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Comment by rapsey | Hacker News Reader

Because it is still very much up in the air if fusion is cost effective. If the price to build a plant is astronomical it can not make enough energy to pay for itself.

A better question is why we are not investing in solar, wind and hydrogen more.

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> A better question is why we are not investing in solar, wind and hydrogen more.

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.

It is small in exactly the sense that it must become much bigger if we hope to fend off climatic catastrophe.

Sure, I agree with that. But when you raise this in the context of fusion it implies that you think fusion is somehow preventing this, so where's the evidence?

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.

Add up the money spent on fusion over decades. Imagine it spent instead, at the time, on improving solar panel manufacturing processes, initiating the exponential decline in cost two decades earlier than we got it.

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.

Again, I really don't think as much is spent on fusion -- or as little on solar -- as you seem to think. People keep throwing this idea around but it's not clear where they get it or they have literally anything to back it up. Fusion spending has amounted to maybe a few billion dollars a year since it began to be something anyone was willing to spend any money on at all, and that's being generous to the idea that a lot is being spent on it. I can find sources that talk about the investments that have gotten us to this point in solar being on the order of trillions of dollars[1].

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...

Again, I compared research on fusion against the prospect of research to make manufacturing solar cheap decades earlier than the Chinese government finally commissioned that work, leading to the present miracle. The consequence could have been solar built out decades earlier, millions of tons more coal left in the ground, and climate catastrophe pushed back.

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.

Do you really believe fusion research is the least useful thing the usgov spends $1b a year on? My issue here comes down to "why is fusion the thing you pick on"? They're both energy projects but so are thousands of other more expensive, more dangerous to the climate things.

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.

I don't see any problem with doing the research involved in trying to get fusion working. There are plenty of practical problems that provoke creative attempts at solutions, which are at least educational and might actually advance the state of this or that art.

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".

Show me your budget and I’ll show you your priorities. What pays better, fusion researcher or CRUD app writer?

Public fusion researcher pays pittance. Private fusion researcher pays fair.

More butts than seats on that fast-moving ride.

The best information available says fusion as pursued will never be anywhere close to competitive even with fission (which is not today economically competitive), never mind with photovoltaic solar panels (which are).

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.

Those have a role in the energy landscape to be sure, but they don’t offer the benefits of fusion because they don’t have the same power density.

Yes, but they have the incredible advantage that they produce large amounts of energy economically today, whereas, as the article states, it is not yet clear whether fusion will ever be able to produce significant energy, let alone economically.

Wind and solar only produce energy when the weather is cooperating, and it's difficult to predict how climate change will impact future availability. Hydrogen might be economical someday, but currently it's rather difficult to generate, store, and transport.

There is always wind and solar somewhere. It need only be transmitted or stored to be used in other places and times.

Both of those are cheap. People advocating nukes wish they were not.

Hand-waving away the transmission/storage required to make intermittent energy sources "reliable" does not magically make them trivial, or even solved, problems.

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.

We can look at simulations using actual historical weather data and actual cost estimates to determine how much it would cost to deal with intermittency of wind/solar using storage. The result is something that looks cheaper than fission (or cheap than fusion is likely to achieve.)

https://model.energy/

Yet, people deciding where to spend their own money are spending it on solar. Nukes are always built with money coerced from other people.

If solar/wind is used to make hydrogen when they are available, you have a energy generating loop that provides energy usable at any time.

Fusion does not "offer benefits" of any energetic or economic kind. It is interesting in the same ways that microkelvin cryogenic and gigapascal hyperpressure are, exercising extreme physics.

Fusion does not offer energy density even approaching commercial fission.

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