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Comment by howardr | Hacker News Reader

I read a letter in the Financial Times over the weekend...

> Forty years ago, when studying for my engineering degree, I learnt a rule of thumb that said that nuclear fusion is always 20 years away. I was therefore reassured by the date given in the report (“Sites sought for Step change in energy supply”, December 3) for the Step nuclear fusion plant — 2040.

(Edit: Unfortunately it’s behind a paywall but will include the link anyway https://www.ft.com/content/e5af6548-a3a9-451f-8f92-268679d5d...)

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For most of my life fusion has been perpetually 30 years away. Now it is only perpetually 20 years away. That's progress!

So the horizon is approaching us at a what? logarithmic scale? What can we infer from this about the topology of the planning surface?

Both ITER is scheduled to be done and SPARC are trying to make net energy in 5 years. They probably won't hit those dates, but we aren't really talking about 20 years anymore. (I agree with several commenters on this thread that any project with a 20 years to completion timeline should be shelved for things with <10 year timelines).

Those are research plants, not regulatory approval for commercial designs. We're still at least 20+ years away.

ITER won't even start burning DT until 2035 or so (assuming they control disruptions enough to be allowed to introduce tritium.)

This graph often gets mentioned in the context of "always 30 years away": https://imgur.com/3vYLQmm

It's not on "schedule" because we aren't putting the resources towards it.

Whenever I see this graph, I wonder what’s supposed to represent. Total world investment in fusion, total world government spending, only US spending, or maybe only the part of the US Department of Energy earmarked for fusion research?

It probably is the last one, considering that the enacted 2012 budget of the US DOE for Fusion Energy Sciences was $401 MM ([1], p 16).

But then, why is only the US DOE supposed to invest in fusion?

In any case, as of 2020, this budget was increased to $671 MM [2].

[1] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/FY13Highlights.pdf

[2] https://www.aip.org/fyi/2020/final-fy20-appropriations-doe-o...

But we can spend ~$40B per year on our misadventures in Afghanistan. It's maddening.

Not just Afghanistan, Biden we'll get us back to bombing Libya and other nations soon

That graph was for a crash program under the assumption that tokamaks work better than it turns out they do.

So, if that money had been allocated, it would have been a failure. There was also not the appreciation then of the grave nature of the engineering challenges facing fusion, even if the plasma physics worked wonderfully.

The implication that we'd have had fusion if that money had been spent is not supported by the evidence.

Yeap. This is the real answer. I guarantee you, if every government of the world came together and everyone said, "Okay, we're all going to pitch in 1% of GDP until we crack this thing," we'd have nuclear fusion in under 10 years.

Turns out doing cutting edge science is expensive... Jesus Christ, who knew?!

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