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Comment by DC-3 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm naive, but I honestly don't understand why governments and private foundations alike aren't throwing money at Fusion scientists. It seems far and away the best possible investment one could make today in humanity's future.

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Throwing money at a problem gets you "more", not "better". If your problem is that you need more scale, then throwing more money at a problem will get you that scale. If what you need is a breakthrough, feeding more money tends to lead to more heartbreak (see, e.g., Alzheimer's--we've spent several billion dollars on a cure and the only thing to show for it is that reducing amyloid plaques doesn't seem to do a damn thing). Fusion is still very much in the latter category: we don't have a working fusion reactor we need to make feasible, we have a vague sketch of one that might become a feasible reactor, if we achieve a few breakthroughs (and even then, we have several more issues to work through to actually make it economical).

I didn't downvote you because I find your assertion about throwing money at a problem to the point. Others have downvoted you perhaps because your other assertion that there's no working fusion reactor might be unfounded, in other words, we might have already working fusion reactors but they are just not yet profitable. (I am not an expert.)

Uncertainty. The risk is much higher investing in fusion than an application.

I'm sure once a proven breakthrough occurs, money will begin to flood in. The potential is massive.

It's also a tough sell since it seems like science fiction whereas roads, schools, medicare, social security, etc are current tangible needs that people understand. I'd venture to say at least 50% of the American population believes you can get sick from being outside without a jacket and so trying to explain to them why you spent most of the budget on fusion would just make people's heads explode.

Why pay for uncertain research when you can just wait for others to figure it out and then use their proven technology? Aka, first-mover disadvantage.

But how to extract know-how from first movers?

Buy it?

Don't scientists disseminate their findings for free (via publishing papers)?

There are probably many papers in semicondactor area, but it is hard to build company producing consumer CPUs. The same is for search engines for example..

There little military application.

Little military application from a near limitless supply of energy? That sounds like a lack of imagination.

It was more a hypothesis, maybe there's little perceived application.

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