I think(read: am guessing, smartly) when you factor the entire cost of fossil fuels (environmental damage to harvest, subsidies, tax breaks, etc) fusion will be cheaper.

Fossil fuels have a number of intentionally "hidden" costs.

Are you aware of how CO2 is used by plants? that's a "hidden" benefit of the large-scale use of fossil fuels.

At current CO2 levels plants are starved for CO2. At 150 ppm there would be a massive extinction of land-based plant life.

I don't think plants are "starved" for CO2, and increasing levels of CO2 most likely do not linearly increase productivity of plants [0].

There's also the other ramifications of increased CO2 concentration like: ocean acidification, warmer overall climate globally and increased incidences of severe weather, rising seas resulting from the warmer temperatures, and not all plants will enjoy the higher temperatures (or the droughts, hailstorms, strong winds, too much rain all at once), especially those in the tropics which already get quite warm.

>Our results suggest that future climate change will push this ecosystem away from conditions that maximize NPP, but with large year-to-year variability

[0]http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2016/08/30/1606734113...

edit: less blunt.

If you reject the fact that the vast majority of plants are currently starving for CO2, you reject science.

Here is one of many scientific papers on the subject: "Carbon dioxide starvation, the development of C4 ecosystems, and mammalian evolution" [1]

[1] http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/353/1365/159

I don't think you are reading the studies you are sharing.

>Global expansion of C4 biomass is recorded in the diets of mammals from Asia, Africa, North America, and South America during the interval from about 8 to 5 Ma.

That's a 3 million year period, ending 5ma. You say CO2 starvation is down to 150ppm, but atmospheric CO2 levels have fluctuated between 180-200 (ice ages) to 300ppm (warm periods) for the past half million years or so.[1] Meanwhile C3 plants (those supposedly which suffered during your linked expansion of C4 biomass) are around 95% of plant biomass currently. Doesn't seem like plants on the whole are starving for CO2 at this time.

[1]https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/

> I don't think you are reading the studies you are sharing.

I'm impressed by your method of argumentation.

What I mean to say is there is more to the data than any single paper, and with a bigger picture in mind there seems to be no shortage of CO2 for 95% of plants on earth(C3 carbon fixation, evolved earlier), and for the other 5% (C4 carbon fixation, evolved more recently) they can be fine in a much greater range of CO2 concentrations.

It's pretty simple and there is ample scientific evidence and writing on the topic: at current CO2 levels, plants are starving. There is even satellite-based measurements of vegetation by NASA that demonstrate a global greening of the planet in tune with atmospheric CO2 increases over the recent decades. You are denying scientific facts.

K. Go gaslight someone else bud.

Is this some kind of a joke? Global warming, full stop. Plants are not starved, they were ubiquitous until we chopped “most” of them down.

It's science.

Land-based plants evolved when CO2 levels were much higher than today. [1] In fact levels have been steadily declining from 3000 ppm 150 million years ago; the current, holocene rise is a relatively minor bump. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692178/

[2] http://caos.iisc.ernet.in/faculty/pghosh/content/Publication...

And by the way global temperature 150 million years ago was the same as today, +/- 2deg C.

Could be. But the bio-make up of the planet was different then, yes?

Perhaps that's true. I appreciate the insight. However it doesn't really address my point, as it was directed at another comment.

The guys over at Tokamak Energy are aiming to produce a small reactor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRyUWOUk_48

Since energy is such an important factor to the life of humans, I'd say the dollar/euro price is a measure that is too narrow. The question is : is fusion necessary ? how many will die if we don't have it ? how many will be born if we have it ? Have we got a future without it ? what will be the quality of life without it ?

Increased birth rate is not necessarily a good thing for human development at this stage. Our planet cannot support an infinite number of people.

Since we are already facing unprecedented growth that won't be stopped except by famine, world war or some other calamity, it's important we find a way to stretch our limited resources further and develop technologies that will help us expand beyond earth like nuclear fusion.

Yup. But I was pointing more at the fact that the notion of "price" is not very useful here. If we're talking about mankind's future, money should be brought back to the level of "minor technical detail".

Price is a proxy for "how much resources would it take to roll this out at scale." That's important regardless of how your economy works.

Price also tells us whether the new energy source would require government support, or require less resources than building and fueling a new fossil plant, or (if extremely cheap) would prompt people to shut down even brand-new fossil plants because the new energy source is cheaper than the cost of fuel.

Money is what we currently have as a means of getting a consensus about what is important for mankind's future and how to allocate resources based on importance and expected payoff. It's not the best system, but it's hard to introduce alternatives.

I agree that it should be that way.

Price is important to motivate people to develop nuclear fusion technology, and to finally build commercial fusion plants when the time comes.

Nuclear fission is a superior power technology already, but we've largely stopped building new plants because of the exorbitant upstart costs compared to other technologies.

It may well start out like that, but like most technology I expect it will just keep getting cheaper and smaller with time.

Fundamental engineering limits aside, fusion progress competes with battery progress, and we put a lot more money into battery research.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but haven't most large infrastructure projects become more expensive over time?

I mean more expensive in inflation adjusted dollars.

The amount of progress over time is a bell shaped curve. For a period of time after the technology becomes practical, it will get more funding & smart people involved. During that time most of the major advanced in the tech will be made. This phase may last a long time. After much of what can be done with it is discovered and optimized, the amount of progress will slow down.

Ah, yes, thank you. I was thinking about the far side of the bell curve after most of the easy gains have been made and bureaucracy sets in.

Once we get it going it will attract lot's of investment, global competition, and mass production. Every fusion reactor you build is essentially a money printing machine and capitalism excels at optimizing the production of things like that.

The moment that anybody demonstrates a real, working fusion reactor, a gargantuan amount of money will flood the sector.

At that point, fusion will go onto a Moore's Law curve and we will see exponential improvements for quite a few years.

Batteries have been around for a long time. A lot of money was (and is) spent, and yet we see slow improvement (incredibly slow on a given technology, advancement usually come from new chemistry, or new physics e.g. lightsail).

Nothing resembling Moore’s law style advancement, despite a lot of money to be made.

It is likely exaggerated but the headlines claimed the big Australian battery returned the investment within a couple of months. There’s a LOT of money to be made on energy storage.

Why would fusion reactors be moorable?

> Nothing resembling Moore’s law style advancement

As you say, batteries have been around for a long time. The rapid growth/improvement part of the battery curve happened back in the late 1800s/early 1900s.

The lead-acid grid lattice design, still the...errr...gold standard when it comes to the most amount of joules stored per buck, was invented in 1881.

(modern technologies like the various lithium battery chemistries win when it come to storage for a given mass -- thus their use in things like portable devices and cars, but lead-acid still wins when it comes to storage for a given cost).

> The lead-acid grid lattice design, still the...errr...gold standard when it comes to the most amount of joules stored per buck, was invented in 1881.

Li-ion has caught up. If you have $400 to spend on batteries both li-ion [1] and comparable lead acid [2] (deep discharge, long cycle life) cost around 3 Wh/$.

[1] https://www.imrbatteries.com/samsung-29e-18650-2850mah-2-75a...

[2] https://www.powerstream.com/BBep.htm (EP100-12)

The magnetic fusion triple product* did in fact increase exponentially from 1970 to 2000, at about the same pace as Moore's Law. Then we reached the limit of the superconductors at the time, and could only move forward by building an enormous reactor which still isn't finished. Now we have better superconductors; fusion output in a tokamak reactor increases as the fourth power of magnetic field strength.

We also have lots of different designs to experiment with, and much better computers for running simulations. As the computers improve, fusion progress will speed up, if the funding is available.

* (The triple product of temperature, density, and confinement time is the critical fusion metric; for every fusion fuel there's a triple product above which you get net power.)

Why would it be exponential? I like Kurzweil's historical exponential growth across IT (pre-dating silicon), and long-term exponential progress, technological, and longer-term biological, but I haven't seen the mechanism convincingly articulated...

Sure, more money means more improvements faster, but at best that can only amplify already-exponential progress. Unless, it leads to even more money? Or, that each improvement scales all factors? Or, that one improvement makes it easier to find subsequent improvements (a kind of positive feedback loop; accelerating returns).

Why should money make fusion have Moores-like growth? Not even silicon has it any more...

> Why would it be exponential? ... Why should money make fusion have Moores-like growth?

Because fusion research is critically underfunded and always has been. Like any project, there is probably a point where we'll hit diminishing returns, but right now we're barely keeping the lights on, much less hitting diminishing returns.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusi...

> Why would it be exponential? ... Why should money make fusion have Moores-like growth?

I'd say the key to the parent's premise, is they said it'd be exponential for quite a few years (rather than indefinitely). That's likely correct. The early improvements would probably leap substantially in regards to the output possible. We saw the same thing in nuclear reactor tech.

I'd love for that to be true but physics reality doesn't care how much money you have, not everything is possible.

Moore's law is an observation, it is not an input into some process.

It is both.

The original observation is basically a winner-take-all combined with the fact that transistors scale as the square of the minimum dimension. So, if there is linear improvement in dimension, there is exponential improvement in density.

The reason why Moore's Law continued on for so long was that companies were willing to spend exponentially increasing amounts of money to hit the next technology node because of the winner-take-all nature of the product. Anybody who got to the next node forced everybody else to the next node or wiped them out of business.

This is going to be the same thing with fusion. Linear improvements in the fundamentals translate to exponential improvements (fourth power or better) in the outputs. The first folks to fusion are going to force everyone to fusion or wipe them out of business.

I agree with you that if they can find those improvements that will all hold. But there is no guarantee for that at any give budget, though the larger the budget the bigger the chances that some improvement will be found.