Hacker News Reader

Comment by eggoa | Hacker News Reader

Relevant graph:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusio...

wow, that’s pretty sad. the 'moderate' path would have required an average expenditure of ~$2.5 billion a year, and projected the completion of a reactor by 2005. a pretty small investment when you consider the size of the federal budget [1] and where most of the funding goes.

even more sad, when considering the likelihood that many graphs relating to other potentially transformative technologies probably look much the same..

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_Stat...

Uh... I would not take that graph as some sort of gospel. The truth is that even now we do not have an effective known path to economically viable fusion power generation, and if nothing else our computer simulations are indescribably better than anything they had in the late 70s. Had we blown billions more in the 80s, we probably would simply have blown billions more in the 80s and still have no fusion today.

that may be true, but getting it (or any new technology for that matter) to the point where it’d be economically viable requires an investment at some point..

and ‘blowing’ those billions in the 80s may very-well not have paid-off with economically viable fusion power today, but i highly doubt it would have left us with nothing to show for it.

We don't really have a hell of a lot to show for what we have spent. Non-zero, sure, but a lot of the lessons we learned could certainly have been learned for a lot more cheaply if we hadn't tried to leap to the end of the process with grandiose projects built more on hope than science.

$2.5B is roughly on par with the combined 2012 salaries of all NFL teams( $90MM - $118MM per team, at the cap ).

Which is as it should be, since football is far more important to humanity than something as silly as cheap, safe, and clean energy.

One thing I take from this graph is that doubling fusion funding would still leave us at "fusion never", so we shouldn't bother doubling it. :(

Here's the paper the graph refers to. The original graph is on page 12:

http://fire.pppl.gov/us_fusion_plan_1976.pdf

Reply on news.ycombinator.com