Yes, it's incredibly difficult to achieve practical energy generation from fusion.
Yes, there are lots of potential hurdles to overcome - and only some of these (timescales being the obvious one) can be immediately resolved by improved funding .
Yes, there is no guarantee that fusion will ever be a useful source of energy.
No, in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money we are currently spending on fusion is insignificant.
No, without fusion, we have no real prospects for a long term, clean, scalable power source to meet our current and predicted future energy demands.
If we actually focussed our attentions properly on achieving fusion - effectively scaling up the ITER project as the international collaboration it is supposed to be (there has been a lot of petty squabbling internally due to funding disagreements) - we could unite on a goal that would truly stand as the pinaccle of man's achievements.
Having worked (and subsequently left) the field, I was depressed by the lack of ambition of most of the established scientists I work worked with. This was a natural effect, I guess, of watching their research grants gradually being eroded from the 60's onwards. And the erosion of these grants is understandable from the political context that it was initially thought it would be easy to achieve fusion, since fission was so easy to get working. Unfortunately, the opposite has proved to be true: the more research that has been done, the more complex the situation has been revealed to be. I like the (admittedly loose) analogy:
fission = pushing a vase off a table
fusion = putting it back together so that it's indistinguishable to its original form.
If we try and fail, we will still have developed a vast amount of new technology on the way. And we will have spent a tiny fraction of what is currently wasted every year on unconstructive areas such as, say, military budgets.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's incredibly difficult to achieve practical energy generation from fusion.
Yes, there are lots of potential hurdles to overcome - and only some of these (timescales being the obvious one) can be immediately resolved by improved funding .
Yes, there is no guarantee that fusion will ever be a useful source of energy.
No, in the grand scheme of things, the amount of money we are currently spending on fusion is insignificant.
No, without fusion, we have no real prospects for a long term, clean, scalable power source to meet our current and predicted future energy demands.
If we actually focussed our attentions properly on achieving fusion - effectively scaling up the ITER project as the international collaboration it is supposed to be (there has been a lot of petty squabbling internally due to funding disagreements) - we could unite on a goal that would truly stand as the pinaccle of man's achievements.
Having worked (and subsequently left) the field, I was depressed by the lack of ambition of most of the established scientists I work worked with. This was a natural effect, I guess, of watching their research grants gradually being eroded from the 60's onwards. And the erosion of these grants is understandable from the political context that it was initially thought it would be easy to achieve fusion, since fission was so easy to get working. Unfortunately, the opposite has proved to be true: the more research that has been done, the more complex the situation has been revealed to be. I like the (admittedly loose) analogy:
fission = pushing a vase off a table
fusion = putting it back together so that it's indistinguishable to its original form.
If we try and fail, we will still have developed a vast amount of new technology on the way. And we will have spent a tiny fraction of what is currently wasted every year on unconstructive areas such as, say, military budgets.