Replies

Not religion.

I find that the people who advocate for it are more persuasive than you are. they have more to lose than you do. They are better credentialed than you are. Their backers are better credentialed than you are. Their backers have greener eyeshades than you do. They have more to lose than you do.

I too thought that fusion power was 20 years in the future and always will be. I have been persuaded in the last two years that it’s the real deal. That we will see the first fruits before the end of this decade in terms of real power generation.

But there’s no need for you to feel alone. There are plenty of old guys on freerepublic—even veterans of the nuclear industry—who still hold fusion 20 years in the future and always will be. They’re retirees. They didn’t enter into the nuclear industry until the 1970s or just after the glory days of nuclear power development. So all of their experience is with a fairly static industry with only incremental changes.

what’s up now in fusion is something like what happened in the nuclear power industry from 1940-1970. We’re only in the first years of the first decade of that period.

Alvin Weinberg was right. The US made a terrible mistake when it shut down his thorium reactor in +-1973. The result has been that our generation never got to see the glory of the promises of nuclear power that were made in the 1950s-60’s. The glory was the tremendous price reduction.

That all died with Three Mile Island.

Fusion power does not have the same regulatory burden as fission. Nuclear Regulatory Commission puts it in the same category as hospital MRIs. As a result, regulation has shifted to the states. They are very accommodating to the budding nuclear power companies.

btw there are scientific endeavors that I’m deeply skeptical about.

The biggest one is string theory/quantum theory which has swallowed the careers of the best physicists and mathematicians for half a century and produced nothing of note.

the death of physics like the death nuclear power research started in the 1970’s.

My guess is that just as AI is resurrecting nuclear power research by accelerating the rate of applied fusion power research—AI will also resurrect and accelerate the rate of basic physics research. I would guess that Musk’s AI called grok which specializes in compute mathematics—will at some point gain the ability to self-improve.

That’s when the really big stuff happens. But that won’t be for another five years or more —Unless AGI shows up everywhere later this year—as some say it will.

Sam Altman has a paper he published in 2021 called Moore’s law of Everything. https://moores.samaltman.com/

He makes the case that physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists are driving the progress of AI. But at some point, the AI will learn to self-improve. So that it won’t be just computer chips that double in power and decrease in price every 18 months or so. It will be everything.

That’s the end game that frightens and excites everyone.

This is just my opinion as to the state of the play.