If China’s economic ascendancy happened 50 years sooner we would probably already have it. Democracies are allergic to massive capital investments that take decades to pay off.
Obviously the graph is very out of date, US funding is around 600 million 2012 dollars annually and China’s is double that.
A graph is not proof of fusion energy. Yelling at clouds would probably generate more net energy than all fusion research has to date.
It’s a dead end. It will never ever work. A combination of civilizational die-back and concomitant reduced energy use and a hodge-podge of renewable sources is the likely future for humanity.
And that’s my optimistic take.
My more realistic take is that we are running out of cheap easy energy. The kind of monstrously massive contraption filled with high-tech exotic materials that is a fusion reactor is exactly the kind of thing we will NOT be able to build anymore in the future.
It’s the same impasse that kills all the space fantasies (like people who think Avatar is just around the corner). If we HAD the resources to build fusion reactors or mine asteroids, we don’t HAVE a resource problem!
And if we have such a resource crunch that we think fusion/space is the only solution, we don’t have the resources to do it.
Practical power production through nuclear fusion still requires significant developments for it to be realised at scale, though several startups are already planning to deliver it within the next few years.
US-based Helion Energy secured the world’s first purchase agreement for nuclear fusion energy in 2023, promising to provide 50MW of fusion power to Microsoft by 2028.
I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.
ha hahahahaahaaaa… oh boy… you techno utopians are funny. Maybe build a Space Elevator out of 3D printed AI Bitcoins and run a fusion reactor at the Lagrange point? Privately! On the Moon! To colonize Mars and mine the asteroids! Become a multi star species!
OK, time will tell. How about I save you the wait: nothing will happen. At all.
It is pretty easy to point out how long we have been researching fusion. That said, few of the skeptics will highlight just what an explosion of private capital we have seen in recent years and how different that is to previous decades. They will not show you the previous times in history when we have seen similar patterns.
Sure this capital is speculative. And most of them will have picked the wrong winner. But history tells us that this is what it looks like before a technology succeeds. Not 30 years before. More like 10. Which means saying 5 is ambitious but not exactly crazy.
Fusion does not belong in your list. First, some of them exist. You can buy a 3D printer with bitcoins. Of those that don’t, none has more than perhaps one resource unconstrained backer. Not a lot of people think we are colonizing Mars anytime soon. Fusion has billions of dollars of private capital chasing it as this point.
The situation may be closer to Quantum Computing than your examples. And I would say there are more physical unknowns in quantum computing. Because we do not have a quantum computer we can see in the sky everyday.
Your list looks funny in another way. Did you know that a company just launched a solar power satellite to do AI in orbit. It is up there and operational. They want to build a solar powered AI data-center in space. Whether you back such and idea or not, you cannot say something is impossible that has already been done.
And sometimes things work out differently than intended. For example, the technology developed or fusion stelerators is being use for drilling. One use may be to drill geothermal power vents. Who knows, maybe fusion power research will inadvertently make geothermal so cheap that fusion reactors no longer make economic sense.
Dude, 10 years ago was 2016… We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least. I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.
We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least.
I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.
I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.
Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)
I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.
Only 75 more years to go!
If China’s economic ascendancy happened 50 years sooner we would probably already have it. Democracies are allergic to massive capital investments that take decades to pay off.
Obviously the graph is very out of date, US funding is around 600 million 2012 dollars annually and China’s is double that.
A graph is not proof of fusion energy. Yelling at clouds would probably generate more net energy than all fusion research has to date.
It’s a dead end. It will never ever work. A combination of civilizational die-back and concomitant reduced energy use and a hodge-podge of renewable sources is the likely future for humanity.
And that’s my optimistic take.
My more realistic take is that we are running out of cheap easy energy. The kind of monstrously massive contraption filled with high-tech exotic materials that is a fusion reactor is exactly the kind of thing we will NOT be able to build anymore in the future.
It’s the same impasse that kills all the space fantasies (like people who think Avatar is just around the corner). If we HAD the resources to build fusion reactors or mine asteroids, we don’t HAVE a resource problem!
And if we have such a resource crunch that we think fusion/space is the only solution, we don’t have the resources to do it.
The future is horses, not Star Trek.
Get used to it.
I mean, time will tell. But that seems a bit sooner than 2100.
Lol any year now!
https://www.solarenspace.com/
ha hahahahaahaaaa… oh boy… you techno utopians are funny. Maybe build a Space Elevator out of 3D printed AI Bitcoins and run a fusion reactor at the Lagrange point? Privately! On the Moon! To colonize Mars and mine the asteroids! Become a multi star species!
OK, time will tell. How about I save you the wait: nothing will happen. At all.
It is pretty easy to point out how long we have been researching fusion. That said, few of the skeptics will highlight just what an explosion of private capital we have seen in recent years and how different that is to previous decades. They will not show you the previous times in history when we have seen similar patterns.
Sure this capital is speculative. And most of them will have picked the wrong winner. But history tells us that this is what it looks like before a technology succeeds. Not 30 years before. More like 10. Which means saying 5 is ambitious but not exactly crazy.
Fusion does not belong in your list. First, some of them exist. You can buy a 3D printer with bitcoins. Of those that don’t, none has more than perhaps one resource unconstrained backer. Not a lot of people think we are colonizing Mars anytime soon. Fusion has billions of dollars of private capital chasing it as this point.
The situation may be closer to Quantum Computing than your examples. And I would say there are more physical unknowns in quantum computing. Because we do not have a quantum computer we can see in the sky everyday.
Your list looks funny in another way. Did you know that a company just launched a solar power satellite to do AI in orbit. It is up there and operational. They want to build a solar powered AI data-center in space. Whether you back such and idea or not, you cannot say something is impossible that has already been done.
And sometimes things work out differently than intended. For example, the technology developed or fusion stelerators is being use for drilling. One use may be to drill geothermal power vents. Who knows, maybe fusion power research will inadvertently make geothermal so cheap that fusion reactors no longer make economic sense.
How about: figuratively tilting at windmills would have generated more net energy than fusion research.
I remember hearing this about solar power ten years ago. And electric cars. And cloud computing, even.
It was never going to be economically viable. Always ten years away from viability. Not competitive with whatever the industry leader was at the time.
Really putting all your chips on “nothing ever changes”
Dude, 10 years ago was 2016… We’ve had affordable, consumer grade solar since the 90s at least. I don’t think people were questioning the viability of solar in 2016.
I’d hardly call the 1998 average of $12/W affordable. It was possible, but not practical.
Even in the mid-'10s, solar instillation were something of a luxury and - thanks to the high cost of batteries - only practical for deferring daytime electricity consumption. The root of the Solyndra scandal was Obama pushing a domestic solar manufacturer as an alternative to Chinese solar imports (which were, themselves, far more expensive than they should be thanks to steep US tarriffs imposed in 2014)
I don’t think anyone was questioning solar viability. But we were still talking about break-even prices on a 5-10 year horizon, heavily predicated on electricity costs outpacing inflation. As a hedge against periodic brownouts or price spikes during a heat wave, it was useful. Now the materials are a third the price and the number of installers has surged to accommodate rising demand. It’s just a much better deal.
To be fair there was and is huge push back against EVs, the US is setting itself back a couple centuries just to not admit it is viable.
Ten years ago Swanson’s law for solar photovoltaics was well established, not comparable.
“It’s only sunny during the day” is a line uttered ad nauseum by people who didn’t see lithium batteries falling through the same price drop.
You’re so dense you could fuse hydrogen.
What a low quality joke. The humor was bad too.
Unlike this captain positivity’s social life, fusion is making some sizable strides forward in short order.
I design diagnostics going into systems like these, there’s a lot of positive news coming our way.
Helion’s gonna have some problems though.