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Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

In this article, or in general? For this article, because it's just not going to arrive in time to solve the main issue. I'm extremely optimistic about ITER, but the current timetable on ITER/DEMO doesn't have an operating poc plant until the 2050s.

If you mean in general, it's not even remotely ignored. There are massive projects underway (see the previously mentioned ITER) as well as smaller, more experimental projects. It's a very exciting field to follow. It just doesn't move fast enough to solve problems that we needed to solve a decade ago.

We're in damage control mode when it comes to climate change, deaths from emissions, etc. We can't afford to wait for a perfect solution when we're bleeding out in the field.

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If anyone's not already aware of it, the SPARC/ARC reactor work spun out of MIT looks pretty promising on shorter timescales than ITER:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8uYNhevRtk

Stuff like this is what got me excited about fusion. Energy is the most fundamental constraint of the universe and people like MIT's Zach Hartwig say fusion merely has a funding problem.

> fusion merely has a funding problem.

When you look at history of ITER failures and the real problems involved in making the whole fusion power production operation economically sustainable, this claim disintegrates. It is a very complex project that is hard to manage, and building and operating fusion power plant is currently much more costly than doing that for a fission power plant. The only benefit of fusion vs. fission is that fusion can give us much more energy. But fission can give enough energy now for decades, and much more cheaply.

It's worth distinguishing ITER from fusion research as a whole. While it's an interesting project, I doubt it's going to be first to market for actual power generation. Its design is fighting some pretty nasty scaling laws that newer research is bypassing.

I wouldn't advocate shutting down fission plants with the expectation that they'd be replaced by fusion in the immediate future, obviously, but some of the non-ITER work might end up viable sooner than a lot of people expect.

Which non-ITER work is closer to power generation? Can you be specific?

The most prominent example I'm aware of is the one I linked earlier in the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26674988

It's still not going to be ready tomorrow, but it doesn't require building the eighth wonder of the world.

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