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
It’s untrue to say that little progress has been made.
A power positive firing of a fusion reactor has happened. That’s huge in that tech.
Don’t know about fusion, but as far back as I (39m) can remember, there’s always been 50 years worth of oil left.
Mostly cause we never invested as much as was needed to get it faster. The “30 years for fusion” came originally from a report in 1979. What that report did was state various “path to fusion”, which included various investment requirements. Like “high effort, medium effort, low effort”. People were like “oh look, we’ll have fusion soon”, but the thing is: That report also included a “fusion never” investment path. And guess how much we’ve invested over the years? Correct.
Fusion research is a classic case of “people want results, but they don’t want to invest for results”.
(*Really* early fusion research was also over-optimistic, mostly based on: We made a nuke in 45, we had nuclear reactors a few years later. Now we have fusion weapons, how hard can it be to make fusion reactors? Turns out: Pretty hard)
Fusion is here.
Now there’s a new problem – how to make it practical and cost effective at scale
The truth is that we don’t know if energy generation with fusion is even possible, other than with gravity holding things for free like in stars. We are very very far from demonstrating any kind of net energy generation once the whole system is considered.
Even if it’s possible, it’s far from certain if that would make any economic sense at all.
But they don’t want to tell you that, so they make up stories about fusion being 30 years away.
Because it’s said by researchers in their 40’s so they’re set until retirement and cannot be held accountable anymore. If they’d make more realistic statements like “100 years from now”, or “not in my lifetime”, they wouldn’t get funded.
The same reason governments make plans with expected results 10 years later: they won’t be in charge anymore.
The problem has always been primarily a money problem. We’ve been able to do a lot more with a lot less, now that computers are so much better and can run far more complicated simulations than ever in reasonable time frames, but we still need to build actual reactors to get real data.
It really comes down to the fact that the U.S and other countries don’t find it politically attractive to invest heavily. Part of that is that there’s a particularly stupid segment of the population who hears “nuclear”, and automatically associates that with radioactive waste, meltdowns, and bombs, even though we’re talking about radically different processes, and these people flip out and make trouble for the politicians.
This is a graph of projections of achieving fusion, vs funding. It was very likely overly optimistic, but shows the issue.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png
I say “I can build you a car in a year for $10,000”. You give me $10/month. A year later you come back and I say “I can build you a car in a year for $10,000”.
Why is the car always a year away?
Fusion is the power source of the future, and it can’t stay that way if it lets us catch up.
(Yes- i’m in that kind of mood today).
Because it’s a carrot on a stick, I’m convinced the science is flawed (trying to shove a square peg through a round hole). This is just my personal opinion, but my theory is that the scientific model is flawed & the research went off track at some point.
Without going back to the ‘basics’ and going down a different path of thinking it takes much longer. I think there is a totally different scientific approach that will yield far better results in the long run. We should be looking into what Tesla was doing, frequency, energy, vibration, etc.
I think the *real* groundbreaking science is being done in secret and is purposely kept away from global science as we know it. My hunch is the mainstream scientific community has been led on a wild goose chase (when it comes to breakthrough science)
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