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Most people in fusion research consider ITER a huge waste of money and is slowing down progress toward a successful fusion powerplant. The fusion research budge

Most people in fusion research consider ITER a huge waste of money and is slowing down progress toward a successful fusion powerplant. The fusion research budget of the US (and other countries?) is now mostly going to ITER with money spent mostly pouring concrete and building magnets, not discovering the new science needed to make an economically viable reactor. Maybe it is worth the money to have a large international project involving most the large world powers (China, European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, United States), but like the international space station, there is not going to be a lot of cutting edge science going on there. Especially since it is taking so long to build. On a brighter note, maybe in part due to the fact that ITER is such a boondoggle, there are now many small (and not so small) VC backed fusion projects being funding that are testing out a wide variety of fusion concepts. High temperature superconductors help and our understanding of how plasmas work and behave is still improving at a great clip. A carbon tax would really improve the economic case for developing fusion power (and fission power, while we are at it)

simonh 5y ago
Exactly, simply spending money doesn’t solve problems. The issues with fusion are not with funding but with fundamental research, but you can’t always spend your way to solutions in research either. The laws of physics can’t be bribed or influenced by financial incentives. I completely agree we need to continue fusion research, proportionately to the evidence for the specific lines of research. The fact is though, we are spending huge amounts on fusion and have done for many decades. As ITER shows simple increasing spending will almost certainly just mean wasting all or at least most of the extra money on dead end lines of investigation.
- njarboe 5y ago
  My father is a long time plasma physicist researching fusion power. I have talked to him quite a bit about these issues. The research budget for fusion has long been, unfortunately, spent on a few large projects instead of many smaller that would have likely let progress toward controlled fusion power plants happen much more quickly. We probably could have had them in the 1990's or 2000's with good planning and $3-5 billion a year (2020 dollars) in funding from the 1970's, instead of the ~$500 million that was being spent. Very significant progress has been made though and understanding how plasmas work continue to improve. We probably understand the physics on how to build an economical fusion power plant (if there was a reasonable carbon tax), but there is a lot of complicated engineering problems that need to be figured out. Materials that can self heal under hight neutron bombardment being a major one. A Manhattan like project with the right focus, leader(s), and the ability to ignore bureaucratic red tape (radiation rules make developing anything that produces radioactivity almost impossible), might be able to do it in a similar time frame, but I don't know if the US's current culture would support it.
  - simonh 5y ago
    Massive funding for a few big projects to do a "Manhattan Project for Fusion", which I have often seen advocated here, has been the actual strategy for a long time and it's failed. As you said, most of the funding has been given to a few big projects. With TMP we actually had several direct engineering routes to viable devices using known technology at a pretty early stage. With fusion frankly we did not. In that situation you're much better off funding a wide variety of different initiatives and ideas, and ramp up funding as the results come in. Even a much smaller budget, but spent on a wide variety of basic research and evaluation projects would have been a far more cost effective, and almost certainly a much more fruitful approach. But maybe I'm not reading what you mean when you say "Manhattan Project" right.
    - njarboe 5y ago
      The original "Manhattan Project" was to produce a nuclear bomb once the physics of sustained nuclear reactions were well enough understood to know it was possible. This level of knowledge was probably known about fusion power generation in the 1960's. As you said, more funding is not always better. It is the whole structure of the project that is important. The Manhattan Project was organized by a military general with direct access to the president and the willingness to use it to get things done and a well known scientist overseeing the scientific side of things. They ran many different paths to possible success at the same time (U235 and Plutonium bombs, at the top level) and had about 130,000 people working on it with the urgency of war and no worries about patents or trade secrets. There were lots of bottlenecks and new technologies to invent in the process, but these problems were systematically addressed and overcome. I don't really think any "Manhattan Project" or Apollo like program run by the government could be done today, but I don't think the US has completely lost the ability to do such things. SpaceX is making amazing progress on rockets at the moment and if they get people to Mars in the next 4-6 years, I would say they have accomplished a similar feat.

simonh 5y ago

Exactly, simply spending money doesn’t solve problems. The issues with fusion are not with funding but with fundamental research, but you can’t always spend your way to solutions in research either. The laws of physics can’t be bribed or influenced by financial incentives. I completely agree we need to continue fusion research, proportionately to the evidence for the specific lines of research. The fact is though, we are spending huge amounts on fusion and have done for many decades. As ITER shows simple increasing spending will almost certainly just mean wasting all or at least most of the extra money on dead end lines of investigation.

njarboe 5y ago
My father is a long time plasma physicist researching fusion power. I have talked to him quite a bit about these issues. The research budget for fusion has long been, unfortunately, spent on a few large projects instead of many smaller that would have likely let progress toward controlled fusion power plants happen much more quickly. We probably could have had them in the 1990's or 2000's with good planning and $3-5 billion a year (2020 dollars) in funding from the 1970's, instead of the ~$500 million that was being spent. Very significant progress has been made though and understanding how plasmas work continue to improve. We probably understand the physics on how to build an economical fusion power plant (if there was a reasonable carbon tax), but there is a lot of complicated engineering problems that need to be figured out. Materials that can self heal under hight neutron bombardment being a major one. A Manhattan like project with the right focus, leader(s), and the ability to ignore bureaucratic red tape (radiation rules make developing anything that produces radioactivity almost impossible), might be able to do it in a similar time frame, but I don't know if the US's current culture would support it.
- simonh 5y ago
  Massive funding for a few big projects to do a "Manhattan Project for Fusion", which I have often seen advocated here, has been the actual strategy for a long time and it's failed. As you said, most of the funding has been given to a few big projects. With TMP we actually had several direct engineering routes to viable devices using known technology at a pretty early stage. With fusion frankly we did not. In that situation you're much better off funding a wide variety of different initiatives and ideas, and ramp up funding as the results come in. Even a much smaller budget, but spent on a wide variety of basic research and evaluation projects would have been a far more cost effective, and almost certainly a much more fruitful approach. But maybe I'm not reading what you mean when you say "Manhattan Project" right.
  - njarboe 5y ago
    The original "Manhattan Project" was to produce a nuclear bomb once the physics of sustained nuclear reactions were well enough understood to know it was possible. This level of knowledge was probably known about fusion power generation in the 1960's. As you said, more funding is not always better. It is the whole structure of the project that is important. The Manhattan Project was organized by a military general with direct access to the president and the willingness to use it to get things done and a well known scientist overseeing the scientific side of things. They ran many different paths to possible success at the same time (U235 and Plutonium bombs, at the top level) and had about 130,000 people working on it with the urgency of war and no worries about patents or trade secrets. There were lots of bottlenecks and new technologies to invent in the process, but these problems were systematically addressed and overcome. I don't really think any "Manhattan Project" or Apollo like program run by the government could be done today, but I don't think the US has completely lost the ability to do such things. SpaceX is making amazing progress on rockets at the moment and if they get people to Mars in the next 4-6 years, I would say they have accomplished a similar feat.