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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

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

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.