7 ms·
5 years away and always will be is a 4x improvement over the previous 20 years away and always will be!
by maxcan 6y ago
5 years away and always will be is a 4x improvement over the previous 20 years away and always will be!
- api 6y agoFusion research has been steadily progressing for many years. The "50 years away and always will" quip is baloney.
- teachrdan 6y agoSo how far away would you say we are now? Because I remember "10 years away" being said in earnest since back in the early 90s.
- api 6y agoI don't know, and I don't think anyone does. It depends on lots of things including funding and what other unknown unknowns there are on the tech/eng tree. What I do know is that superconducting magnets have been getting cheaper, more powerful, and more compact for quite some time and that's one of the limiting factors on fusion reactor designs. I also know that there is no known physical barrier to net-positive fusion, only engineering barriers. If I had to totally guess I'd say someone will show net-positive fusion for a brief period of time before 2030... assuming the funding is present. It will not be a fully viable power plant yet but a proof of concept. This will be followed by a huge bump in funding and a race to produce power plants. ... but that's a guess. It's like asking "when will there be a human base on Mars?" We know it's possible and I think it will happen, but I don't know how long it will actually take. We could probably have one in 5 years if someone wanted to write a blank check. I would bet that we could have a fusion PoC in 5 years if someone wrote a blank check and fully funded many different credible efforts.
- simonh 6y agoI'm pretty confident it will make it over the line into viability eventually, but it's a really tough problem and it is going to take decades. There's still a lot about the engineering required we just don't fully understand, and it will take a lot of tests and investigation on a lot of different fronts to make meaningful progress. So I agree, we're in it for the long haul on this one.
- pfdietz 6y agoWhy are you confident it will be viable? Remember, commercial viability means not just that it works, but that it's better than any competitor. Why is it that fusion will win this competition? It's the nature of most technologies to fail in the face of something better.
- runarberg 6y agoI was reading somewhere that the earliest point for commercial viability will be in the 2060s. By which point we can assume there have been build a lot of renewable energy infrastructure (or else the climate crisis is still in full effect; and I can’t really think about what kind of society will have evolved from that disaster). This should bring down the cost of renewables even more then today as economics of scales grow exponentially. Making the quest for comersial viability of fusion even tougher. I honestly wonder if fusion will ever be commercially viable. And if all these experiments will simply lead up to us realizing that: “cool, so fusion power is possible on Earth. Now what should we do with it?” But hey. Maybe it will be the energy of the future on Antarctica or the Moon or something instead.
- simonh 6y agoIt just a best estimate, there’s no way to be sure at this stage. Plenty of smart people think it will and plenty think that it won’t. I think there are so many different promising alternative approaches that hope to solve this problem, that on balance I’m not prepared to bet against every single one of them not panning out. It’s just a guess though. I agree renewables might make it mostly moot, but there’s still the issue of base load. Storage might solve it, but if fusion can be made safe and cheap enough it could still have a niche. Then there’s Mars and the belt. There’s no guarantee we’ll colonise it permanently, but if we do fusion could be really useful as it’s far enough out that solar is significantly less efficient. Also fusion reactors could be handy power plants for spacecraft. Cheap reusable heavy lift systems may make all of this feasible. Finally, the future is a long, long time. If we don’t wipe ourselves out, eventually we will every technology that is viable will be achieved (not possible, viable).
- Ekaros 6y agoFusion is a complicated thing. Even if we reach net positive energy generation before 2030. How much longer will mature power plant design take? Lets say something lasting at least 10 if not 20 years with reasonable maintenance(that is not replacing the whole thing every other year). Not to forget that nuclear plants can run 60 years. And then comes questions of life-cycle energy inputs and costs. How long will it be to be net positive on these? That is we spend less energy on cooling the coolant for superconductors and overall building the thing.
- willis936 6y agoThere have been tokamak and stellarator fusion power plant studies published every few years for the past several decades. Answers to all of your questions and more are in them.
- tsimionescu 6y agoDon't keep us guessing, what is the date these studies came up with?
- willis936 6y agoWhen we decide to fund it.
- jonas21 6y ago> I would bet that we could have a fusion PoC in 5 years if someone wrote a blank check and fully funded many different credible efforts. If that's the case, then why hasn't anyone written that check? The potential profit from commercialized fusion seems enormous (unlike a mars base), and there doesn't seem to be a shortage of capital seeking large returns.
- willis936 6y agoFew people have the ability to write the check. Musk is the only one that even comes to mind, and he’s on the record saying he won’t touch turbulence. Still, there is hope.
- dividedbyzero 6y agoI guess it would be a really really big blank check, and then you'd still have to get from a PoC to a commercially viable plant and convince the public it's not a hydrogen bomb and it's quite safe and then you'd have to outcompete renewables for decades to get a decent return while you miniaturize your device for use anywhere else than a stationary plant, and then someone starts making a paint with tiny organic solar cells in it and absurdly-efficient batteries and while you can still make a killing for niche applications, it's a pittance compared to your investment. I guess in the end both risks and upfront costs are just way too high to do things that way.
- cygx 6y agoDepends on the funding. The standard response to the 20 years away for 50 years quip is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...
- tehjoker 6y agoWhy do you think the funding has been so low?
- willis936 6y agoThe investment prior to any payoff is significant. Few countries, or even groups of countries, have had the excess capital and idealistic interest to solve the problem. Raegan gutted virtually every US program and refunding has only come back to things that are politically relevant. “That giant science machine that might one day make lots of heat” isn’t high on the “political value” list.
- tehjoker 6y agoThere was a lot of juice back in the day for research priorities around aviation, nuclear weapons, etc but those were all things that were militarily significant.
- cygx 6y agoWho knows. If I had to make a guess, here are some ideas: You cannot yet make money with it, so there's no capitalist lobby. Success is not certain, and timeframes are too long for politicians to score points in the election game. It's not as cool as space, and the green faction isn't too keen on the whole nuclear thing. So far, fears about peak oil turned out to be largely unfounded (but do note that we probably did pass the peak as far as conventional oil production in concerned). If I kept at it, I probably could come up with more theories...
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Fusion research has been steadily progressing for many years. The “50 years away and always will” quip is baloney. The upthread comment was 20, not 50, and I’ve heard 15 or 20 years away frequently since the 1980s and seen it in things dating back to the 1960s, so, no, its not baloney. Nor does it necessarily mean that progress isn’t being made, its more of a comment that the unknown unknowns are being converted in known unknowns as fast as a known unknowns are being converted into known knowns.
- function_seven 6y agoJust got a new Mac. As I read your comment, my Migration Assistant is doing similar estimates. “13 minutes remaining” then “41 hours remaining” then back again. It’s been whipsawing between these estimates for the last couple hours. I think I now understand the state of fusion research.
- api 6y agoThink of it this way: how hard is it to estimate the time required for a software project? How successful are most such estimates? We don't know how long it will take, but at the same time there is visible progress occurring on many fronts: understanding plasma behavior and how to control it, better superconducting magnets, better control systems, solutions to the neutron embrittlement problem, etc. There's not going to be a single breakthrough... or rather the fusion breakthrough already occurred. We've already learned about fusion and how to trigger it. That happened in the early 20th century. Instead of a single breakthrough it will be continued progress on all fronts until at some point everything matures enough that someone manages to build a proof of concept reactor. At that point investment will flood into the space because it will have been sufficiently de-risked.
- wolfi1 6y agofusion is the energy of the future and has been so for the last 50 years
- tambourine_man 6y agoHopefully not like an asymptotic curve.
- mpalmer 6y ago5 minutes away and always will be.
- Iv 6y agoPeople love to joke about it but I remember 20 years ago, the joke was about it being 40 years away.
- wlesieutre 6y agoIn SimCity 2000 it didn’t show up until around 2050. Game was from 1993, so that was a 57 year prediction.
- SkyBelow 6y agoGiven we know how long it has been 40 years away, 20 years away, and now 5 years away, we can estimate how long it will be until it is 0 years away. Unless it goes down by a power of 2 each time.
- coldpie 6y agoZeno's fusion reactor
- gweinberg 6y agoWell, 40 years ago it was 30 years away, so for a while it must have been going backwards.