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> we have only ever invested money in fusion (risk) and have never received any useful power for it (payoff) Now you're just being silly. You can say this abou

> we have only ever invested money in fusion (risk) and have never received any useful power for it (payoff) Now you're just being silly. You can say this about ANY research project. Better scrap the Manhattan Project before it finishes, we haven't seen any results. You're saying it's impossible to build a fusion power plant because we don't have one now? Nevermind the fact that magnetic fusion research has been grossly underfunded for over 30 years.

dekhn 13y ago
By the time the Manhattan Project started, we had already made signficant progress. Such as Fermi's pile. We knew how to seperate uranium. The math was all there; it was mostly a matter of decision-making and execution. I never said anything was impossible. But fusion is still solidly an unknown unknown: we have no credible path at this time to even plan a workable test reactor. I'm saying, for the amount invested, the results achieved, and the potential payoff, our money is best spent elsewhere are more boring and conventional things.
- drjesusphd 13y ago
  That's just not true, and skirts the line of the being a deliberate lie. Fusion has occured in tokamaks, at an efficiency of 65%. ITER, as currently designed and being built, is expected to make a 10-fold return on energy input. We are precisely at the position of "the math is all there" with regard to magnetic confinement. And so is the engineering and the funding (barely). It's going to happen, hopefully not before it's too late.
  - dekhn 13y ago
    I should mention that in the past, I worked on the software backing research tokamaks. ITER is a research project. It is not designed to produce electricity. It was originally projected to cost over 5 billion pounds to build and has now tripled, but is years from completion. Even if it was successful beyond its wildest dreams, the best result would be that we'd have to spend another $50B to build a plant, and since that one would be the first and only, we wouldn't get much power from it. These are the harsh economic realities of today.
    - Gravityloss 13y ago
      That's not much. A single modern nuclear plant costs around 8.5 billion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U...
  - dekhn 13y ago
    BTW, ITER isn't even scheduled to be turned on to produce research results at scale until 2027. That's another 14 years before they even do something interesting!?
    - drjesusphd 13y ago
      So? Are we really that shortsighted? If the payoff was immediate, it wouldn't be research.

dekhn 13y ago

By the time the Manhattan Project started, we had already made signficant progress. Such as Fermi's pile. We knew how to seperate uranium. The math was all there; it was mostly a matter of decision-making and execution. I never said anything was impossible. But fusion is still solidly an unknown unknown: we have no credible path at this time to even plan a workable test reactor. I'm saying, for the amount invested, the results achieved, and the potential payoff, our money is best spent elsewhere are more boring and conventional things.

drjesusphd 13y ago
That's just not true, and skirts the line of the being a deliberate lie. Fusion has occured in tokamaks, at an efficiency of 65%. ITER, as currently designed and being built, is expected to make a 10-fold return on energy input. We are precisely at the position of "the math is all there" with regard to magnetic confinement. And so is the engineering and the funding (barely). It's going to happen, hopefully not before it's too late.
- dekhn 13y ago
  I should mention that in the past, I worked on the software backing research tokamaks. ITER is a research project. It is not designed to produce electricity. It was originally projected to cost over 5 billion pounds to build and has now tripled, but is years from completion. Even if it was successful beyond its wildest dreams, the best result would be that we'd have to spend another $50B to build a plant, and since that one would be the first and only, we wouldn't get much power from it. These are the harsh economic realities of today.
  - Gravityloss 13y ago
    That's not much. A single modern nuclear plant costs around 8.5 billion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U...
- dekhn 13y ago
  BTW, ITER isn't even scheduled to be turned on to produce research results at scale until 2027. That's another 14 years before they even do something interesting!?
  - drjesusphd 13y ago
    So? Are we really that shortsighted? If the payoff was immediate, it wouldn't be research.