Why is fusion ignored?
replies(8):
If you mean in general, it's not even remotely ignored. There are massive projects underway (see the previously mentioned ITER) as well as smaller, more experimental projects. It's a very exciting field to follow. It just doesn't move fast enough to solve problems that we needed to solve a decade ago.
We're in damage control mode when it comes to climate change, deaths from emissions, etc. We can't afford to wait for a perfect solution when we're bleeding out in the field.
LENR has had to have a name change because the primary connotation with cold fusion is a bunch of psuedoscience and bullshit.
Yes, some real scientists have published some results that make continued study worthwhile, but if regular fusion is 50 years off, our indication is that LENR, if it's even possible, is 100.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
My own idea is that plasma micro-bubbles are hot enough to cause nuclear fusion somehow.
[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/scientists-in-the-u...
I don't think the hundred or so scientists at a bunch of disparate universities are part of some conspiracy to push quack science, but something is up when there is no theoretical framework that even begins to explain your results, no one outside of your community can reproduce it, and your results are still just "well that's weird" vs. "we have something we can build off to actually produce energy"
However, you can look at results produced by Akito Takahashi[0]. Are they convincing enough for you?
[0]: https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BiberianJPjcondensedzb.pdf...
We know how to make fission reactors, we have many of them operating right now. We could build more this very second.
We have every reason to believe that a fusion power plant will be even more expensive and slower to construct than a fission one. So, even if you skipped over the additional expensive and slow step of proving that a reactor design works, they still wouldn't be chosen by any energy company that expects to turn a profit.
Lab results that show some evidence for trace amounts of fusion reactions do not imply net energy production. E.g. one of the recently announced results needed a powerful xray beamline to get some tiny results, which consumed more energy than the fusion reactions ever released.
This is comparable to the ancient greeks inventing a "steam engine"[1] that does no meaningful work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile
When you look at history of ITER failures and the real problems involved in making the whole fusion power production operation economically sustainable, this claim disintegrates. It is a very complex project that is hard to manage, and building and operating fusion power plant is currently much more costly than doing that for a fission power plant. The only benefit of fusion vs. fission is that fusion can give us much more energy. But fission can give enough energy now for decades, and much more cheaply.
I wouldn't advocate shutting down fission plants with the expectation that they'd be replaced by fusion in the immediate future, obviously, but some of the non-ITER work might end up viable sooner than a lot of people expect.
It's still not going to be ready tomorrow, but it doesn't require building the eighth wonder of the world.
If $10B is hard (i.e. impossible) to justify for proven fission, how about $100B for fusion? $200B?
Nobody involved expects ever? to field a competitive Tokamak power station. Not in their lifetime, not in their grandchildrens' lifetime. That is not the purpose of the project.
It has a different purpose. Its main purpose is to provide employment for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population to be available to draw on for sporadic weapons work. Another purpose it shares with a lot of others, to provide a reliable long-term conduit of public funds to select private hands. The hot-neutron physicists are not getting those $billions, but somebody is.
Every penny spent on ITER is stolen from other possibly viable projects. Imagine how many GW-years could be generated by 2050 by solar and wind paid for out of what is earmarked for ITER.