Public nuclear (fission) energy R&D gets 1.85 Bn USD in annual funding. Public annual fusion energy sciences gets 675 Mn USD in annual funding.
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/doe-fy202...
https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/doe-fy202...
Where you and he differ is in your judgment of how likely fusion programs are to succeed.
I personally don't think ITER is worth pursuing. I'm skeptical about other tokamak efforts as well. Small efforts that might yield more attractive reactors (Zap, Helion) may be worth pursuing, not least because such efforts would be cheaper.
magnetic confinement, lasers, material sciences have all advanced because of these projects and had impacts in other markets.
even if the money invested never ends up with an ITER reactor. we've still come out ahead economically.
without the original research, the spinoffs may never occur because the initial capital outlay isn't warranted for the various individual uses.
the fact of the matter is fusion reactors are such a game changer ignoring them because of the chance they might not work is insane. meanwhile all the research into getting them to work generates a ton of economic activity because other smaller markets can take advantage of the technological progress that was made in the attempt.
Whatever "economic activity" happens around fusion would be overwhelmingly better devoted to building out solar, wind, and storage, to slow the fast developing climate disruption catastrophe.
Claims that space spending had a 8:1 (or 24:1, or whatever) payback via spinoffs have typically just assumed the spending has the same macroeconomic payoff of private R&D spending, which demonstrates absolutely nothing.
Without that contribution inflation, one has to somehow show that a particular technology would not exist without the putative spinoff contribution. And that's really difficult to do in most cases. Here, the military has had an interest in high power millimeter wave sources for a variety of reasons.
The argument remains, also, that if spinoffs are an inherent part of research, then it doesn't matter what the research is on, and so you get the highest payoff by funding research that makes sense via direct benefits, as the spinoffs come regardless. You'd need to argue that fusion is somehow better at producing spinoffs than other research. I find that likely; I suspect small scale research is more likely to provide spinoffs, as desktop technologies seem likely to have more applications.
you can hand wave 'possible alternative realities' all you want but the fact is they triggered those economic returns. spacex would be another (recent) example of a primarily NASA funded endeavor that will generate massive returns in the future and would not exist without said funding.
anyways good luck.
> the fact is they triggered those economic returns.
Your blind faith in this dogma is touching, but it isn't supported by real evidence. For example, if you examine what actually happened, the NASA role in developing integrated circuits was rather minor.
D-D and D-T fusion would cost even more than fission, for the same power output. Fission is today uncompetitive. Fusion would thus be more uncompetitive. The longer it takes to get fusion power working, the more uncompetitive it becomes. Tokamak fusion will thus, also, never be commercially competitive.
But it will be able to absorb an unlimited amount of money.
The designs they publish for the fateful day they do get anything out are overwhelmingly bigger than a fission plant of similar capacity, overwhelmingly more costly to build, and overwhelmingly more expensive to operate. Leaving aside the plasma physics, no solutions are known for basic engineering questions in construction and operation.
Fission has turned out to be a dead end, for cost reasons: renewables are cheaper, and easier and quicker to field, and cost is still plummeting, making fission less competitive with each passing day. So, anything that costs more obviously has no chance.
All of this is a click away, if you care to know. Nobody is obliged to know, or care. But not bothering says all.
The reactor described there has a thermal power density 1/40th that of a PWR reactor vessel. And it uses so much beryllium that using the entire world's estimated resource of that element would let you build enough reactors to supply maybe 1% of world primary energy demand.
$25 billion would build a hell of a lot of solar, wind, and storage, that would start displacing fossil-generated power immediately, and then generate revenue to build out more.
In the mean time, there are arguments from analogy/difference. The market for fusion power is electricity production. (Other possible uses such as hydrogen production, district heat, desalination, or carbon sequestration have been hypothesized[1], but adding fusion to any of those needlessly adds technical risk, and is unlikely to be greenlit.)
At a very high level, fusion electric power plants would be like fission power plants in all economic respects except being more complicated and therefore having higher O & M costs, and that they operate with bigger parasitic losses and startup power and energy requirements. Therefore fusion plants would have a worse return on capital employed than fission plants.
We observe (1) that capital costs are nearly all of the cost of fission plants, and the same would be true of fusion, and (2) that fission power plants are uncompetitive[2] and will almost certainly remain so. Therefore fusion, being strictly less profitable than fission, will not be competitive.
1. ARPA-E review of initial markets for fusion energy: https://arpa-e.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/105PM_...
2. Lazard's LCOE Analysis: https://www.lazard.com/media/451881/lazards-levelized-cost-o...
If the thousand tons of molten radioactive lithium/beryllium gets loose, it it distinguishable from a fission meltdown by being worse. Ordinary beryllium oxide dust is worse than radioactives; radioactive beryllium might be worse, or only just equally bad. Molten lithium burns on contact with air and explodes on contact with water, and lithium oxide vapor turns into drain opener on contact with your nose or throat.
"Hull maintenance" is I guess your name for dismantling and replacing the whole hundreds-of-tons and miles-of-pipes radioactive innards of the reactor using only R/C robots.
The most reliable product of fusion promotion has always been falsehood. It seems unlikely tho change.
A tritium leak is orders of magnitude less worse than a fission meltdown in terms of poisoning the water table. In the absolute worst case the exclusion zone lasts 100 years.
A tritum or molten salt leak also trivial to contain compared to a fission meltdown. Ten feet of concrete. This is reflected in lower costs to build and relative ease to comply with regulation. Draw me the scenario where there is an explosion that cannot be contained by existing engineered solutions.
Your most reliable product is FUD and misinformation born of confident ignorance. You really ought to stop until you know more.
Simply cooling the magnets back to operating temperature will take longer than that. ITER's coils will take a month to cool down from room temperature.
The problem with leaks isn't so much that tritium is dangerous; the problem is that a leak (of coolant, or air) into the vacuum vessel destroys the ability of the fusion reactor to function at all.
One of the big problems with fusion that Lidsky pointed out is they cram all this complexity into a space that's off limits to people (due to induced radioactivity). Anything breaks there, even something minor? Time consuming pain. Abdou has put up numbers on estimated MTBF and MTTR for fusion reactors that given uptimes of maybe 4%.
A fission reactor can operate with 2% of its fuel rods leaking. A fusion reactor will cease to operate with a single leak from a blanket module into the reactor vessel.
A $30 billion reactor complex, judging by recent experience with nukes, would never be completed, but would burn $100 billion before finally being cancelled.
None of the money spent would be returned, afterward.
Nobody has ever come forward with any such thing, to my knowledge.
Suddenly those scaling laws are invalid because someone on the internet who has no idea how to make an MCF machine implicitly thinks they are incorrect. You'll pardon my skepticism.
I will welcome any skepticism you can muster.
After you get all of 1, 2, and 3, you are ready to begin actual work on turning emitted neutrons into electrical power in an economically viable way. We have not had occasion to begin such work. If begun, it will predictably fail, for relentlessly practical economic reasons.