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> See the nice funding graph in question three. Oh please, that graph is dug out whenever the feasibility of fusion is discussed. It's a prediction from 1976 –
by adwn 11y ago
> See the nice funding graph in question three.
Oh please, that graph is dug out whenever the feasibility of fusion is discussed. It's a prediction from 1976 – you should know how credible decade-long predictions on the progress of unproven technologies are.
It's also pure fantasy that if we just throw enough money at the problem, we'll get the work done quickly. That's not even the case for large software projects, so how do you expect that to work for a task with so many hard scientific and engineering challenges?
- tormeh 11y agoImagine that instead of writing "javac file.java" every time you wanted to recompile you had to hire workers and buy materials to build the program using cogs and levers. Development would obviously slow down a lot if you had to ration your recompiles because of funding. Also, a project has an optimal amount of employees. I'm pretty sure ITER and the like has less than that number right now. Throwing money at the problem seems like an excellent way to speed things up.
- adrianN 11y agoBesides the obvious problems of building very expensive machines like ITER with a limited budget, there are multiple routes that might lead to commercial fusion. Magnetic confinement is just one of them. Currently it's the only one that gets any significant funding. If we had unlimited money we could pursue all options simultaneously. That's how it worked in the Manhattan Project. They tried all ways to a working nuke in parallel. So they came up with Little Boy (gun type assembly) and Fat Man (implosion type assembly).