It seems that for the last couple decades fusion is always 30 years away and by this point we’ve well passed the initial 30 and seemingly little progress has been made.
Is it just that it’s so difficult to make efficient?
Has the technology improved substantially and we just don’t hear about it often?
In: Physics
That’s just a guesstimate not a rule.
People who said that in the 60s were very wrong. People who said that in the 90s were wrong.
But if you were to say that today, would you still be wrong?
The difficulty in fusion is the temperatures and pressures required, and the engineering that surrounds it. Projects like ITER are massive, but their math is for Engineering Q > 1, and it’s due to do first plasma next year. So if all goes according to plan, Engineering Q > 1 next year.
Now when it comes to Commercial Plasma, best case is probably 10 years, and that’s if one of the many commercial endeavors manages to also hit Engineering Q > 1. There is a lot of science that has happened between ITER’s design (2001), and today, and it does bring a lot of promise to smaller scale reactors and alternatives to tomahawks and stellarators.
The math behind fusion was pretty confident 75 years ago, but the engineering/compute was no where near necessary. We are a lot closer now.
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