Fusion: Really just around the corner?

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https://youtu.be/gI4rWcu9LIg

According to this lady, it's not going to happen in the foreseeable future, if ever:

The same lady returns. Though she made this after the recent news she still has a jaundiced view of it.

fusion

Bill Nye is selling science.
He is not serious about everything, but more or less trying to attract younger generation and inspire people to science as well as cover science for lay people.

The second lady is a physicist who actually does physics.

The problem with people is they think science is done quickly.

Most of the current science we see working for us today was made during a period of 70 or more years of hard core work.
There is a considerable delay in what scientist know and how it gets applied in real world.

Think of the fact Feynman was working on quantum physics decades earlier and till to this day we still only work in theoretical realm in quantum physics.

Some people who consume scientific news think science is slowing down because no major scientific break through like Einsteins theory of relativity happened.

The fact is quantum physics will have applications maybe 20 or 30 years from now.

Fusion is in making relatively few years.

Anything in this real will probably with help of almighty happen only in decades. Not now.

People who are representing science in media have taken a weird turn to marketing science like its some sort of weird adventure.

Science is slow and meticulous process, its boring and its absolutely blind, no one knows until they figure it out, and when they do its still long way to reality.

People should stop misrepresenting science as something super fun and cool.

Nerds and big brains will love science regardless.

But science is mostly passion not a freaking money mill.

Science does not pay.

All new discoveries are basically random luck and chance.

All new avenues in science are just random directions scientist take and they work at some point by sheer luck and grace of universe.

I got tired of science bull long time ago, because it looks so hot and new all of the stuff they write and then when you dive deeper you realize its just media game.

Science is slow burn boring and brain breaking mind numbing process that takes a toll on the brain and its only fun for few crazy people who can afford to do it, or they scrape by financially.

Most serious science is built on decades of work of 100s of scientists.

Einstein the poster child for science is good example. His main contribution was the ability to put together incoherent picture into a major theory that changed some major equations. He looked at the work of scientist and worked out the theory, but basically his contribution would have been no where if it weren't for 100s of physicist working their asses off before him slowly and painstakingly contributing one step at a time.

Yup, I'm always reminded of this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic about how science reporting works whenever I read a claim that something is 'just around the corner' or that scientists have allegedly 'made an amazing breakthrough'.

Look beyond the pop science articles and the headlines written for laypersons.

I picked that title because thats the running joke. That hydrogen fusion is always X number of years away.

It was 20 years away in 1950, it was 20 years away in 1990, and ...it will "always be 20 years away".

The point being that THIS time its supposedly different...that it really IS just 20 years away. Even if it were true...it still would be ...20 years away.

But apparently the experts say that the running joke still applies. That fusion is still a mirage down the highway.

"You only get out of life what you put in".

"There's no such thing as a free lunch".

"You can't get something for nothing".

We're all familiar with these sayings, and generally accept their validity. With the fusion thing, the experts tell us that these rules don't apply, and that the science backs them up. Well, so far, they've still got a lot to prove, it seems to me...

I seen this on the news.

More often than not, if the media airs it, it happens.

For some reason I think if the above debaters compare this new type of energy production to say when we discovered nuclear power and how long that took.

So, yeah, maybe 20 years..

My Sherlockian cross referencing is just on par with the (really smart) posts above.

^ The attempts to produce electricity from nuclear fusion are not all that new. They've been trying for at least 60-odd years. In the late 1950s the Zeta Project, based in Oxfordshire in the UK, was said to be on the verge of producing viable electricity, but it all came to nothing.

The next phase was the JET (Joint European Torus) project, which dates from the late 1970s and is also based in Oxfordshire.

The ITER project, based in France, is probably the best known of the more recent undertakings, though there are quite a few others these days. 'First Light', another Oxford-based British company, is attracting quite a bit of attention in the press right now. This apparently uses 'projectiles' rather than the traditional plasma and magnets formula, as far as I can see.

https://firstlightfusion.com/technology/our-approach

What Deephour said.

We figured out how to use nuclear FISSION to flatten whole cities in enemy countries by 1945. And it only took us like fifteen years to figure out how to harness fission for peaceful purposes like generating electricity for cities, and for powering submarines.

We figured out how to use nuclear FUSION to make bombs a 100 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb by 1949, and we still havent figured out how to harness fusion for peace even though (as with fission) we have been trying since the get-go in 1949.

Thanks.

This is essential history and I like to get it all condensed.

With the "20 years" thing, I assume that once all the science and engineering has been achieved and sorted out and all the papers are written and there are actual, real, fully stable and working fusion reactors running in research facilities all over the world, THEN it will be 20 years until they're being operated as part of the regular power grid.

Which means that even in the best scenario, actual fusion power of any useful sort is most likely a minimum of 50 years away, and possibly closer to 150. I certainly don't expect to see it in my lifetime. I'd be amazed if I live to see a long-term sustainable controlled fusion reaction - let's say for, oh, 60 days at a minimum of 0.5 megawatts, just to toss out some hard numbers.