russ_watters
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@mfb pointed out something similar. Those numbers basically buy you ITER and DEMO at $50 billion apiece. The tone seems to be complaining that the funding commitment is low, and I tend to agree. By comparison the US spent $260 B over 13 years on the early human space program (all up through Apollo). That's considered one of the greatest achievements in human history. The ISS cost $150B and the US currently spends $3B a year on it. Viable commercial fusion electricity would be bigger, and is definitely far more important than either. And not for nothing, the US also spent $4T on COVID stimulus/relief (some with a payback, some without). If scientists (3rd party reviewers, not the scientists involved in the project) think there is a significant likelihood the ITER and DEMO projects will succeed, as in, for real succeed not fake succeed, then I think a large increase in funding is warranted. And if we spend $100B and prove that fusion will likely never be viable, that's an important if expensive lesson too.Vanadium 50 said:If I may venture a prediction, I would say we're $100B away as an order of magnitude. That's a more useful view of the work it would take than a time with no associated level of resources.
The US puts $700M in per year. The rest of the world, a similar amount. You can do the math.
The world GDP is $100T/year. Just to compare.
The question of timing still remains though, even with ample funding. Research and engineering projects just take time, and time is not inversely proportional to funding. It's hard to see how the two projects could be sped-up to be complete in less than 30 years.
So it's important to recognize that fusion will not help us defeat climate change by the self-imposed 2050 deadline (realistically we have basically no chance of that anyway). Nor will it come in time to replace our aging fleet of fission plants. We'll still need new power plants in 2075 though, so it would be nice to have figured out fusion one way or the other by then.