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Comment by transfire | Hacker News Reader

ITER is a money hole. It was setup to suck R&D money away from real fusion research.

While I do think that alternative fusion paths should be better funded, cranks aside, I don't think that it's the fault of ITER that it's the most promising and best developed and so the best funded one. The entire field is ridiculously underfunded for what it can offer and we shouldn't be having to risk it all on one or two projects.

Exactly. This article just makes me mad - they are penny-pinching on quite simply the most important piece of technology that humanity has ever tried to develop. If commercial reactors are switched on by 2040, the planet's CO2 output will have dropped drastically by 2060 - way more than all but the most optimistic estimations linked to climate change.

$10b is nothing compared to what was destroyed in the GFC. It's nothing compared to what the US spent on a largely futile war in Iraq. It is nothing compared to what G8 governments spend every year on defence. FFS, damages from Hurricane Sandy are estimated at twice that figure. It's peanuts.

Somewhere along the line, the message that this is R&D, and not science has been lost. Politicians honestly seem to think that this is another of those toys that scientists are always wanting to build, and not the solution to the world's energy problems. Dear politicians - no, this is not another space telescope. It's not even another LHC. It is nothing more or less than the one technology that can save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change, and they quibble about the cost. Madness.

> Politicians honestly seem to think

I am not making an anti-American point here. UK politics has equally daft politicians. But politics is full of people like this:

http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=87390

> "Wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it's hotter to areas where it's cooler. That's what wind is. Wouldn't it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can't transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It's just something to think about."

http://imgur.com/gallery/JPoWLEx

It's a little bit over the cost of a single aircraft carrier.

I tend to agree. But maybe part of the problem is that few people have an understanding of what commercial fusion reactors will look or behave like. And people have even less of an estimate of the risk or cost inherent in their operation.

I certainly don't have a great idea. I'm assuming you won't be able to put a fusion reactor in a car or airplane. Will a fusion power plant be roughly the scale of a current fission plant? What will be the output? What are the risks? And how much do we trust these projections?

If your objective is to lock up control of all the energy available rather than just secure a reliable supply for yourself, then fusion probably doesn't look nearly as attractive as oil wars. Madness in that case too I suppose, but of a different sort.

Why is ITER not real fusion research? And by "set up" do you mean intentionally, to hold back fusion research? If so, by whom, and why?

I believe he's referring to assertions made by Robert Bussard in this talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rk6z1vP4Eo8. Bussards comments on the DOE and funding tokomaks is toward the end iirc. Bussard is by no means a crank, he IS from a different era for sure.

Edit; for those just discovering polywell fusion; Bremelstrung radiation is the primary reason why it may or may not be practicable.

Bussard was one, but there's a lot of alternative fusion research going on, including MIT's levitated dipole, Sandia's MagLIF, several variants of laser fusion, stellerators, focus fusion, General Fusion, Helion, Lockheed's high-beta design, Tri-Alpha, and probably others I've forgotten.

Some of these are well-funded, others are struggling. Even some of the other tokamaks are struggling. MIT's Alcator C-Mod has the highest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, and the potential to lead to a smaller, cheaper power plant. The whole project was nearly cancelled a year ago.

Can you explain what you mean by this?

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