1]. Your number is over 50 times larger.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-15/world-s-b...

Ah, maybe that's why it's taking so long...

The number is $20B for a "technology of the future" project because if you would propose a number 20x larger the project would never get started.

How are you going to justify $1.2 trillion to tax payers for something ephemeral that might work or not, all while their kids cannot get toilet paper in school?

$20bn is kind of "normal" in government spending and those numbers are quickly forgotten.

On the other hand, the yearly US defense budget is already half of that amount and the loud voices do not care.

I understood the 1.2-1.5 trillion number to be the cost of "fusion as a viable energy source" not the cost of ITER. ITER itself, to be clear, won't generate electricity. It's a demonstrator project that proves the viability of some of the technologies that would be prerequisites to an eventual successful electricity generation project. Its planned successor, DEMO, will be even bigger, and will be the first one that actually generates net electricity, but even that won't be geared towards commercial use on the grid -- nobody will ever build these things for commercial use, even if we get to the point more energy comes out than goes in, if they cost tens of billions apiece. Even if both ITER and DEMO go exactly to plan, multiple additional major technological advances will be necessary before the any of it is commercially viable.

Was that a while ago, before the management shakeup?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com