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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually

Wasn't it perpetually 20 to 50 years away? I'm not an expert on the space. But new computational methods and magnets seem to be genuine steps forward.

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IIRC the one of the first times a group put timelines to a fusion reactor they had time vs funding level of something like 20 years/50 years/never, and the funding level that actually materialised was below the 'never' amount and yet it started the 'always 20 years away' joke. Now I think the timeline was probably still optimistic but fusion is also obviously a very expensive thing to develop and while it's gotten a lot of funding it's still at the 'in the background' level.

Plasma physics (magnetohydrodynamics / turbulance) turned out to be a bigger challenge then expected, but it's not far fetched to assume we would be somewhat further along had the funding been closer to one of the "more ambitious" curves.

Here's them infamous 1976 budget scenarios: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...

the PBS Space Time episode suggests to me the housing walls might be the biggest problem

it consumes itself or makes molecules that are destructive to the walls or insanely toxic so can never risk leaks

whatever solution they come up with I suspect it will require a lot of constant maintenance on the first generation

Then they are wrong. The biggest problem is efficiently gathering energy from the fusion reaction. Right now, we can only get a tiny fraction (less than 1%) of the energy out. If that can't be raised to 50% or so, fusion will never happen.

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