It’s amazing just how many problems scaled up fusion would solve.
War in iraq? Why bother.
War in Ukraine? Just stop giving Russia fossil fuel money
Climate change? Let’s just not.
Why aren’t we just spending _all_ the money on this?
War in iraq? Why bother.
War in Ukraine? Just stop giving Russia fossil fuel money
Climate change? Let’s just not.
Why aren’t we just spending _all_ the money on this?
If you think about it, you can't simply give money to JS developers to do fusion research instead of making HTML buttons for internal use.
Those who can work in the field already do but so far there's nothing to show in terms of practical solutions. They even receive fair bit of criticism for misrepresenting the outcomes of their work to get more funding. Every now and then a startup or something will come up to claim that they thought of something novel that will solve all of the problems and how the people who work in expensive government funded programs are amateurs with no creativity, then disappear in the valley of vaporware dreams.
Humanity is deeply invested in it, it's just that it's really hard.
Oh, BTW, We already have a reliable and extremely powerful nuclear fusion reactor in the sky. We can actually pour enormous amount of our resources into harnessing it and succeed but it is considered a divisive topic.
On HN, anyway. The wider world is all in on solar, except where it might compete with oil extraction subsidy.
It is like planning a project and ignoring half of issues which will make or break your project.
Besides, as we are creatures who sleep roughly in sync with the fusion in the sky, we don't really need to have 24/7 constant energy input. Combination of storage and older tech like good old fission energy and natural gas can be enough.
Also there is lot of things going on at night - people are heating their homes or charging their BEVs.
With fusion we don't know how to do it. There are many, many ideas we could pursue, and they are being pursued, but we have no idea if any of them will actually work. It's quite possible none of them will, or that solving it might take enabling technology we haven't even thought of developing yet.
For context we have already spent several Manhattan Projects worth of fund on fusion research, in inflation adjusted terms.
Fusion can never even come close to competing with fission, and fission is not today competitive. It gets less so every year.
IMO, the only fusion company that has a real chance is Helion. Most of the breathless hype runs into generic showstopping issues like the ones above. If someone presents a new fusion concept, ask them about their power density, and how much complexity there is in that core.
And there's the more insidious variant of this: to solve it we need new physics. I say it's more insidious because, if we used all the money in current approaches, we would be diverting it from the research that could really solve it.
I mean, the Manhattan project wasn't about trying to figure out how to harness nuclear power, it was about how to deliver a nuclear explosion. getting some energy out of fission was never really a particularly hard problem once we understood what was going on (it's literally so easy that it's a problem), getting it to explode from a package you could load into a b-52 was the harder problem.
The difference isn't really about what we know is possible, it's that unlike fission, making a fusion bomb is easier than making fusion power, so the military funding dried up before it made much progress, like a person's interest in a porno once the fun part is done.
A better question is why we are not investing in solar, wind and hydrogen more.
Both of those are cheap. People advocating nukes wish they were not.
I don't really care whether or not nukes are cheap when they're the only reliable low-carbon energy source we have, and when they're the safest energy source we have. Some things are more fundamentally important than economics.
Fusion does not offer energy density even approaching commercial fission.
This always comes up in discussions about fusion but do you really think we aren't? Solar didn't get where it is now from a lack of funding. A lot of money and time and effort has gone into it, just not mostly into one boondoggle project everyone can point to.
I would really like to hear numbers to back up the idea that investment into these (esp. solar and wind) is "small" in total because I'd easily bet on it being several orders of magnitude more invested in than fusion.
If you took every dollar of ITER and put it into solar would it make a meaningful difference? Probably not. It just reads as extremely misdirected, and maybe even sealioning.
And to be clear, I think ITER specifically probably is a waste of money, but it's a waste of money on a shockingly tiny scale for how much negative attention it draws, it's by far the bulk of spending on fusion, and none of it really has much to do with anything to do with scaling out manufacturing and deployment of proven technology.
But just now probably the biggest effect is confusing people about the cost structure of power generation, leading them to believe that lots of heat per unit mass input results in cheap power.
It's likely that in a parallel universe where 0 investment into fusion happened, and most of it was pumped into solar, the difference might be something like:
- One small city might be covered in solar panels.
- We'd be farther behind on some areas of material science, superconductor research, and fundamental physics than we are by a bit.
[1] eg. https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/press-release/decade-r...
Back when that spending might have made a difference, there was no work on superconduction for fusion, because high-temperature superconductors were not a gleam in anybody's eye.
That said, it is possible that training up and employing plasma fluid dynamics physicists could yet have unforeseeably consequential results that might yet (as it were) eclipse the effects of cheap solar PV.
Anyways I suspect $1b of 2022 dollars wouldn't go nearly as far in 1980 or 1990 in terms of advancing solar tech. It's not like all that happened in a vacuum, semiconductor tech likely had to get to a certain point before this explosion could meaningfully happen, and there's never been a shortage of investment into semiconductors.
In this whole thread you've provided no evidence or reason to believe fusion research was in any way inhibiting solar research. You just seem to have a feeling it's true, but what, specifically, would those dollars have done for solar, and why are they somehow uniquely suited to being repurposed towards solar? If it's so glaringly obvious you should be able to explain more deeply.
The problem is promoting the work as if it might ever lead to practical power generation.
The first is the same as all other research. The other is just lying. I don't like lying. That is all.
It is worse when they claim yet another "breakthrough".
More butts than seats on that fast-moving ride.
Fusion research is cool beans, but not for any plausible practical reason.
Given that, all the work on making it happen at big scale is a wholly wasted. The companies issued billion-dollar contracts to build parts of it do not see those contracts as wasteful, and hope we won't.
Upgrading living standards for poor people is (or should/would be) easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtbjQ51NvDg
A bigger problem is making people less career-driven and settle for a simpler life, small-scale farming, permaculture etc. Photosynthesis is free and abundant!
But we're locked into this mental trap of constant growth. We just assume that the only way should be up - more energy, more people, more stuff...
"On the far end of the overshoot spectrum are situations in which a community of living things receives a surplus of energy through some accidental event that happens only once. Imagine how the lives of field mice would be transformed if a truck full of grain overturned on the nearby freeway and spilled its load in their meadow. The mice suddenly have more energy than they can use and their population soars far beyond the meadow’s carrying capacity. As the number of mice in the meadow grows, though, the rate at which the grain is consumed also rises, until the grain begins to run short. At this point nothing the mice can do will spare them from dieoff; most of the mice will starve, and the survivors’ struggle to keep themselves fed may damage the meadow badly enough to decrease its carrying capacity over the long term. Years later, the meadow may still not support as many mice as it did the day before the truck overturned."
From John Michael Greer's book The Ecotechnic Future
I guess we take as a given we were there for cynical oil based reasons?
> War in Ukraine? Just stop giving Russia fossil fuel money
The oil/gas doesn't cease to have value under sanctions, at worst it can all be consumed internally to drive their war machine. Climate change isn't driving Russia to desire Ukraine, it just does.
> Climate change? Let’s just not.
The government we are cynical of now has the power to control climate and our cynicism vanishes?
2) it they have less value, to the point you wouldn’t have to be a slave to the producers of energy.
3) even cynics can’t sell ice to eskimos. If fusion really did pan out and make energy abundant it doesn’t matter if they have lots of oil and gas. No one would need it.
As many other comments have pointed out though, fusion seems kinda unlikely to actually do that, but arguing that even if it did it wouldn’t change anything is a bit pessimistic for me.
Renewable energy today provides very cheap energy inputs and no improvement in this field can yield any dramatic difference. And everything that comes further downstream has to be paid, anyway.
Research in it is still a good thing though because a lot of other discoveries and technology improvements are done on the way, bringing benefit even if result itself is useless (like with the moon landing).
Until the winds change and supporting fusion would make it more likely for them to get reelected, they will be making up all sort of stuff of why we should waste money in less proven and more unreliable, and possibly dirtier sources of energy.