Why is fusion always “30 years away?”

Question

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

Answer 1

The biggest problem with Fusion research is the overall lack of funding.

The paltry amount of research funding for Fusion was once described by a Scientific Journal as *”Fusion Never”*.

There’s tons of brilliant engineers and scientists with good ideas willing and able to work on it, but there just isn’t the money to build and run the test equipment required for every project.

The big government funding throughout the 20th century was put against fission research because a by-product of Fission reactors is enriched uranium and plutonium used in Nuclear Weapons. So it was very politically motivated by the Cold War.

As a result Fusion power research was entirely niche and the few teams working on it make very limited progress.
If we assume that there’s a 98% chance that any particular fusion concept is actually a dead-end, there’s hundreds of potential design concepts, and we only have 3 projects on the go at any time, we make very little progress. Each experiment though teaches us more and more about Fusion, so saying that we are making no progress would be incorrect, it’s just very very slow.

There’s been a significant uptick in research in the past 20 years because of the push towards green energy, but what politicians don’t realize is that Fusion is such a game changer that what we really need is a *’Manhattan Project’* for Fusion. If you give the scientists effectively unlimited funding and have multiple teams working on it we could probably figure out viable means of using it within a decade.

The first country that figures out sustainable and practical fusion will have a huge economic and scientific advantage for decades and will make the investment worth it. Let alone the benefits of cheap power that comes with it.