It's impossible for fusion to be a significant source of energy in the time left to avert catastrophic global warming. Even with the most optimistic estimates, we will at best have a handful of small plants, nothing comparable to a fission power plant.
We can't just be thinking about what we'll do to stem the tide, we have to keep working on how we're going to push it back.
We definitely want to be looking at technologies that have a high ROI for emission reduction in the next 10 year span, mixed with longer term projects.
Fission is a longer term project. Simple as that.
This... is my point? So I think you do see it. "Fusion can't save us now so we shouldn't invest in it at all" is short-sighted. This is not an either-or proposition, and frankly people have completely out of whack ideas of the scale of money that's been invested in fusion. Tens of billions of dollars are nothing in what's going to be a trillions of dollars problem.
We need to be building out renewables, and ideally fission too, now. We need to get to carbon zero asap. And then comes the project of getting things back to where we need to be, and we are just not ready for the energy we're going to need to do that.
People thing 10 billion dollars is a lot of money.
My view is that 10 billion dollars is nothing.
My view is that the total OECD investment in fusion R&D should be 10 billion. A year. For the next 50 years.
The investment in the high ROI technologies, principally solar R&D and overnight energy capacity projects like water pump batteries, should be 100 billion (across the OECD). And the investment in CapEx, installing new panels, 200 billion.
Our investment in STEM R&D, as a society, is just pitiful across the Western world.
The portion of our tax dollars that go to long term R&D, the primary driver of productivity growth and progress in our nation's, is scrap.
Certainly, the fact that solar and wind are sure things right now warrants massive investment. Just throwing endless gobs of money at a problem that's as-yet unsolved doesn't necessarily lead to good outcomes, it also takes directed goals and all that. That's in theory what ITER is all about, though I think the slowness with which it got started will hamper it and we'll see success on other projects before it even gets to the testing phase. It was an attempt to create a moonshot that kinda failed, but the private sector seems more interested now so it might not matter.
That said I'd actually be surprised if there isn't already much more than $200bil going into building out solar capacity worldwide. It's just not easily enumerated because it's not special anymore, and a lot of it is on small scales (ie. I'm gonna install about $20k of solar panels to my home this spring and I'm not alone, but it's hard to tell how much that adds up to).
It is well worth keeping focus on fusion energy, especially if there are theoretical reasons to think it works.
Even if it's too late to avoid it completely, it still makes very much sense to work on not making it even worse.
Suggesting to abandon efforts in something because it will anyway not be ready in time, or to stop restrictions because "anyway it's too late" is just the next step in the strategy of the deniers - or, rather, their agitators, motivated by immense profit.
A dollar spent on fusion is a dollar not spent on solar panels or turbines that would displace fossil fuels immediately. And, it would be a dollar wasted, because the fusion work will never produce any commercially competitive power, anyway. So, it is a choice between buying something that contributes to a solution, or just pissing it away.
I see this claim a lot, but what makes this true? Why would money allocation be so inelastic, and why can't it become flexible?
Or am I missing something?
No one knows the future but with the way things have gone so far, fusion in its current form looks like a giant waste of time and money.
Few lack that experience.
Anyways, at the scale of international project budgets, "killing fusion to increase money spent on other green projects" is, at this point, like not buying a daily coffee so you can afford a car.
Even pessimistic estimates of ITER's cost are still under $100B for a 5 decade long project. Or, put another way, less than $2 billion dollars a year. There are highway interchanges that have cost that much. And the EU and the US alone of ITER's contributors have a combined GDP of $35 trillion.
I'm a big believer in wind and solar, although their intrinsically intermittent operation causes me to also worry about baseload power options, and nuclear fusion is the most attractive and promising development in that field.
I think it's stupid to look at one part of the solution and not at the other(s).
SPARC won't have a turbine either, but with a construction time of four years, it brings us a lot closer to the next reactor which will.
Which may be the core explanation for its failure.
It's good to have fusion power in our back pockets, but we shouldn't be relying on it for our energy plans quite yet.