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Comment by xyzzyz | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but on the other hand, such a lucky break of this new approach might have had never happened. At the same time, if super-ITER approach was shown to work, by producing it en masse, it would likely be cheaper per installed MW than nuclear power, which would remove the need for solar panels and wind altogether. We'd have cheap power with no danger of nuclear pollution, no real nuclear waste problem, and no destroyed habitats and landscapes by solar panels and wind turbines. We'd still have won over current status quo, just not as much as we might with this lucky break.

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Maybe, or maybe not, who knows? That’s the problem, your betting everything on your best guess what the optimum approach might be long before you have any idea what the odds are.

The problem is (1) the earlier you spend big the greater the chance you’ll pick wrong because you have less information to base a decision on and (2) Spending big doesn’t actually improve the odds that the approach you pick will end up being the right one. It just means you find out sooner.

You don't know that. What if you had spent 1000x the budget of the manhattan project on building an atom bomb in the year 1789? You would have gotten squat.

I know that, because we already got ITER, which is widely expected to be energy positive. Moreover, the ITER approach is known to scale upwards: in fact, the ITER is so large, because it's the smallest size that is expected to work.

ITER is expected to be energy positive, but it's a kind of pyrrhic breakeven. The gross power density of ITER will be 1/400th power density of a PWR reactor vessel.

I don't think that's quite an apt comparison. The fundamental physics of an atomic bomb were not well known until the late 1800s. Apparently the Manhattan Project cost about $23 billion in 2007 dollars. ITER apparently had an initial budget of around $5 billion in 2005-6. By now, the construction cost is estimated to be at least $22 billion. It seems plausible that if we throw $15 or 20 billion at it in 2006, we could get bring forward the timeline by a handful of years. Or we might burn $20 billion on things like advanced construction and salaries for physicists and engineers, with relatively little to show for it.

The GDP of the EU is apparently $18 trillion, so $20 billion is about .1% of the GDP in a single year, and of course that $20 billion is spread over 1-2 decades. If anything, it seems like as a species, we should have more of these bets going. What if we spent 1% of our GDP on 10 long-shot, high-impact projects? Or hell, half a percent on 5 long-shot projects, and half a percent on solving the dozens of problems that we could solve simply by funding them.

Yes exactly, this is what Nassim Taleb writes about in Anti fragile. Bets with a known limited downside and the potential of an almost unlimited upside.

The upside is in no way unlimited. Even in the best case scenario, fusion power will be expensive. It might end up being useful for base load but it's unlikely to be cheaper than solar in most areas.

Assuming that you use it like before. But if you have a lot of power in one place you may think about using it for something like an orbital launch system.

The power grid already allows us to have as much power in one place as we want.

> The fundamental physics of an atomic bomb were not well known until the late 1800s.

Er, don't you mean the early 20th century?

Rutherford's exegesis of the nuclear model of the atom was published in 1911.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rutherford_model

Heh, wasn't sure where to draw the line. Radiation was discovered in the 1890s, so that seemed like as far back as you could go.

https://www.nature.com/articles/454397c

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