We'd have electricity beaming out of our asses by now if we didn't attack Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria, and instead spent $2T on fusion R&D. And hundreds of thousands civilians would be alive, on top of that.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
So any fusion fans who still say we won't have grid energy from fusion for another 30 years are either misinformed or not very optimistic.
"A handful of organizations have performed bulk fusion, where a large volume of particles reaches temperatures high enough for fusion to occur on a large scale. [...] none of the organizations that have managed to do bulk fusion have done it in a practical way that can be used to make electricity."
Will fusion ever be economical? I don't have a crystal ball, but properly charging for the economic cost of carbon emissions is necessary before answering that question. I also can't predict how much cheaper reactors would be than test machines and how long they would run for. The science needs to be funded to answer these questions. When society decides these answers are worth 5x F-35s then we'll have our answers.
> The science needs to be funded to answer these questions. When society decides these answers are worth 5x F-35s then we'll have our answers.
Isn't society funding ITER for $22 billion, and much else? The American and UK people are investing in some of the companies, per the OP.
MIT's HTS coil winding is the space to watch now imo. If it isn't all smoke and mirrors then we could see real test reactors for less money than ITER in our lifetime.
Given constrained budgets theory has continued to thrive. Cutting edge turbulence models are being made by theoretical plasma physicists. This is a problem no other engineer wants to touch with a 10 foot pole yet has incredibly far-reaching implications for many engineering fields.
That's if it were a failure. If it were a success, we'd end global warming, attach a ginormous rocket booster to the world's economy without dooming the planet, kick the stool from underneath several authoritarian/theocratic regimes, and who knows what else.
What makes you say that management and vision declined? NASA does incredible things, as does NIH, NSF, etc.
> this would have been a _way_ better way to spend taxpayer money.
In order to do research, you need freedom, and political and economic stability, and those require militaries - not solely or most importantly, but necessarily. Sometimes militaries will be misused or used inefficiently, but there is no option to just spend all the money elsewhere.
It's comparatively easy to say that with hindsight. There was about as much reason in 1940 to predict that making a nuclear bomb was feasible with enough resources as there is today to think the same about fusion power generation. Both started from the standpoint of "theoretically possible, but levels and levels of unknown engineering challenges."
True, but you mean fission :)
Yes, and I omitted an essential factor: All the funded projects that failed and are mostly forgotten.
> There was about as much reason in 1940 to predict that making a nuclear bomb was feasible with enough resources as there is today to think the same about fusion power generation.
My impression is that it was believed to be a very likely project, and mostly a race with the Nazis. An excerpt from Einstein's letter to FDR, credited with kicking off the project:
In the course of the last four months it has been made probable—through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America—that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.
This phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable—though much less certain—that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.
https://www.atomicheritage.org/key-documents/einstein-szilar...