Had a draft here for toooooooo long that I need ta publish, one of b_b's comments about R&D funding jogged my memory. We're still so far away. I think about it every day. The best known way to drive stable magnetic confinement fusion was found by accident, thirty-nine years ago, and we still can't model it right. Obviously doesn't bode well. It might be career-limiting, but I plan to forever refuse private funding. Any remotely orthodox business model will expect some returns, eventually, and I still consider anyone promising scalable success to be crazy. I'm worried that an expectation of eventual profitability hinging on my success would compromise my objectivity. And I think, generally, as much fusion know-how should be in the public domain as is possible, anyway. Even if it took less than ten years to get the world's best tokamak scheme, scalability and mass production are daunting, and for whatever reasons, we're not even rewarding $'s for people trying to think that far ahead. Sucks, but the way I plan to break in and start winning grants will have to be through modeling. Historically, I'm a fan of cowboyin' the way through experimentally testing the gamut of possibilities, but you can ruin millions of dollars worth of lab equipment if you cowboy wrong. No one will grant me millions before I prove I can handle that. Hence why so many physicists are like at least 50 before they make a splash these days. That and the complexity of the problems we're trying to solve. I've already started recruiting people in my field to build a fusion team, but I was kind of appalled at the reaction of most folks at my last conference when I said "In a more just world, almost all of us plasma peeps would be working in fusion". Honestly, I now think our best bet for energy is improving solar cells, wind, battery tech, and clever energy grid engineering. Eventually we'll need fusion reactors for deep space, but this you know. My new perspective has created a moral quandary; if I really wanna maximize a timely, positive contribution to humanity through muh science, I'm probably too far down the plasma physics road to say "OK, now I'll do solid state (applied quantum theory) so I can slog away at improving solar cells". Ugh. Posting the same plot, maybe for the fifth time, for anyone still saying "HURR DURR Y NO FUSION, DUMBY PHYCISTS?": That said, it's probably primarily us physicists' fault that we haven't sold this to the public better. But throw in at least a dash of big oil & gas conspiracy, for fun, as is custom. One of the other Big Problems out there that still fascinates me is quantum computing (QC). QC probably re-enables proof-of-work blockchaining. Maybe a hybrid proof-of-stake/work model is the asymptote most cryto flatlines to. That's like 30 years out, though, I'd guess. Edit: I told wasoxygen that this was in the works, so there ya go.The ONLY way to slow global warming in a socially and financially expedient fashion is fusion breakeven so shit in one hand, wish in the other, see which fills up first.
Hey, I do that to you all the time! I basically wrote a chunk of a WSJ article that I'd not read until now, and took a perspective somewhere between extreme skepticism and VC-fueled overhype. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad the private sector has taken an interest in the industry, but we miiiiiight be living in a bubble at the moment, and people are gonna lose some capital. FTA: Ehhhh, about the accidents... I guess in the sense that maybe only a lab tech and all your lab equipment could get badly burned in a particularly terrible loss of plasma confinement, it's impossible to have an accident? It's fair to say that a "meltdown" is impossible, that's a fission thing. Spot on about "can't be weaponized" and "not terribly radioactive byproducts", though. One more thing I'll add is that the current schemes involve using the generated heat to boil water. Sure, the specific heat of water is high, so it efficiently stores energy, but there's gotta be a better way to output energy directly as a voltage (even AC; a 1/60[Hz] period is basically forever to the fusion regimes of plasmas) instead of going through water to spin turbines. Even if we get room temperature superconductors or other materials science voodoo, there's all kinds of problems to solve. It won't be like "Welp, MIT's VC crew beat us to the punch. Turn it in, team." Job security!“The thing with fusion is, it’s impossible to have an accident; there’s no long-term waste and you can’t weaponize it,” says Christopher Mowry, the chief executive officer of General Fusion, a Canadian startup backed by billionaire Jeff Bezos.