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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Roughly $50 billion has been spent globally on fusion research since the 1950s with nothing material to show for the effort; at what point do you stop throwing good money after bad? This strikes me as the learning from these posts.

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I think you make an excellent point that fusion research is underfunded. NASA budget since the 50s is ~$1,400 billion — almost 30x what’s been put into fusion research. We’re asking fusion research to produce “free, clean, and carbon-free base-load electricity forever.” Seems worth a NASA-level of investment to me.

You could use the same logic to claim perpetual motion machine research is underfunded. The likelihood of the research leading to a useful result has to enter into it somehow.

Saudi Arabia alone exported almost $100 billion in crude petroleum in 2020 [1]. That was significantly less than the previous year.

Given these scales I'm not really sure $50 billion is a lot of money for the entire world to spend on an energy R&D project. In fact, that number seems surprisingly low, do you have a source for it?

[1]: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/crude-petroleum

I'm sure it is difficult to decide that since, as pointed out, there is a working example staring at us every day. So it always feel just out of reach.

Intel has a capex budget of $27 billion just for 2022, so you don't really understand scale or have a point.

Intel has working products, customers, shareholders, and fundamentally, accountability for that research spend. Results driven research funding is not unreasonable, unless you want to classify this research in the same vein as particle accelerators and a curiosity with no expectation of success (which is fine; just don’t sell as an energy silver bullet where there’s no evidence it can be delivered on). Hope is not a strategy nor a cost justification.

Just because the semiconductor's productivity gains have been massive on a short term time horizon, does not mean that fusion research has been a waste, or that is not on track to "deliver". Fusion as a technology is a long term bet and requires much more capital expenditure, for little short term return, then even semi fabs (which are notorious capital sinks).

Your mention of cost justification is ignoring the bigger picture that our economic system is setup to benefit public companies like Intel, and not grand research endeavors.

As an exercise to the reader, imagine what organizations/companies would exist if the contemporary economic incentive structures were different.

There is in fact no "track" with commercially competitive fusion-generated power at the end of it, tritium or no tritium. It's great that plasma physicists are being employed and enabled to do research, but that could be done much more cheaply and effectively by not spending on ITER.

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