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 technology has improved substantially but it’s so extreme in terms of temperature and pressure – essentially you’re trying to cage a bit of the sun – that finding a method to keep it contained that doesn’t take more energy to hold it in place than it creates is ferociously difficult. And when you’ve suceeded at laboratory scale, you then have to make it up to production scale, and the problems amplify exponentially.
In short it’s like climbing a lot of mountains – just when you think you have reached the top, you find you’ve just reached a false summit and the real one is further away. And when I was 50 years younger it was 50 years away, so we have made some progress.
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