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The shuttle never had funding halted multiple times. Also, ITER is a plasma physics experiment. It is being made to learn about plasma behavior. It isn’t goi

The shuttle never had funding halted multiple times. Also, ITER is a plasma physics experiment. It is being made to learn about plasma behavior. It isn’t going to fail or somehow not produce useful results before DT or high Q campaigns. A fusion reactor does not fall out of the sky. Was the V2 a failure because all it did was eat up a bunch of money and blow up a bunch of expensive equipment? No. The knowledge costs money. Tangible things are laughably low value by comparison.

crmd 6y ago
> The knowledge costs money. Tangible things are laughably low value by comparison. I imagine Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters saying this to the Columbia dean as their lab is being disassembled and they are being fired.
- willis936 6y ago
  Consider the difference in value between a fish and the knowledge of fishing. Now consider the value of a set of fishing gear to the invention of fishing.
Robotbeat 6y ago
Shuttle was an experiment in reusable launch technology. It was also a reentry science platform. It was a materials science tour de force, pioneering carbon fiber composites, carbon-carbon composites, metal-matrix composites, and high performance aluminum-lithium alloys among other things. ITER is supposed to get break-even. Plasma experiments can better be done at smaller, much cheaper facilities (many of which already exist). ITER, as of 2006, was supposed to be followed almost immediately by DEMO, a power plant capable of producing electricity in 2033. But now ITER is so delayed that it's almost irrelevant. In order to address climate change, we'll have to have transitioned to, say, solar and storage before the 2050s when DEMO might be built, or we'll be stuck with terrible climate consequences. It's just insane how bad it has been. ITER is so badly delayed that it's almost certainly not going to be a key player in fighting climate change.
- willis936 6y ago
  Fusion power is not a replacement for solar. It is the technology that needs to be working in the next two hundred years if we want to see society continue on its current trend. It may be the difference between human society lasting billions of years or being a small footnote on a single planet in a dark universe. We’re already stuck with bad climate consequences. We might not destroy the entire habitat or run out of usable fuel if we stop penny pinching and actually pay what’s needed to solve a problem far harder than something like LEO launch vehicles. As for breakeven: no plasma physicist I’ve talked to see it as some amazing barrier. It is what it’s always been: a publicity thing. It gets people excited so laypeople can point and say “See! It works!” without having to dive deep into physics and economics. The real physics goals of ITER are in testing models when pushed outside of previously measured parameters. You can’t just spend $50 billion on a reactor and hope it works. That’s why increasingly large and expensive science machines are necessary. Once a design is complete you don’t need diagnostics and scientists. You just need a tritium processing facility, some HTS coils, some vessels, and some plasma heaters.
  - adwn 6y ago
    > Fusion power is not a replacement for solar. You're conflating ITER with fusion power in general. There're at least half a dozen competing approaches to fusion power with several orders of magnitude lower funding. Several of them are probably more promising than ITER, but ITER is primarily a political project, and only secondarily (at best) a physics project.
    - willis936 6y ago
      I am not conflating them. “Several of them are probably more promising than ITER”. Keyword: probably. There are no magic bullets. Would I be happier to see an optimized stellarator with a 10 meter major radius? Yes. A lot of the physics goals of ITER will apply to all MCF reactor designs. If you’re touting the benefits of non-MCF fusion: vaporware. I think many designs should be funded and explored, but it’s not like people haven’t tried clever ways to put particles together before.
    - 6y ago

crmd 6y ago

> The knowledge costs money. Tangible things are laughably low value by comparison. I imagine Peter Venkman in Ghostbusters saying this to the Columbia dean as their lab is being disassembled and they are being fired.

willis936 6y ago
Consider the difference in value between a fish and the knowledge of fishing. Now consider the value of a set of fishing gear to the invention of fishing.

Robotbeat 6y ago

Shuttle was an experiment in reusable launch technology. It was also a reentry science platform. It was a materials science tour de force, pioneering carbon fiber composites, carbon-carbon composites, metal-matrix composites, and high performance aluminum-lithium alloys among other things. ITER is supposed to get break-even. Plasma experiments can better be done at smaller, much cheaper facilities (many of which already exist). ITER, as of 2006, was supposed to be followed almost immediately by DEMO, a power plant capable of producing electricity in 2033. But now ITER is so delayed that it's almost irrelevant. In order to address climate change, we'll have to have transitioned to, say, solar and storage before the 2050s when DEMO might be built, or we'll be stuck with terrible climate consequences. It's just insane how bad it has been. ITER is so badly delayed that it's almost certainly not going to be a key player in fighting climate change.

willis936 6y ago
Fusion power is not a replacement for solar. It is the technology that needs to be working in the next two hundred years if we want to see society continue on its current trend. It may be the difference between human society lasting billions of years or being a small footnote on a single planet in a dark universe. We’re already stuck with bad climate consequences. We might not destroy the entire habitat or run out of usable fuel if we stop penny pinching and actually pay what’s needed to solve a problem far harder than something like LEO launch vehicles. As for breakeven: no plasma physicist I’ve talked to see it as some amazing barrier. It is what it’s always been: a publicity thing. It gets people excited so laypeople can point and say “See! It works!” without having to dive deep into physics and economics. The real physics goals of ITER are in testing models when pushed outside of previously measured parameters. You can’t just spend $50 billion on a reactor and hope it works. That’s why increasingly large and expensive science machines are necessary. Once a design is complete you don’t need diagnostics and scientists. You just need a tritium processing facility, some HTS coils, some vessels, and some plasma heaters.
- adwn 6y ago
  > Fusion power is not a replacement for solar. You're conflating ITER with fusion power in general. There're at least half a dozen competing approaches to fusion power with several orders of magnitude lower funding. Several of them are probably more promising than ITER, but ITER is primarily a political project, and only secondarily (at best) a physics project.
  - willis936 6y ago
    I am not conflating them. “Several of them are probably more promising than ITER”. Keyword: probably. There are no magic bullets. Would I be happier to see an optimized stellarator with a 10 meter major radius? Yes. A lot of the physics goals of ITER will apply to all MCF reactor designs. If you’re touting the benefits of non-MCF fusion: vaporware. I think many designs should be funded and explored, but it’s not like people haven’t tried clever ways to put particles together before.
  - 6y ago