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I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long? Point is: you can't really put a deadline on R&D. We won't really know

I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long? Point is: you can't really put a deadline on R&D. We won't really know when it works, until, well it does. And who knows how long it will to take commercialize once we do get it working. I mean, Musk said fully autonomous vehicles in 2015 were easy and would be solved in 2 years. 4 years later, Tesla'd are killing people by driving into highway barriers or broadsiding a semi trailer. Ambitious? Yes. Are we there yet? No. I think autonomous driving is a worthy goal and we should keep working at it. Same with fusion. But do I believe the projected timelines? No. Doubt that I'll see fusion as a power source in my timeline. Maybe never fully autonomous vehicles (I mean trully fully). And I'm still under 40. Maybe I'm overly pessimistic, but I think a lot of people underestimate the true difficulty of some of these projects.

arcticbull 7y ago
It's always 5 years out until it isn't! :)
DuskStar 7y ago
> I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long? Fusion is an amount of money away more than an amount of time.
- hyperbovine 7y ago
  Unless you believe markets are completely inefficient I just don’t buy this argument. Think about the reward awaiting the person or company that finally cracks fusion power: trillions of dollars in wealth; the gratitude of an entire planet; instant, everlasting fame, and so on. So, ample incentives already exist. No, the reason we haven’t solved fusion is that it’s a hard problem, and the right genius(es) have yet to come along.
  - chmod775 7y ago
    Companies are just too risk averse for expensive moonshots like this. Construction costs alone for ITER are estimated to be $22 to $65 billion dollars. This doesn't even factor in the cost of actually running it after that or the cost of feeding all the scientists involved in it (which receive government funding through their respective countries). You can probably count the amount of companies with enough cash lying around to finance this on one hand. And then they'd still need the people for it. Even once ITER is completed you still don't have a realistic product to sell. ITER is of no use besides getting us one step closer to fusion energy. And at the end of it we may just realize that fusion is never going to be cost efficient compared to other energy sources. That's no risk any sane company will take. As always the free market will wait until all the groundwork has been laid by taxpayer funded scientists, and even then only make a move if there are massive government subsidies - as has happened and is still happening with fission energy. The free market is much better at low-risk and incremental innovation. Stuff like this? Not so much.
    - godelski 7y ago
      This is exactly right. If we look at history most of the major moonshots have at minimum had a substantial help from the government. Even silicon valley had a lot of help. Places like Bell Labs did as well, and partially forced. We see things now like X, but they're moonshots aren't decades out from being useful. That would be dumb for a company to do, which generally don't last on the other of centuries. But countries do! Even when they don't, the use lives on in the birth of whatever new country. Countries are in the business of succeeding on the time line of centuries, so funding things that takes decades of research and billions of dollars (mind you this is an international effort so that money is spread out over decades AND by many countries) makes a lot of sense. It's a simple fact that countries and companies operate on completely different time frames. That being said, I have friends in fusion. I know plenty of others that work in various areas of it. No one thinks iter isn't going to work. All the major problems have been solved. The infighting you see is about money, because there isn't much going around for this because the gp is right that this is a difficult problem and we thought it was easier. The argument now is that some think we need iter to prove that it works and that will cause more funding to come in and then we can build the nice fancy power reactors. The other camp is that we don't need iter and that we should put that money into <insert popular method> (most will probably work). This is a very different conversation then what it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago we had neutron problems.
godelski 7y ago
> Musk said fully autonomous vehicles in 2015 Quoting Musk is probably the worst example you can give. His track record for prediction isn't great. You're right that it is hard to predict how long R&D takes, but governments are different than companies. Companies have a lifespan in decades, possibly a few centuries (if you're REALLY really lucky and pivot a lot). Profits are focused at the yearly level and long shots are decades out. Governments on the other hand generally have much longer lifespans. Decades are short periods of time for them. Investing in things that will pay off in a century is great business here (lots of science and math falls into this category). This is the problem. People are comparing how companies operate to how governments operate. They have completely different agendas, priorities, and operate at completely different time scales.

arcticbull 7y ago

It's always 5 years out until it isn't! :)

DuskStar 7y ago

> I don't mean to be negative, but we've been hearing fusion is 5 years out for how long? Fusion is an amount of money away more than an amount of time.

hyperbovine 7y ago
Unless you believe markets are completely inefficient I just don’t buy this argument. Think about the reward awaiting the person or company that finally cracks fusion power: trillions of dollars in wealth; the gratitude of an entire planet; instant, everlasting fame, and so on. So, ample incentives already exist. No, the reason we haven’t solved fusion is that it’s a hard problem, and the right genius(es) have yet to come along.
- chmod775 7y ago
  Companies are just too risk averse for expensive moonshots like this. Construction costs alone for ITER are estimated to be $22 to $65 billion dollars. This doesn't even factor in the cost of actually running it after that or the cost of feeding all the scientists involved in it (which receive government funding through their respective countries). You can probably count the amount of companies with enough cash lying around to finance this on one hand. And then they'd still need the people for it. Even once ITER is completed you still don't have a realistic product to sell. ITER is of no use besides getting us one step closer to fusion energy. And at the end of it we may just realize that fusion is never going to be cost efficient compared to other energy sources. That's no risk any sane company will take. As always the free market will wait until all the groundwork has been laid by taxpayer funded scientists, and even then only make a move if there are massive government subsidies - as has happened and is still happening with fission energy. The free market is much better at low-risk and incremental innovation. Stuff like this? Not so much.
  - godelski 7y ago
    This is exactly right. If we look at history most of the major moonshots have at minimum had a substantial help from the government. Even silicon valley had a lot of help. Places like Bell Labs did as well, and partially forced. We see things now like X, but they're moonshots aren't decades out from being useful. That would be dumb for a company to do, which generally don't last on the other of centuries. But countries do! Even when they don't, the use lives on in the birth of whatever new country. Countries are in the business of succeeding on the time line of centuries, so funding things that takes decades of research and billions of dollars (mind you this is an international effort so that money is spread out over decades AND by many countries) makes a lot of sense. It's a simple fact that countries and companies operate on completely different time frames. That being said, I have friends in fusion. I know plenty of others that work in various areas of it. No one thinks iter isn't going to work. All the major problems have been solved. The infighting you see is about money, because there isn't much going around for this because the gp is right that this is a difficult problem and we thought it was easier. The argument now is that some think we need iter to prove that it works and that will cause more funding to come in and then we can build the nice fancy power reactors. The other camp is that we don't need iter and that we should put that money into <insert popular method> (most will probably work). This is a very different conversation then what it was 20 years ago. 20 years ago we had neutron problems.

godelski 7y ago

> Musk said fully autonomous vehicles in 2015 Quoting Musk is probably the worst example you can give. His track record for prediction isn't great. You're right that it is hard to predict how long R&D takes, but governments are different than companies. Companies have a lifespan in decades, possibly a few centuries (if you're REALLY really lucky and pivot a lot). Profits are focused at the yearly level and long shots are decades out. Governments on the other hand generally have much longer lifespans. Decades are short periods of time for them. Investing in things that will pay off in a century is great business here (lots of science and math falls into this category). This is the problem. People are comparing how companies operate to how governments operate. They have completely different agendas, priorities, and operate at completely different time scales.