Every so often I’ll think about the U.S. defense budget (around $880bn this year), and wonder where we’d be with power technology if even one percent of that money every year had been invested in fusion research. That would fund an ITER-scale project every two to three years.
I can't say I'm optimistic that it would have led to any sort of fusion power, but it could have encouraged more people to go into physics knowing there was a well funded jobs program for it.
Also, it's possible we might have a spinoff technology to show for it all.
For example, the VASIMR thruster that has been going nowhere for two decades was a spinoff from MCF research.
Maybe we could also have a Z-pinch spinoff thruster and a pulsed laser thruster going nowhere for decades.
@isaackuo
yeah, we just don’t know what it would have led to—but it seems likely that another hundred billion or so in investment in the last couple decades probably would have got us something
(and this is just talking about the routine US defence budget, not the mind-bogglingly extravagant expenditure on the wars in Iraq etc.)
I think that fusion research physicists actually have a pretty realistic idea of what the money would likely result in, but they know this won't get them the funding.
So, if this money isn't wasted of fusion research, I expect it would be wasted on some other field which is 2nd best at making duplicitous promises. Maybe solar freakin roadways.
The challenge is to figure out how to design and maintain a system that can disincentivize the B.S.
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