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Comment by mslathrop | Hacker News Reader

Nuclear fusion is always only 10 years away from working.

Funny, it used to always be 20 years away. Before that it was always 30. It's strange how the number keeps decreasing with the passage of time.

Apparently it's dropped down to 4 years since that comment...

Yes I won't disagree that the technology is getting better and that we are getting closer to achieving it. But a commercial fusion reactor in ten years seems very unrealistic with the current regulation and standards set by current government regulatory bodies.

When I was in school studying nuclear engineering, the running joke was that fusion will always be N amount of years away from happening. It seems like every year or so a new company or group of researchers has found a breakthrough that will allow fusion to happen in N amount of years even though we have yet to reach breakeven in a research setting.

But a commercial fusion reactor in ten years seems very unrealistic with the current regulation and standards set by current government regulatory bodies.

I think it would be too much of a competitive disadvantage for a country to not use fusion if it became practical.

Decades of research and money into fusion, but the limiting factor is government regulation? C'mon...

There'd be some need for regulation but less than with fission. The only nuclear waste is activated reactor components, not transuranics and fission products. The reactor turns off like a light switch, with nothing to produce decay heat, and it has no potential for a runaway reaction. (It's hard enough to get the reaction going in the first place.) The only potential radiation release is small amounts of tritium, and there's no concern about fissiles getting diverted for weapons. Tritium has some weapons use if you're ready to progress to thermonuclear bombs, but in that case you hardly need fusion reactors to make it.

If we manage boron fusion, we'll be producing less radiation than burning equivalent coal, and won't have tritium. It's hard to see how anyone would justify regulating that for anything other than electrical safety, just like any other power plant, and for radiation standards on par with medical equipment.

People bring up that joke in the comments section of every fusion article ever published. The fact is, fusion has progressed exponentially since about 1970, about as fast as Moore's Law, despite a level of funding far below what those early optimistic advocates said we needed.

I specifically came to the comments section to post that same comment. Glad you did it for me :-)

Corollary, IPv6 is always only 5 years away from replacing IPv4

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