I thought the us stand was on competition/ the capital system will ensure low cost , efficient systems
oh, let me think, medical bills, fuel prices, uhm.

Exactly: the electricity companies, railway companies etc. will make huge profits, because their costs will go down and their selling prices will stay the same or increase.

 

In 1976 I went to work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program. Enthusiasm was high and all of the scientific staff expected rapid progress towards viable fusion reactors. Needless to say, building a fusion reactor is much harder than everyone thought. The physics problems that need to be solved are almost insurmountable. A working reactor was always "Just around the corner" and will be that way for many years to come. Someone will get there eventually but it will be a long time before we get any real power from fusion energy.

 

In 1976 I went to work at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) program. Enthusiasm was high and all of the scientific staff expected rapid progress towards viable fusion reactors. Needless to say, building a fusion reactor is much harder than everyone thought. The physics problems that need to be solved are almost insurmountable. A working reactor was always "Just around the corner" and will be that way for many years to come. Someone will get there eventually but it will be a long time before we get any real power from fusion energy.

I'm not sure that we will ever get there eventually (of course, I'm not sure that we won't, either). All it takes is one "almost" insurmountable problem to turn out to be truly insurmountable.

 

The current World record for sustained fusion is 22 minutes 17 seconds by France.
https://newatlas.com/energy/france-tokamak-cea-west-fusion-reactor-record-plasma-duration/

Before that, China held the record at 17 minutes 46 seconds.

We're a long way from a commercial application.

I just hope after a bad storm everybody's cell phone charges up fast

 

Hello again,

I was talking to some people yesterday and realized something that may shed some light on the fusion debate.

I compared the fusion energy development investments and talk about that to the Theranos investments and story behind that, and found there is a big difference in pure hype vs reasonable hype.
The Theranos project story was pure hype with no science behind it and no reported science, it was all talk and no verification of any kind. The Fusion energy project is different for a number of reasons.

First, there is worldwide agreement that the science is good. With Theranos there was no science to back up any of the claims.
There have been progress reports that suggest some actual progress toward the goal is real. With Theranos there was complete public secrecy, no feedback.
With fusion there is some hype about the completion time along with the science and public feedback. With Theranos there was pure narrative with nothing else; pure talk.

So there are differences between fusion and really fake projects, it's just the hype that makes it unbelievable sometimes. The science and the experiments say it will happen, but with Theranos there was just a con artist with a bunch of talk about how good it was.

We also have to factor in that there is a long list of reasons by an entity might invest even huge amounts in a project without even expecting any return, ever. And, once the first large investment is made other investors may feel more confident in investing as well, which leads to even more investments, etc.

The bottom line though is that fusion is not as much of a hype as other schemes that are at some point known to be fake because there is a respectable amount of science, agreement, and progress behind it. If they are all completely faking it, they are dooming investment strategy for the future in any project.