Why is fusion always “30 years away?”

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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

34 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Fusion is possible *now* but requires a lot of resources to achieve or an undesirable fission reaction to start.

>Is it just that it’s so difficult to make efficient?

Sadly, yes. I use ‘sadly’ because there would be tremendous upside to fusion power. Getting two atoms to fuse that do not want to fuse takes astronomical amounts of pressure/temperature to achieve.

>Has the technology improved substantially and we just don’t hear about it often?

Yes, but not nearly as fast as we’d hope. There is a lot of motivation to achieve this so it’s not forgotten.

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