Wow, fusion power in less than 15 years! Gee whiz!
Actually, the 15 years out time frame puts it beyond what I've expected, 10 years out. That's where fusion has been for most of my life, 10 years from now.
Actually, the 15 years out time frame puts it beyond what I've expected, 10 years out. That's where fusion has been for most of my life, 10 years from now.
2. Ideas for parallel implementations of nuclear fusion have expanded, and as a result, funding and research has arguably become fragmented and resources have been diverted. In reality, there's a fixed amount of capital and knowledge (which is also a function of the availability of money) available for this kind of research. The amount of money the US puts into fusion research is quite paltry compared to the potential benefits. It may be a priority, but the way Washington spends money says otherwise.
Scientifically, fusion is maybe 10 years away. Politically, it's more like 40 for a real power plant, but with the current congress, I couldn't say. In addition to that, it's an expensive enough endeavor that it would be corporate suicide for a private company to attempt it, especially considering the majority of companies with enough capital to pursue something like fusion tend to be in the Oil and Gas industries.
Tri-Alpha has over $90 million in venture capital, some from Paul Allen. General Fusion has about half that, with Jeff Bezos as an investor. LPP is a lot smaller, but also doesn't need nearly as much at this point.
There are several other approaches in the works that could conceivably by privately funded, including Helion (needs $20 million for a full-scale reactor, already built a 1/3 scale version) and petawatt picosecond laser fusion (once the lasers get a little better).
Another promising approach is levitated dipole, but I don't know what costs look like for that one.
(extremely speculative of course)
PS: I have heard that the real issue was scaling up Jet was assumed to be work but doing so was to far from commercially viable to be useful.
But we lack the infrastructure and investment to build them.