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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

Because you do not get to be a billionaire by pissing away all of your money on a fool's errand. Fusion is a black hole of broken promises that will not delivery a single watt of useful energy to consumers in your lifetime and additional funding from Gates won't change this. Fission works. Fission delivers today. Fission gets the job done. Making fission cheaper, easier to deploy, and safer will have a much bigger impact than chasing fusion dreams.

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Becoming a billionaire and trying to push the envelope are different activities, although sometimes they align. And as you describe, when a guy catches some important near term thing that nobody sees - that's where he finds billions.

But the unreachable areas are sometimes not that unreachable. Look at the space industry companies. If you ignore the flagship ones that popped up in a scale of mere years then moving out in your lifetime looks like a pipe dream too.

The problem is urgency and we don't have an enough amount of uncertainty budget to chase fusion reactors. The scale of the problem is so huge that even Bill's fortune could be insufficient to make a dent to the problem in a foreseeable future. Yes, it'd be nice if Bill can make it happen but if not, he's going to regret it. I'm pretty sure that Bill already has done the math, concluded that we probably have only less than 10 years and next-gen nuclear fission reactor is the only feasible mid-term technology to fight against climate change.

The 'he did the math and then did an obviously impossible thing' is really easy to understand. Otherwise it's just a meh explanation that's based on some predictions mixed with politics.

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