Note that we've never spent as much money as we've always known would be necessary to achieve useful fusion power, so the oft-repeated idea that it's been surpr

Note that we've never spent as much money as we've always known would be necessary to achieve useful fusion power, so the oft-repeated idea that it's been surprisingly technologically difficult is not actually justified by the historical track record. > Typically, outsiders cannot comprehend how the massive expenditures never manage to yield energy. Typically, insiders cannot comprehend how little is being invested in a project that presents such immense technical obstacles and also such potential. A graph commonly passed around among the insiders—an enduring scrap of twentieth-century budgetary ephemera—depicts the 1976 federal plan to build a working thermonuclear reactor. The graph tracks various scenarios for attaining fusion energy. The “maximum” effort, the most expensive up front, with initial spending as high as nine billion dollars a year, was projected to yield a reactor by 1990. The “moderate” effort, with spending never exceeding four billion dollars in a year, would take fifteen more years. The fusion community might be easy to criticize for its many unmet milestones, but for decades the United States has never come close to even the moderate effort. In 1977, when the American fusion budget was at its peak, government investment in the research, adjusted for inflation, was seven hundred million dollars; by 1991, this had fallen by more than half. It is now half a billion, not appreciably more than the Korean budget. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bottle http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bot... The chart was produced by Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), which was later subsumed into the Department of Energy and presumably represented the expert wisdom at the time. It can be found, in 1976 dollars, as figure 1 here: http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2009/Who_Killed_Fusion.pdf http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Winter_2...