I used to like the idea of fusion energy, but practical application has always seemed to be 40 years in the future, and it's starting to sound more like 60 years now.
I hope it will be possible some day, but it's not going to help with out energy needs in our lifetime. (Unless that longevity research is going to pay off, I guess.)
It took more than 300 years to build the cathedral [1] in my home town (albeit with a 60-year pause in the middle). So indeed it might take another 4 or 5 generations to master nuclear fusion, but I see no issue with that. We should not shy away from starting projects that we won't see any benefit in our lifetime.
But of course, it also means that we should not rely on nuclear fusion being available in the short term...
The linear model of time estimates here work well for cathedrals but not necessarily for scientific and engineering advancements.
For a Cathedral, you have a general idea of how long it's going to take (at least finite) and know that every piece of material added onto the structure is going to move it closer to the end goal.
For things like fusion, anything beyond say 20 years is basically a bullsh_t speculative guess that sounds better than "we don't really know whether this will even work out in the end". It doesn't really matter whether it's 30 or 60. The real question is whether the number is finite or infinite.
I suspect there was a lot of inceramental value to be had while the construction was ongoing. A cathedral doesn't need to be 100% complete to use as a house of worship, an inspiration for the community, a display of wealth and soft power, and so on.
Fusion hasn't really produced much utility at all so far, aside from some interesting discussions.
Are you trying to argue therefore we should stop or something? There are countless areas of research and activities we do as humans that offer virtually no tangible benefit to society.
It seems to me that fusion is unfairly criticized because there is an obvious end-goal.
If you never stop working on some creative art project it's never finished, your endless cathedral build has nearly zero relevance to nuclear fusion producing electricity for consumers which would be a definitive "delivered" goalpost, after which any further developments/improvements would just be optimization iterations.
There appears to either be a problem where these are either convenient money sinks, problems that are missing key break-throughs or missing critical technologies. Nuclear Fusion would be easy if we had 400T magnetic fields and the structures to support them.
We seem to be missing a critical cultural element required to drive these types of innovations - or we are missing the slow tooling, process, and incremental innovations required to support these technologies.
Used to be on the list: reusable rockets, reasonably priced electric cars with charging infrastructure, rapid development of new vaccines with direct genetic engineering mechanisms.
Driverless cars would be very useful; it would mean I can use my time in the car in a more useful way, like reading. Now I have to use the train for that.
But maybe that's also the risk of driverless cars: it would make them more attractive than they should be, because they're really too inefficient to be able to afford them as society's main form of transportation.
> I used to like the idea of fusion energy, but practical application has always seemed to be 40 years in the future, and it's starting to sound more like 60 years now.
You have to understand that fusion has been funded at "fusion never" levels for 5 decades now.
The amount of money that we poured at the mining engineering that later became "fracking" was larger.
Had we funded fusion at the amount we have funded petroleum extraction, we'd have free energy by now. :(
Who is "we"? Fracking was funded with private money. It was "conventional" technology, no edge-of-science stuff, so private entrepreneurs could afford it, and the rewards were quick to materialize.
Nuclear fusion? There's this urban myth that fusion could have been achieved if only we'd have poured more money into it, but where's the evidence? Plasma modeling requires a lot of computational power. What you have now in your iPhone in your pocket you could not have had for 10 billion dollars back in 1970. How much money were we supposed to put into fusion research? Do you think with lots of money and just a slide rule, you can solve the fusion problem?
I think you're mistaken about the government involvement in fracking. Sure, the basic technique may have been developed by private companies, but government supported research expanded it to oil and gas applications.
> government supported research expanded it to oil and gas applications.
The Government gets involved in a lot of things, but it doesn't mean its contribution is essential. For a recent example, the NIH is claiming the Moderna vaccine is due to their contribution, and sure, you'll be able to find one or a few grants here or there of a few hundred thousand dollars, but the massive investments of tens of millions of dollars were done by Moderna itself.
As for fracking, the father of fracking is considered to be George P. Mitchell [1].
You're right, but I think it was essential in this case:
"
His comment that “the DOE started it” refers to the Eastern Gas Shales Project, a research effort in the Appalachia Basin from 1979 that proved shale rock was rich in natural gas. The DOE-supported project tested the use of nitrogen foam to fracture shale formations, and its analysis led to a deeper understanding of natural shale fractures.
George Mitchell’s team studied those results while developing the Barnett Shale near Fort Worth, the first modern fracking play. The company relied on research from the Sandia National Laboratory to use micro-seismic technology to map the shale fractures in wells, and Mitchell also benefited from federal tax credits for unconventional drilling, which helped underwrite the cost of developing hydraulic fracturing.
"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorensteffy/2013/10/31/how-much...
I interpreted that as meaning "don't forget private industry had an important role". This doesn't mean that the private sector could have done it alone (my interpretation of government investment being essential).
But at that stage it's semantics really.
Maybe we could ask the question: "would private industry have funded all the basic research to get to the same starting point?" I doubt it since it would not have been shown returns for many decades and had a high risk of showing no returns. But maybe they would have, who knows?
A parallel question: "would private industry have developed semiconductor transistors without WW2 research into radar systems?
I love the idea of fusion and certainly hope people make progress, but given advances in solar and wind, I’m starting to think the best location for a fusion reactor is 93M miles away.
I hope it will be possible some day, but it's not going to help with out energy needs in our lifetime. (Unless that longevity research is going to pay off, I guess.)