I admire your optimism. I'd say half a century, if things go well, but I'm not convinced fusion will ever be economically feasible.
There's this [1] famous graph comparing US research spending into Fusion, compared to 1976 predictions how long it would take with different budgets. According to that, the US funded fusion below the "not enough to ever get it done" budget. With that in mind, we have come remarkably far.
1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
Also, I think you have causality reversed. Fusion isn't remote because of lack of funding; rather, funding was low because there weren't stakeholders pushing for it, and that was because the stakeholders didn't see any value coming from it. For example, all the reactor designs utilities had been presented with were not things they had any interest in building, they were too large, complex, and expensive.
(I know I still owe you a detailed response on the thermo thing.)
Not on Earth. But put a good enough fusion reactor on a rocket, and you can reach neighboring stars in 3 or 4 decades instead of the 15 one would expect for fission. (Of course, nobody is even sure reactors can get that good, but it does look possible.)
I think nuclear propulsion is going to be the biggest beneficiary of higher mass-to-orbit-for-a-reasonable-price advances.
There are a huge number of propulsion technologies that are physically possible but too heavy and/or dangerous for near-Earth use.
Cheaper lift (to bootstrap) + more ongoing destinations and transit work (to drive) + outside of Earth orbit (to alleviate safety concerns) = rapid progress
The proposed fuel is even worse as AM242 has a half life of 141 years making it hard to collect in bulk.
And there is absolutely zero chance of fusion solving our current energy crisis, the odds for fission are already low enough. There is no point on speculating on that.
Early designs for ITER where for a larger device that would have actually produced electricity though not cheaply enough to be economically viable, but it got scaled way down.
HTSCs weren't usable when it was designed, and have only just become usable in the last 5 years or so but they are a fundamentally different material. You don't just drop them into a large, incredibly complex machine that depends on it's integrated magnetic containment system: you are functionally building a new device.
If you can ITER, then you don't get a refund on spent dollars. You get a loss. And then you get to start another 30 year project to maybe build a new vacuum vessel, which you have to do because you still haven't actually tested plasma stability.
"But but MIT skunkworks!"...yeah. It's still going along, and they haven't suddenly churned out a functioning reactor based on HTSCs because oh look, whatever the advantages they're a new material with different properties, manufacturing and handling behaviors all of which need to be developed, measured and inspected before you can use them effectively in a fusion device. If they look good then great: they can be used to make DEMO, the ITER-successor commercial powerplant prototype, cheaper and more powerful.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
We have the solution, it's removing the most egregious wastes of energy and using the sun to power the rest. It's the same solution that we've always had available, we just have to do the intelligent thing rather than the thing which gives more power to the powerful.
I've been quoting the proverb for a long time. Thank you for the quote, I feel it says basically the same thing but I appreciate the different wording and that it is attributed to Plato.
- Forgot where I heard that. It may have been a comedian.
About mRNA vaccines I agree with you, because they indeed have been a niche thing before covid, but then they were the first available vaccines while the alternatives were still being researched when the first mRNA vaccines got their emergency approval. But how has CRISPR benefitted from covid? It doesn't seem to be used anywhere in therapeutics, no?
I imagine it's on the comment because it was used to create many of the non mRNA vaccines.
But I don't think it got popularized. It was already widely popular.
This has been IMHO inappropriately hyped. We have an expected gas shortfall in Europe due to the mess made by one rogue actor (though Putin hasn't shut the pipes off yet, The existing price shocks are all speculative!). Petroleum production is fine. Gas production outside of Europe is fine. Existing interests in those industries have been exploiting the resulting price shocks (which are not the same thing as a crisis) to try to drive public policy decisions in their direction.
We've been here before in the 1970's when rogue actors tried to exploit their production capacity for political gain. It sucked, but we didn't get fusion out of it then either.
Frankly it's not even the first time we've had a supply shortfall. People tend to forget this, but we ran out of oil in the late 90's too! Turns out, there was lots more oil available at higher price points.
I don’t think it’s actually evolved all that much. They just deployed something that wasn’t really tested. I recall learning about theoretical mRNA vaccines back in 2014-2019 (granted they were killing the hosts and stuff). As someone who’s studied bioengineering (university, reading papers and some projects) I’d really like to see 10-15 years of usage before we consider anything with the tech.
I for one home we don’t do the same thing with fusion. There is an amazing amount of risk as technology has expanded, we have to be far more cautious.