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Comment by onlyrealcuzzo | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure $50Bn could get us Fusion. Instead it got us slightly better taxis.

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.

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"When the technology matures, according to Mowry, the wholesale price for fusion fuel is expected to be around $50-60 per megawatt-hour"

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.

I can say that: fusion is objectively better than fossil fuels because it’s a sustainable source of energy that doesn’t destroy future generations’ prospects for a decent life. If you were to calculate the real costs of fossil fuels, including the effects on climate, I’m sure fusion comes out ahead. We don’t consider those costs typically, so we’re effectively externalizing them onto future generations.

It's hard to say a hypothetical energy source (commercially-viable fusion) is objectively better than one that actually exists.

A hypothetical, completely clean energy source is objectively better than one that emits greenhouse gasses, on its face.

I'll counter with a hypothetical way to clean up greenhouse gases using fossil fuels.

That is, until something can be put into production, it is not a superior product.

Ok, let’s add “renewable” to the equation. How do fossil fuels stack up to a clean, renewable source of energy?

> We've only invested $1Bn in fusion (according to this article)

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...

> I'm pretty sure $50Bn could get us Fusion. Instead it got us slightly better taxis.

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.

The CFS group at MIT is trying to build a larger test reactor to show Q > 1 results. In some cases, it is a matter of scaling up (construction work) a hypothesis.

Agreed on your research point within the context of one approach in one company.

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