Comment by bsder

> 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.

Erm, natural gas uses turbines and generators and nobody seems to be whining about that. It isn't the turbine driving the cost in coal (nuclear is a different story).

First, we still can't engineer a superconductor. We have barely doubled magnetic field strength since 1970ish. And the big advance of superconductivity in graphite with slight offsets demonstrates just how little we know. Superconductors would have had a massive improvement in basic science with funding (this was one of the huge losses in not funding the Superconducting Supercollider).

The FFT (fast fourier transform) was effectively useless in the 1970s and 1980s--until Moore's Law made it not so useless. Similarly, computational dynamics made huge advances since the 1980s--to the point where non-simple toroids are now the standard.

Knowledge advances in a "front". If you throw money at a point (especially a fundamental one), it drags related knowledge forward as well. Look at steel, for example. Steel has been considered "mature and well-understood" (hah!) practically since 1910--but there was so much money being thrown at it that it continuously advanced for almost a century. Once steel moved forward, architecture and construction moved forward. Then we got new applications like cars. Then we got new tooling like heavy presses. Then we could use more exotic materials like titanium. I can go on and on.