Right - there are incredible cancer immunotherapy and other biotech startups that are on the cusp of HUGE things. Softbank is clearly at a point where it has more capital than sense.
We've only invested $1Bn in fusion (according to this article: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/fission-fusion-capital-flow...). Physicists have been saying "we're close" for like 70 years.
It took the Manhattan project the equivalent of $23Bn. If we had the same type of investment, we could have clean and (almost) free energy forever. Instead we spend like 20% of GDP on energy per year. And destroy our only planet...
It's not like the stakes are high or anything.
I think it's telling that the most optimistic scenario they can come up with is "someday it might be competitive with fossil fuels if you consider the cost of fuel only".
The thing is, if fission is uncompetitive in the long run because of capital costs, can you, with a straight face, claim that fusion will be better, even in 50 years?
Edit: Of course, making fossil fuel more expensive would change the calculus. But my point is, since that is a prerequisite to addressing climate change anyway, we shouldn't be talking about fusion as a particular alternative.
That is, until something can be put into production, it is not a superior product.
This is patently untrue. ITER, the source cited in that article [0], gives a cost so far of $15 billion and rising just for one facility.
What the article actually says is that $1 billion has been invested by venture capital firms in fusion since 2002. Most of the investment, like in the Manhattan Project, comes instead from government sources.
[0] http://www.iter.org/faq#Do_we_really_know_how_much_ITER_will...
It's not construction work, you can't just hire more people to speed up research. When you have the top 50 or so scientists in the field, you just need to wait for results.
Agreed on your research point within the context of one approach in one company.
It's the equivalent of the software developers' "I'm 90% done, I just have to.."