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This field is so underfunded, but progress is still being made. Check out Commonwealth Fusion and their progress with insanely powerful compact energy efficient

• cycomanic 2y ago
  Calling fusion research underfunded is rich(no pun intended). Costs for ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD it's one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in the world to date. That's not even accounting for all the other fusion projects. There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding. I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially unlimited free energy is wrong. The extremely high capital costs would likely mean that fusion is unlikely to ever match solar or wind in energy production costs. I'm not opposed to fusion/plasma research, we have much insights into nonlinear dynamics and chaotic behaviour due to this research, I disagree with the notion that this is a field that achieves incredible outcomes with small budgets, that's far from reality.
  • nabla9 2y ago
    Let's read again what you just wrote and think: "ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD" That's not the most costly costly project, not even close (prices in current dollars and total costs) Apollo project: $257 billion ISS: $150 billion. STS: $196 billion. Fusion energy has been constantly underfunded.
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      None of those projects was worth the cost.
      • selfmodruntime 2y ago
        the ISS was definitely worth the cost.
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          Really? What result did ISS deliver that justifies its construction? It's an exercise in orbital flagpole sitting.
          • shepherdjerred 2y ago
            What's the point of being alive without building monuments?
            • pfdietz 2y ago
              I find that justification not only not convincing, but utterly repulsive. Governments shouldn't be in the business of praising themselves.
          • api 2y ago
            It’s an engineering test platform for long duration space flight. Along with the development of reusable rockets we are now almost to the point of being ready to actually go somewhere and do more than just plant a flagpole. Apollo was ridiculously ahead of its time and was not sustainable. The entire stack was disposable and it’s pure luck that we never lost a crew. We needed a project like the ISS to do the real work to figure out how to live in space and build long lasting space hardware. The biggest shortcoming of the project is that we never tried centrifugal gravity. There were plans for a module but it never got there.
            • pfdietz 2y ago
              That's great, except (1) the thermal environment is all wrong, (2) ditto for the radiation environment, (3) that just pushes back the need for justification to long distance spaceflight. Justifications for space activities that amount to "enables other space activities" are an example of what's called a "self-licking ice cream cone". There were plenty of non-self-referential justifications for ISS (like growing protein crystals, or space manufacturing) that never really went anywhere. Ironically, maybe the best justification was it shows large space structures can be assembled from small units, so large launch vehicles aren't needed. NASA has of course totally ignored this lesson with SLS.
      • Dylan16807 2y ago
        "Estimates of the return on investment in the space program range from $7 for every $1 spent on the Apollo Program to $40 for every $1 spent on space development today." I guess you take issue with estimates like this?
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          Yes, because they are basically exercises in bullshit. You might think they went and catalogued in detail what the benefits were, but they're actually just based on macroeconomic assumptions about what the return on R&D is. I mean, think: for spinoff arguments to work, you need to have some notion of how technology would have progressed without NASA. How could one possibly figure out that contrafactual?
    • deleted 2y ago
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  • api 2y ago
    The new Vogtle reactor in Georgia (the US state) cost about $17B. A single offshore oil platform can cost upwards of $1B and we build hundreds of these. When weighed against the potential payoff fusion is very underfunded. If we make it work we basically have infinite clean energy until the heat death of the universe, not to mention a source of energy that could jet us around the solar system and beyond at speeds far beyond what anything we currently have can achieve. The cost of ITER is not crazy for the energy industry in general. Huge energy projects are very expensive. We spend multiples of that on oil drilling every year.
  • baq 2y ago
    Apple is buying back $110B of stock. They could build an Apple iFusion Reactor instead and still buy back $50B.
    • willis936 2y ago
      Arguably for much less than that. The current fusion startups are targeting burning plasma and altogether they've raised a tenth as much as ITER's (speculated) 6.5 Bn USD. Granted, very few companies are targeting burning plasma with their current level of funding.
  • jiggawatts 2y ago
    ITER is like electric cars. There’s no point in spending millions to design a new EV until the battery technology exists. That’s the key limiter, not the “rest of the car”. For fusion, this key technology limiter is the superconducting magnetic tape. Even small improvements in field strength have a dramatic non-linear improvement in fusion power gain. ITER started their design work decades ago and will continue construction for decades more. Meanwhile, SC magnetic tape technology has moved on, making the entire enterprise a dead-end waste of time and money. They got bogged down in the paperwork and bureaucracy of the “rest of the facility” with no hope of making actual working reactor. There are many instances of this issue in industry, and in my experience large government bureaucracies are pathologically incapable of planning ahead for where the puck will be instead of where the puck was. I like to imagine what would happen if a rich industrialist like Bezos or Musk approached the problem: First, spend a few billion on superconductor tape research and then start building many small reactors that are minimal test beds while in parallel improving the magnets. Only “go big” once the reactor can produce net power. See also: NASA spending billions per launch on the SLS with a couple of test launches per decade while SpaceX spends millions per Starship and plans half a dozen test launches this year!
    • XorNot 2y ago
      So how's the Lockheed Martin skunkworks project going? That was the last poster child for "REBCO tape will quickly solve all the problems". Oh right - incepted in 2010, cancelled in 2021. 11 years - over a decade - and no reactor in sight.
      • willis936 2y ago
        They never mentioned REBCO or HTS. It was obvious bullshit from the beginning. It was more likely a cover for a black project, like the SR-72.
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          I wonder if some of these whacky military things are actually honeypots for espionage. That's been my assumption for the Navy work on Polywell.
  • xcv123 2y ago
    That's a ~12 year construction project. 5.4 Billion USD per year is nothing these days. Only 0.006% of annual GDP for a project that has the potential to transform our civilization.
  • mdprock 2y ago
    fusion research is underfounded while ITER is overfounded. I worked with it and it is clear that 1) it is too big of a step from the previous nuclear fusion reactor. 2) french regulatory agency is being way too strict 3) the procurement mechanism with in kind contribution has been a total failure.
    • pfdietz 2y ago
      4) even if it "succeeded" it would be a dead end.
      • mdprock 2y ago
        not true. if it works it will demonstrate a huge number of technologies that any type of fusion reactor will face. it is just not efficient in pursuing these
        • pfdietz 2y ago
          Anything exposed to neutrons is not going to be "demonstrated" in the sense of shown to work in an environment of a working production DT reactor. The integrated neutron flux over the lifetime of ITER, assuming it works at all, is just a few percent what would be needed. This will not be sufficient to show the devices or materials are adequate or to conduct necessary reliability growth. There is the larger issue of whether anything like ITER, with solid surfaces exposed to DT neutron flux, could ever be successful. ITER itself is very far out of the running as a prototype for a competitive source of heat, with volumetric power density of the reactor 400x lower than existing PWRs. A substantial part of that problem is limits on power/area through the exposed surfaces.
          • mdprock 2y ago
            some material in iter are not relevant for future reactors, true. But some yes and will face a fluence that is n order of magnitudes higher than what has been tested in jet, the most powerful tokamak so far. so it's a "half-way" demonstration. in any case materials are not everything, iter will test remote handling, breeding, long pulses, etc etc. we can argue that tokamak are not the right path but at the moment is the most advanced so it is worth pursuing it.