Hacker News Reader

Comment by hasoleju | Hacker News Reader

> However, since successful fusion power would provide humanity with unlimited clean power forever, a little patience might be in order.

This great promise seems to be the main reason why we still try to built that machine. I have the feeling that putting these resources into economically already proven clean technologies would be a better investment.

On the other hand, a lot of young researchers are working on such a project. Their education is also valuable and might justify parts of that investment.

View on HN

> I have the feeling that putting these resources into economically already proven clean technologies would be a better investment.

There's something to be said about putting all one's eggs in one basket. While current renewables are a big leap over non-renewables, there are glaring flaws in each implementation.

Wind and solar still require massive manufacturing and transportation back-ends to scale up, and solar in particular requires weird rare-earths, the mining of which causes serious ecological issues. Nuclear fission power is fantastic, but has a huge PR and NIMBY problem (despite ironically being orders of magnitude safer than its non-renewable counterparts), and therefore has skyrocketing costs today as well.

Battery-electric vehicles and storage face the same problem, and in many cases, simply offload their emissions to a central (usually coal/oil/gas-fired) power station.

There's a lot of money to go around; the gross world product is approaching US$100 trillion and I'm fairly certain a handful of billions could be spared for the development of fusion.

In terms of physics, it's a solved problem; even in terms of engineering, the issue has been narrowed down to confining the working plasma enough and managing instabilities for long enough to produce net positive power. Funnily enough a big issue previously was having enough compute to simulate the plasma behaviour; with high-end GPUs, this is also less of a problem now.

I am cautiously optimistic—ITER is going for sheer size, whereas start-ups like SPARC are trying new superconducting magnets. I believe the late 2020s and early 2030s will be a very productive period for fusion.

Given the current scale of clean energy investment, transferring the fusion projects' money would be a drop in the ocean.

25 years ago (the customary fusion time unit ;)) that would have been very different, but who knows, perhaps that would have created a rigid "big money" mindset in the fledgling renewable market that would have crippled it forever, compared to the mix of brute force state money and organic growth we had in the history that did happen.

And yes, unexpected side effects of large research spending can be a thing. Who knows how computing would look like today if European countries hadn't pooled to create that permanent physics festival called CERN.

I look at my kids and then I look at this kind of project and it's promise.

If it works, if we can get fusion and it's promise, then my kids are going to live in a radically different world, and a much better one.

Gone are many of the resource wars, gone are the fears of fission based power, whether it be the waste or refinement, gone are the limitations of the electrical grid due to weather (mostly).

Finally, we'll have electricity too cheap to measure. Finally, they won't have to care about the price of a barrel of oil and how that affects their governments. Finally, they'll have the energy to actually do something about climate change without adding to the problem.

But all these thoughts are going to seem like 'faster horses' to them. Their ideas in a world of nearly free and clean energy are going to make mine seem so very antiquated.

I'm hoping that they are going to live most of their lives in a world just so much better than mine. And I really do think that fusion is one step in that direction.

Something about that makes me just smile.

The resources being put into this aren't _that_ huge; this cost about 550m EUR to build. ITER may come in at up to 60 billion EUR (originally meant to be 20, but these things tend to slip), which sounds like a lot, but it's a quarter of one year's global spending on solar panels alone. It doesn't seem like an unreasonable bet, really.

Beyond the benefit of never needing to burn something for electricity again, the sheer output of fusion will bring things that have been cost prohibitive due to power/fuel costs into the realm of feasibility. Near unlimited energy for desalination, carbon capture, fully climate controlled farms etc

The cost appear exorbitant but in the end it's not much compared to what it will cost to replace fossil fuels.

And it's not like the current proven clean technologies do not have drawbacks.

I guess if your context is only one generation then yes. However, these long term projects are as much for future generations as now. They are also a tiny tiny percentage of the world's GDP

Reply on news.ycombinator.com