Hacker News Reader

Comment by karxxm | Hacker News Reader

So you suggest that they should dump nearly 2 decades of work because there is something else which seems to be a potential energy source? The ITER project was founded in 2007. From there on hundreds of physicist, chemists, engineers and computer scientists started planning this RESEARCH project in order to better understand this kind of technology. Shouldn't we stick to what we have started (since this is (more than) cutting edge technology) and have a look at other technologies in parallel?

View on HN

> So you suggest that they should dump nearly 2 decades of work because there is something else which seems to be a potential energy source?

OP said nothing of the sort. They said that they didn't understand the prioritization of funding given an alternative that they found personally much much more valuable.

I am pretty sure that this project is not prioritized in any way. It's a research project with funding from all over the world. It should be compared to the CERN project where scientists from all over the world try to understand science behind it better. One could argue that CERN is a waist of money since there are other fields of study in physics which seem to have more potential. We should be happy that states from all over the world are willing to pay for a research project, which does not have a direct "value" for the next couple decades. There will never be a private investor for this scope of project since there is no monetizable value behind it yet and maybe in the next 50 years.

No one claimed the opposite.

That's the very definition of a sunk cost fallacy

Came here to say just this. While I'm glad to see that research is finally culminating in investment and assembly we shouldn't be committing to this project just because people put time and effort into it.

Of cause we should put time and effort into it because it is not proven that it is wasted. There have always been people who said CERN is a waist of money but in the long run, mankind wouldn't be the same as today if we didn't fund it back in the days.

> ITER began in 1985 as a Reagan–Gorbachev[18][19] initiative[19][20] with the equal participation of the Soviet Union, the European Atomic Energy Community, the United States, and Japan through the 1988–1998 initial design phases. Preparations for the first Gorbachev-Reagan Summit showed that there were no tangible agreements in the works for the summit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Background

Not only that, before ITER we used to work on JET in 1991, which is in kind of a twin relationship with ITER. Abandoning ship now for a technology that isn't even proven to be viable in large scales would be insanity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com