"These and other scientific, technological and engineering hurdles will need to be overcome before fusion will produce electricity for your home. Work will also need to be done to bring the cost of a fusion power plant well down from the US$3.5 billion of the National Ignition Facility. These steps will require significant investment from both the federal government and private industry."
If fusion research scientists continue to insist that their research has any viable path to use in commercial power generation, and to demand large amounts on funding on that basis, then they should expect to be critiqued on that same basis.
We don't really know what path fusion research will lead to. It's science. We don't know what we could find out tomorrow that could apply this research. But even the promises of commercial power generation alone should be enough to keep funding the project whether it will happen in 50 years or 100 years. It's not like they aren't making progress. You can't rush research and also under fund them.
~$2 trillion was used to bailout big businesses. If money was properly accounted for, $2 trillion could fund approximately 87 Manhattan Projects simultaneously in today’s dollars.
Laser was cool, but nobody knew what to do with it. These days we're at the stage where we're thinking: what can't we do with it??? But for about 3 decades (before CDs, basically) laser was a pop science laughing stock, more or less.
And fusion is much harder plus has been talked about and hyped for at least as long.
Yup:
In college English classes I took, they wanted the students to write term papers. Ah, sure, they expected some review of some case of belles lettres, maybe Medieval French romantic poetry!!!!
Instead, in one case, I picked the transistor and another, the laser.
For the laser, I had no idea of the applications. For the transistor, all I knew was, what it seemed was all Bell Labs had in mind -- replace their usage of vacuum tubes, that is, analog amplifiers and not digital, Nyquist sampling, etc., even though Shannon was at Bell Labs, etc.
The idea of a few billion transistors on a sheet of silicon about the size of a large postage stamp, 16 cores, 64 bit addressing, 4.0 clock, etc. -- beyond all expectation or belief. The graphics processors -- still less belief! Lasers sending trillions of bits per second per hair-thin glass fiber -- not even ready for science fiction!
No doubt I picked the transistor and the laser out of media hype. So at least some people in the media expected something from those two. Here the media was not wrong, and in the long term the hype was way below the reality.
No one is shitting on the research itself. But the PR around this story has carpet bombed sci-comm as a potential practical energy source. Not as basic research.
So it's perfectly reasonable to ask if there's a there from a commercial POV. And to note out that currently there really isn't.
If they really had announced a viable commercial product everyone here would be cheering.
The comment I replied to stated "Better to focus on standardised production lines for small fission reactors." To you, is that not shitting on the research? It implies the only purpose for this research is for power generation. And that it is clearly inferior to small fission reactors for that purpose, when the technology doesn't even exist yet. It just diminishes the accomplishment as a whole. It's so short sighted from a group of people who's jobs only came to existence <100 years ago.
Science is rarely a linear path. It's also rarely "I have this problem so I solved it this way." That's more engineering than science. It's really disappointing to me to see people, for lack of a better term, just shit on this accomplishment on HN when it's some seriously amazing stuff. It seems like a lot of people here don't understand science, they only understand engineering and then think about engineering mostly from a dull business and product oriented perspective.