4 ms·

Depends 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

• tehjoker 6y ago
  Why do you think the funding has been so low?
  • willis936 6y ago
    The 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 ago
      There 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.
      • api 6y ago
        Eternal energy security is not militarily significant?
        • willis936 6y ago
          Not really. Energy scarcity is a very useful geopolitical tool when you're the one with the tap on the oil, the weapons, and the money.
  • cygx 6y ago
    Who 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...
    • runarberg 6y ago
      I don’t think the green faction disagrees with fusion because “nuclear = bad”. I think the fact that current estimates point to the 2060s as the earliest point in time for commercial viability. By that point we will have had to have moved on from fossil fuel (or at least gained net 0 carbon emission) for at least 10–20 years. So nuclear fusion is not a solution to the climate crisis. In other words the green faction is simply disinterested in nuclear fusion, like we are disinterested in the Large Hadron Collider, sure its a cool experiment, but nothing we should be considering to further our goal of fighting our current environmental disasters.
      • cygx 6y ago
        From personal experience, "nuclear = bad" is a thing. That said, I agree that as things stand today, fusion research is no panacea to climate change. However, note that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was ratified in '92, and if we'd decided to go all-in on fusion back then, who knows where we'd be at today...
        • runarberg 6y ago
          Just because some people believe blindly that “nuclear = bad”, that doesn’t mean they won’t change their opinion of fusion once they receive an adequate explanation on how fusion is different from fission. I’ve personally never met anybody in the wild that disagrees with fusion power because of our current track record with fission power. I.e. the believe that “nuclear = bad” does not equate to the believe that “fusion = bad”. So honestly I don’t believe that there exists people in the wild who’s opinion is: “No to fusion! Because nuclear = bad”, and if they do exists, I don’t think they are of anywhere near size and numbers required to influence public funding.