Technology

The ITER was basically supposed to have been built starting in the 80s from my understanding... Until cheap fossil fuels dried up all interest in funding fusion research. When it takes 40 years to fund a single project via international collaboration, 50 years is a short timescale.

Even with renewed recent interest, fusion still has less than half the funding it did during the energy crisis. Of course the predictions from that era were optimistic given they were no longer able to do experiments like these when they expected them to proliferate.

Progress is always incremental, except in hindsight

Funding is almost nothing compared to other endeavors.

We’ve been working on AI for 50 years too.

I wouldn’t frame it like that.

Oh, I believe working fusion reactors are in the very near future, without a doubt. However, I also believe it can't possibly work out to be as transformative as people seem to expect. In the end, we'll be saying "congratulations, you've developed the most expensive form of energy production yet! It's nearly useless!"

And worst of all, we don't have enough beryllium in the world to produce the fusion breeding blankets needed to make more than a few fusion power plants. And even if we could make all those shiny beryllium blankets, we then have another problem... one of the side effect of using a heavy metal to absorb high energy particles and turn then into heat, is that over time the entire blanket becomes highly radioactive. Now we're back to the same problems we have with fission, but at a much higher cost.

Will fusion work? Absolutely, and it will be extremely useful for long duration space missions, or antarctic bases. But beyond edge cases, the tokamak will probably never make sense.

I'm curious to see if other solutions like helion's reactor will work, that certainly seems a lot more sustainable.

I’m not optimistic about it as a solution to climate change nor any current day energy needs primarily because it feeds right into the techbro/capitalist lame kink that if we just had wayyyyy more power it would solve everything. Most of the problems we are experiencing today stem from having too much power, too much capability to extract resources violently from the earth, too much power from oil to the point that we built a batshit insane transportation system based around cars (even in the center of the worlds largest and densest cities) and most importantly too much power in the hands of energy and fossil fuel companies.

Fusion would solve 0% of any of those problems, and the more people fixate on it as the kind of solution we should be holding out for to save us, the more dangerous it is.

However, the science is cool, it is definitely worth investing in and studying because one day it could be huge. I just think if we discovered an energy source that provided us with limitless power today, right now, it would actually be the precise thing that would doom the human race into not fixing any of the problems that truly threaten our survival as a species nor would it save the planet from us.

We have not spent a hundred billion dollars on fusion energy research collectively as a planet in the past 70 years of working on it. We do spent 10x that every year for the US defense budget.