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
The short answer is that it was never 30 years away. We straight-up do not have a practical path for creating a fusion reactor that can be used to generate power, and we never have.
Research, in general, doesn’t operate on predictable timelines. You could have a breakthrough tomorrow, or you might never figure it out. You might have 99% of what you need to make it work, but the remaining 1% is physically impossible. Or, more cynically, 30 years is close enough to justify funding, but far enough to not be held accountable for a lack of results.
Right now, we’ve got a fundamental problem with a fusion reactor, which is that we don’t have a way to contain a sustained reaction that doesn’t require more power than we’re getting out of the reaction, and we don’t have a way to get power out of the reaction while containing it. We’ve been coming up with better ways to keep a reaction going, but we’re still talking about micro-scale reactions.
Nuclear fussion isn’t just going to require “X more years of research”, it’s going to require a new technology that we don’t even have on the drawing board right now, and we don’t even know where to start drawing.
Latest Answers