Well, I think you're underestimating oil and gas, but that's another argument.
Nobody's denying fusion is a great energy source.
But your claim that there is a payoff for low risk is unsupported by reality: we have only ever invested money in fusion (risk) and have never received any useful power for it (payoff). At this time, the risk/payoff ratio is infinite.
> we have only ever invested money in fusion (risk) and have never received any useful power for it (payoff)
Now you're just being silly. You can say this about ANY research project. Better scrap the Manhattan Project before it finishes, we haven't seen any results. You're saying it's impossible to build a fusion power plant because we don't have one now?
Nevermind the fact that magnetic fusion research has been grossly underfunded for over 30 years.
By the time the Manhattan Project started, we had already made signficant progress. Such as Fermi's pile. We knew how to seperate uranium. The math was all there; it was mostly a matter of decision-making and execution.
I never said anything was impossible. But fusion is still solidly an unknown unknown: we have no credible path at this time to even plan a workable test reactor. I'm saying, for the amount invested, the results achieved, and the potential payoff, our money is best spent elsewhere are more boring and conventional things.
That's just not true, and skirts the line of the being a deliberate lie. Fusion has occured in tokamaks, at an efficiency of 65%. ITER, as currently designed and being built, is expected to make a 10-fold return on energy input.
We are precisely at the position of "the math is all there" with regard to magnetic confinement. And so is the engineering and the funding (barely). It's going to happen, hopefully not before it's too late.
I should mention that in the past, I worked on the software backing research tokamaks.
ITER is a research project. It is not designed to produce electricity. It was originally projected to cost over 5 billion pounds to build and has now tripled, but is years from completion. Even if it was successful beyond its wildest dreams, the best result would be that we'd have to spend another $50B to build a plant, and since that one would be the first and only, we wouldn't get much power from it.
BTW, ITER isn't even scheduled to be turned on to produce research results at scale until 2027. That's another 14 years before they even do something interesting!?
Nobody's denying fusion is a great energy source.
But your claim that there is a payoff for low risk is unsupported by reality: we have only ever invested money in fusion (risk) and have never received any useful power for it (payoff). At this time, the risk/payoff ratio is infinite.