You mean to say that fusion is only 5 years away? Amazing!
What I do know is that superconducting magnets have been getting cheaper, more powerful, and more compact for quite some time and that's one of the limiting factors on fusion reactor designs. I also know that there is no known physical barrier to net-positive fusion, only engineering barriers.
If I had to totally guess I'd say someone will show net-positive fusion for a brief period of time before 2030... assuming the funding is present. It will not be a fully viable power plant yet but a proof of concept. This will be followed by a huge bump in funding and a race to produce power plants.
... but that's a guess.
It's like asking "when will there be a human base on Mars?" We know it's possible and I think it will happen, but I don't know how long it will actually take. We could probably have one in 5 years if someone wanted to write a blank check.
I would bet that we could have a fusion PoC in 5 years if someone wrote a blank check and fully funded many different credible efforts.
I honestly wonder if fusion will ever be commercially viable. And if all these experiments will simply lead up to us realizing that: “cool, so fusion power is possible on Earth. Now what should we do with it?”
But hey. Maybe it will be the energy of the future on Antarctica or the Moon or something instead.
I agree renewables might make it mostly moot, but there’s still the issue of base load. Storage might solve it, but if fusion can be made safe and cheap enough it could still have a niche.
Then there’s Mars and the belt. There’s no guarantee we’ll colonise it permanently, but if we do fusion could be really useful as it’s far enough out that solar is significantly less efficient. Also fusion reactors could be handy power plants for spacecraft. Cheap reusable heavy lift systems may make all of this feasible.
Finally, the future is a long, long time. If we don’t wipe ourselves out, eventually we will every technology that is viable will be achieved (not possible, viable).
And then comes questions of life-cycle energy inputs and costs. How long will it be to be net positive on these? That is we spend less energy on cooling the coolant for superconductors and overall building the thing.
If that's the case, then why hasn't anyone written that check? The potential profit from commercialized fusion seems enormous (unlike a mars base), and there doesn't seem to be a shortage of capital seeking large returns.
Musk is the only one that even comes to mind, and he’s on the record saying he won’t touch turbulence.
Still, there is hope.
Raegan gutted virtually every US program and refunding has only come back to things that are politically relevant. “That giant science machine that might one day make lots of heat” isn’t high on the “political value” list.
You cannot yet make money with it, so there's no capitalist lobby. Success is not certain, and timeframes are too long for politicians to score points in the election game. It's not as cool as space, and the green faction isn't too keen on the whole nuclear thing. So far, fears about peak oil turned out to be largely unfounded (but do note that we probably did pass the peak as far as conventional oil production in concerned).
If I kept at it, I probably could come up with more theories...
In other words the green faction is simply disinterested in nuclear fusion, like we are disinterested in the Large Hadron Collider, sure its a cool experiment, but nothing we should be considering to further our goal of fighting our current environmental disasters.
That said, I agree that as things stand today, fusion research is no panacea to climate change. However, note that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified in '92, and if we'd decided to go all-in on fusion back then, who knows where we'd be at today...
So honestly I don’t believe that there exists people in the wild who’s opinion is: “No to fusion! Because nuclear = bad”, and if they do exists, I don’t think they are of anywhere near size and numbers required to influence public funding.
The upthread comment was 20, not 50, and I’ve heard 15 or 20 years away frequently since the 1980s and seen it in things dating back to the 1960s, so, no, its not baloney.
Nor does it necessarily mean that progress isn’t being made, its more of a comment that the unknown unknowns are being converted in known unknowns as fast as a known unknowns are being converted into known knowns.
It’s been whipsawing between these estimates for the last couple hours.
I think I now understand the state of fusion research.
We don't know how long it will take, but at the same time there is visible progress occurring on many fronts: understanding plasma behavior and how to control it, better superconducting magnets, better control systems, solutions to the neutron embrittlement problem, etc.
There's not going to be a single breakthrough... or rather the fusion breakthrough already occurred. We've already learned about fusion and how to trigger it. That happened in the early 20th century.
Instead of a single breakthrough it will be continued progress on all fronts until at some point everything matures enough that someone manages to build a proof of concept reactor. At that point investment will flood into the space because it will have been sufficiently de-risked.
Perhaps also noteworthy from a historical perspective is that the whole thing was proposed by the Soviet Union, which doesn't even exist anymore. The US also pulled out of the collaboration in '98, necessitating a redesign; they rejoined in 2003, but congress periodically tries to pull the plug...
The problem is we don’t have « stable fusion » this one will take another 5-6 years.
Then we need « positive yielding fusion » today fusion has negative yield... that’s another 5 -10 years at least.
Finally we need «commercial scale fusion reactor » like France did with their Nuclear Reactor massive investment from post war to today in order to make cost and delay acceptable.
That would be 2040 at least for industrial nuclear fusion.
I have no idea what humanity will look like in that timeframe.
Namely, that there is a path to financial viability
> Namely, that there is a path to financial viability
I see what you did there.