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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

ITER is taking the safest approach, and being a giant international cooperation makes them probably as flexible and nimble as a boulder. A startup betting on a novel, cheaper approach could beat them as long as they accept a much higher risk of failure. And while a government wouldn't invest $100M in something with say 10% chance of success, compared to $6B for ITER that's a worthwile bet for everyone else

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> And while a government wouldn't invest $100M in something with say 10% chance of success, compared to $6B for ITER that's a worthwile bet for everyone else

Maybe governments should. That’s doesn’t seem like a large amount of money in the scheme of things and I’d rather the tech not belong to a startup.

In an ideal world, government would invest in many more low-probability/high-impact engineering projects. But this doesn't align well with political incentives - 100M on a bet that will return 50X 10% of the time is great for a private investor, but a politician won't get 50X the votes from a successful project as an unsuccessful one, instead there's a 90% chance the project will be portrayed as a boondoggle.

The problem with investing in a lot of low probability things is that when, say, 100 of them all fail, how do you know whether that's because they were low probability, or zero probability? Unfortunately, there's no limit to the number of very low probability things you can invest in, so nobody has the budget for them all.

it's also not ideal for government to make those sorts of bets, because they is no reasonable incentive structure for the government to 1) find the talent to make correct bets about those sorts of things and 2) to be accountable in case the person making those bets is just an garden variety idiot, or, worse, taking the government for a ride.

Also, those relatively small investments of $100M will add up to a lot over time. At some point people are going to get a bit sour on the idea of acting like an angle investor with tax dollars.

Why does it matter if the tech belongs to a startup? If any of these projects ever actually works, 1) they're still going to be very capital-intensive, and 2) it's still going to be a private company that builds the production plants. Patent exclusivity only lasts a couple of decades anyway, so personally I'd rather go with whatever approach gets us commercial fusion power in my lifetime.

I’m a firm believer that any sort of fundamental research and their outcomes should be owned by the public. We may have to contract a company to build the thing, but the knowledge should be free for all.

Then what incentive is there for investment into R&D if it doesn’t give a competitive advantage? Patents are designed to encourage investment by providing a monopoly for an exclusive time only - we can debate how long that should be - but the fundamental fact is that without patents innovation slows greatly

I agree. I wonder though how these kinds of funding decisions could be made without too much money just funneled to friends of the reviewers pet projects. Its not like you can just put out a bid for cheap fusion and award the lowest bidder.

I think another factor is that it is much harder to defend high risk investment from corruption and cronyism.

"Safest" here being the approach that physics and enfineering say is most likely to succeed: project risk, not actual safety risk.

(Ironically it was so large that until it shaken up, the project nearly sank for the usual "megaproject drama" reasons)

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