Comment by bsder
7 years ago
We know what the issue is--fusion never got a useful amount of funding.
Now, it is entirely possible that even given an enormous amount of funding--fusion might still not work. However, engineers with lots of money are remarkably clever and effective beasts (see: radio, semiconductors, plastics, steel).
Fusion has been funded at "Fusion Never" levels for almost 40 years while we subsidize every other significant energy source to the tune of billions or trillions of dollars every single year. (For example, how much money got poured into the technology that became "fracking"?)
No, that's not what the issue is. That's an effect, not a cause. The cause is that fusion turned out to be less promising than had been thought, and that led to budgets being tight. Lidsky's devastating critique was part of that (tokamaks not being as good as early hopes implied was another.)
> The cause is that fusion turned out to be less promising than had been thought
So did a whole lot of chemical rocketry. Instead of whining about it--we spent a lot of money on engineering, we made the Saturn V, and we went to the moon anyway.
The issue is that fusion only has one end point--providing energy. Researching chemical rocketry made better weapons--so we funded the snot out of it. The DOE spent billions on the Unconventional Gas Research Programs and lined a lot of pockets.
Funding isn't guaranteed to make progress, but lack of funding practically guarantees lack of progress.
Not a good analogy. Chemical rockets are the only real way to get to space. So if you make them better, even incrementally, you have a win. It also helped that launchers were very far away from fundamental economic limits on their performance. Expendable launchers, unlike power plants, are expended.
But fusion is competing against a plethora of other approaches to production of energy that actually work, and are being used, and are arguably superior.
Fusion also uses components that are mature due to their use in these other approaches. DT fusion, which Lidsky is addressing, will produce its energy as heat. This heat has to be turned into power using turbines and generators, a mature technology. And it's a mature technology that's a major part of the cost of coal and nuclear power plants, and is a big reason why those power plants are no longer competitive.
(This echoes an argument from the mid 20th century, when it was pointed out that fission power would, at best, be only slightly less expensive than power from coal, due to all the common elements the power plants shared. And it turned out nuclear fission was more expensive than that, as one could not do the nuclear parts too cheaply. DT fusion reactors promise to be much larger and more complex than fission reactors, for the fundamental reasons Lidsky and others gave, so one can reasonably expect their economics to fail even more.)
(This is also why the focus on thorium and SMRs to try to keep fission alive is probably hopeless.)
("Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it")
The complaint about funding is a red herring. It has the presumption that if funding had been available, fusion had a real chance of succeeding. But as Lidsky points out, it didn't have a real chance of succeeding. Even if the program had produced a reactor, no one would have wanted it.
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This kind of neglects the fact that "rocket science" was just "harder than thought" for american scientists. Stuff started to work when they let German scientists build it.
Which is no surprise. Germany already had dozens amateur (space) rocket clubs way back in 1930, long before people in other countries were even mostly aware of the possibilty of sending rockets way up there.
The US had some catching up to do in the science department, which they accomplished in the end, though rockets loosely based on those initial designs are still in use today.
This is different to today's fusion situation, where we don't know whether there will be any better design at all - because nobody did built something that could be adapted to fit our purpose before us.