> Given the climate crisis, the government should be doing the same as they did with the CRS for space, award DOE contracts of $X billion for a working reactor, dole it out to people doing SPARC or Thorium Molten Salt (LIFTR) designs.
> The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow, we need to build and fail a lot more rather than sink $22 billion into multi-decade projects like ITER.
We don't need fusion for climate change; fission will do, and we have working reactor designs already. I don't mean that we shouldn't spend some money on fusion research, just that it isn't reasonable to spend 100% GDP on it (or some significant fraction thereof).
Fusion is a noble goal, and its success is compulsory if humans want to stay on their current track for more than another few hundred years. However, even with a Manhattan Project for Fusion, reactors won’t come soon enough to “save” the human habitat. We need to implement solutions right now today. It’s already too late. Waiting another 50 years to do anything guarantees humans technological empire will not make it to 2200.
Do you think the politics of fusion would be any better? The politics opposing fission aren't grounded in science; do you think the politics around fusion would be?
Yeah the politics would definitely be better because it's deuterium/tritium for fusion as opposed to uranium, which has a lot a cultural and historical baggage and it's on the news in a bad way all the time. So yes it would be better.
Now would it be better enough to get out of the same political/cultural hole that fission is in?
I don't know, but it at least has a better chance.
Also not having to source and mine uranium is actually a huge advantage. We have more lithium then ever, and deuterium can be extracted literally any large body of water.
> The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow, we need to build and fail a lot more rather than sink $22 billion into multi-decade projects like ITER.
We don't need fusion for climate change; fission will do, and we have working reactor designs already. I don't mean that we shouldn't spend some money on fusion research, just that it isn't reasonable to spend 100% GDP on it (or some significant fraction thereof).