I'm surprised we haven't seen more mention of ITER in this thread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER http://www.iter.org/ http

I'm surprised we haven't seen more mention of ITER in this thread http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER http://www.iter.org/ http://www.iter.org/ One of my professors from college moonlights as a consultant for the project. What most people don't acknowledge about the "30 years away" joke is the type of environments in which the statement was made. In the 1950's the confidence was rooted in naivete (similar statements were made about making artificial life), but in the 1970's the confidence was rooted in economics. The fuel crises led to substantially increased funding in alternative energy sources. Much lamented by my professor from college, as oil prices dropped back down so did research funding for fusion reactors (although given that the bulk of electricity in this country comes from coal, nuclear, natural gas, and to a lesser extent hydro I'm not clear why that would've been the case, maybe we were running more extensively on fuel oil back then). If ITER proves promising (beyond energy break even) another facility will have to be constructed that will be more expensive and will take longer to construct, this facility will prove promising only if it indicates potential for economic break even (I think it has to put out >7x the input energy). If that can be accomplished then there's still a few material challenges (neutron bombardment has a tendency to make metals brittle, the appropriate containment chamber materials aren't even a glimmer in a material scientists eyes yet as well as the radioactivity issue (the entire plant will gradually become more radioactive). If this kid built a fusor he clearly has a great deal of potential, while I'm skeptical that he can make a difference alone I wouldn't be surprised if he could offer contributions to the current projects underway to advance this field. Plasma magnetohydrodynamics has so few people that understand it that every additional mind has potential to make a difference.