> A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now.

Maybe the ~$29 billion [1] spent by the US on fusion total since 1953 to date seems like a lot from a personal perspective, but consider the modern cost of $3.5 billion for building 1 Giga Watt of generation capacity [2] for a coal power plant, the claim that fusion is unreasonably expensive and impracticable doesn't hold water. Compare fusion research to other broad spectrum research projects that benefit broad swaths of mankind, you see a remarkably different attitude and perception. This one cancer research foundation in the UK raised 460 million pounds in 2012/13 [3], more than twice the total international spending on ITER in 2014 [4]. There is clearly a double standard when it comes to comparing the results of fusion R&D with other long term efforts that still fail to offer satisfactory solutions after decades of concerted effort.

[1] http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful/ [2] http://schlissel-technical.com/docs/reports_35.pdf [3] http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/prod_consump/groups/cr_commo... [4] (page 20) https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/Lists/depts/Attachm...

That's completely irrelevant to efficiency. It's objectively a terribly inefficient technology as it stands now for watt generated per dollar spent.

Using watt's generated per dollar as a metric of success for fusion research (emphasis mine) is a false analogy. No commercial fusion power plant exists, however you seem to want to hold research reactors constructed for the purpose of discovery to the same financial standard as operating coal power plants. When the first commercial fusion reactor is turned on then we can bemoan capital costs using real data. Until then, don't compare apples and oranges.

> "But fusion IS very expensive electricity."

You're falling into the same trap as the article author, you have no way of knowing that.

For example, this article on the dense plasma focus approach to nuclear fusion shows the costs are far below that of other non-nuclear sources:

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/cost-advantage-roi/

Even if you take into account the research costs (which I think is a mistake, the cut off point is too hard to define, I mean would you include R&D into petrol-based cars in the solar car R&D costs?) the level of funding that the dense plasma focus has had to date has been relatively small, it could recoup those costs quickly. You can get a sense for the investment costs involved in one dense plasma focus project here (though admittedly this doesn't include all similar research projects, of which there are a few):

http://www.integrityresearchinstitute.org/FutureEnergy/Focus...

So you see, because you have no way of knowing which fusion approach would win out, you cannot say with any certainty that it is expensive electricity.

You have also now way to know if these 0.5ct/kWh are correct. And that article is actually sales material from the plasma fusion company. The wikipedia article on this topic suggests that no progress has been made since 2012.

> "You have also now way to know if these 0.5ct/kWh are correct. And that article is actually sales material from the plasma fusion company."

The article I linked to contained an estimate. The point I'm making is that nobody knows what the final cost will actually be. If you want to play guessing games then you should be happy to know what information is available to base that guess on.

> "The wikipedia article on this topic suggests that no progress has been made since 2012."

Progress has been made since 2012, though the progress has been slower than it could've been as there's been a lack of funding. This year the focus appears to have been on improving one of the key parts. The team update their website fairly frequently, last news update about the project was made less than a month ago:

http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/news-and-archives/lpp-...

> A lot of money has been going into fusion for many, many years now

Sure, but if you're going to holistically include the cost of the science in the comparison price per KWh you should also balance it against the cost of dealing with the consequences of sustained carbon emissions from other types of power generation.

That's really not an unusual or surprising thing. Most products have research and development costs factored into their prices. It's the primary reason why bleeding edge stuff costs so much.

As far as carbon emissions go, it's hard to compare without knowing what byproducts fusion will generate.

> Sure, but if you're going to holistically include the cost of the science in the comparison price per KWh you should also balance it against the cost of dealing with the consequences of sustained carbon emissions from other types of power generation.

Guess what? They all still beat fusion hands down. Think of all the cows that farted and then died to feed the researchers. Think of all the carbon emissions generated by the actual research. Think about the real, actual return we have today.

You seem to be banking on the fact that we actually CAN produce an efficient fusion reactor in the near future. Total efficiency of our investment is very, very, very dependent on how fast it can crank out.

Now compare it to military investments and you might get somewhere....

EDIT: if you disagree, I'd obviously love feedback. It just seems silly to think that fusion is at all something we can depend on being able to pull out of our ass. The manhattan project was never a sure thing.

> "if you disagree, I'd obviously love feedback."

You've clearly made your mind up that pursuing nuclear fusion is a waste of money, there's no point in debating if you're not prepared to consider that the research could pay off.

I don't make up my mind, I follow the dialectic of the conversation. Who the hell are you used to talking to?

The problem is there are NO ARGUMENTS bounding the possibility of the research paying off, and until you can you're going to just talk past the other person.

Nuclear fusion is relatively well understood from a physics perspective, what remains is an engineering challenge. For the longest time most of the money spent on fusion reactor research has been plowed into a single approach. The good news is that at this point in time a wider variety of approaches are getting decent levels of funding.

That's the reality of the situation, we've gone from a one horse race to something closer to an eight horse race. There's a decent chance that the horse we were backing at first will get overtaken by some of the other entrants. If that is the case, some would argue we've been backing the wrong horse for the last 50 years. What it doesn't mean is that the race is over.

Again, it's important to understand the level of confidence when it comes to nuclear fusion. The science is relatively well understood, we've built plenty of working fusion reactors, in fact some fusion reactors are so simple that high school students have built them. What remains is mostly an engineering challenge, working on various ways of triggering and controlling the plasma, shielding the machines from the forces that would interfere with its function, and working out the best way to capture the energy as an electric current. The sun proves you can have get more energy than you put in, hydrogen bombs prove the same, so the potential exists, we're just looking at how best to harness it.

Is there a chance this research won't pay off in, let's say, 20 years? A slim chance yes, but considering the enormous benefits that's a chance many groups who invest in nuclear fusion are willing to take.