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>Thus, every cent spent on this project actually takes us farther away from a renewable-energy future, vs. that same money put into building out wind and solar

>Thus, every cent spent on this project actually takes us farther away from a renewable-energy future, vs. that same money put into building out wind and solar capacity and storage. I believe you don't understand there is a law of diminishing returns on everything. If I spend 10x more on electronic chip research, I don't get 10x faster electronics, I get 1.2x, because improving becomes harder and more expensive. The same happens with renevables. There is real state for solar and wind, places with lots of solar light and access to cheap refrigeration, like Algeria or Morocco, or places with lots of wind like the US Great Planes. Once you build on this real state, energy is way more expensive and it gives you worse returns. On the contrary, it is a very good idea to explore different fields, because it is extremely cheap(the investment in nuclear fusion has been minimal compared to other energy sources) and gives you lots of scientific developments, because of the same law of diminishing returns. It does not need to give you a new energy extraction mechanism. Just exploring what nobody else has done before, like getting plasmas at millions of degrees, have always provided scientific breakthroughs in the past. Just putting all your eggs in one basket is not a good strategy.

ncmncm 5y ago
I understand diminishing returns perfectly, thank you. Tokamak fusion will never pay back even the money already spent on it, never mind the billions more to make it work at all, or the many tens of billions needed to build a power generating facility, or to build another one two or five years later as the first one destroys itself with neutron flux. I.e., we are already in diminishing returns on hot-neutron fusion. Probably the only result of any value will be a generation of practical plasma fluid dynamicists, who will be needed for fusion propulsion systems. Meanwhile, each dollar spent building out solar and wind generates production capacity at least in proportion, with discount for bigger sites: the literal opposite of diminishing returns.

ncmncm 5y ago

I understand diminishing returns perfectly, thank you. Tokamak fusion will never pay back even the money already spent on it, never mind the billions more to make it work at all, or the many tens of billions needed to build a power generating facility, or to build another one two or five years later as the first one destroys itself with neutron flux. I.e., we are already in diminishing returns on hot-neutron fusion. Probably the only result of any value will be a generation of practical plasma fluid dynamicists, who will be needed for fusion propulsion systems. Meanwhile, each dollar spent building out solar and wind generates production capacity at least in proportion, with discount for bigger sites: the literal opposite of diminishing returns.