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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

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.
- hyperbovine 7y ago
  > Companies are just too risk averse The risk calculation is: expected cost minus expected reward. The expected reward is astronomical (no pun intended!), so you're simply restating my point: fusion is not likely to work regardless of how much money we throw at it. Amazon's R&D annual budget exceeds $20b. That's one company spending half an ITER a year. The private sector has no problem coming up with those sums for ideas it deems promising. The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.
  - chmod775 7y ago
    > That's one company spending half an ITER a year. No it's not even close to the total cost of ITER. It may just pay for the cost of actually physically constructing it. The R&D that got taxpayer funded scientists to the point where we are able to construct it at all is going to be a multiple of that. > The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas. So you're saying that things like fission reactors, spaceflight and GPS, treatments for some rare and not-so-rare diseases, the Human Genome Project, ARPANET, everything that came out of CERN, etc. were bad ideas just because no private company could be assed to develop and build those first? No. It's a fact that all of these were vitally important to get our species where it is today, even though they would have looked like a terrible investment of time and money from the perspective of a private company. Today private companies have happily entered some of those spaces that have been pioneered by government funded scientists. It's true that many moonshots fail. That's why they're called (sometimes literal) moonshots. But it's important to try anyways so we can advance as a species. And most of the time we learn a lot even if we fail.

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.
hyperbovine 7y ago
> Companies are just too risk averse The risk calculation is: expected cost minus expected reward. The expected reward is astronomical (no pun intended!), so you're simply restating my point: fusion is not likely to work regardless of how much money we throw at it. Amazon's R&D annual budget exceeds $20b. That's one company spending half an ITER a year. The private sector has no problem coming up with those sums for ideas it deems promising. The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas.
- chmod775 7y ago
  > That's one company spending half an ITER a year. No it's not even close to the total cost of ITER. It may just pay for the cost of actually physically constructing it. The R&D that got taxpayer funded scientists to the point where we are able to construct it at all is going to be a multiple of that. > The problem is that industry has decided, quite rationally in my opinion, that fusion power is not one of those ideas. So you're saying that things like fission reactors, spaceflight and GPS, treatments for some rare and not-so-rare diseases, the Human Genome Project, ARPANET, everything that came out of CERN, etc. were bad ideas just because no private company could be assed to develop and build those first? No. It's a fact that all of these were vitally important to get our species where it is today, even though they would have looked like a terrible investment of time and money from the perspective of a private company. Today private companies have happily entered some of those spaces that have been pioneered by government funded scientists. It's true that many moonshots fail. That's why they're called (sometimes literal) moonshots. But it's important to try anyways so we can advance as a species. And most of the time we learn a lot even if we fail.