For decades, government scientists have toiled away trying to make nuclear fusion work. Will commercial companies sprint to the finish?
They have been ‘closing in’ for 60 years.
Most highly sought-after technologies ‘take time’, and develop in an iterative fashion called ‘successive approximation’.
Heckling from the sidelines is what is known as ‘being unhelpful’.
I am not ‘heckling from the sideline’ to the ppl working on it. I am just ‘heckling from the sideline’ the media for trying to generate clicks with such headlines.
It would have been achieved by now if it had more than just token amounts of funding.
You’re completely missing the point. Yeah, this stuff takes time, and it will continue to take time. The point is, this article saying we’re “closing in on it” is clickbait garbage that’s just as useful as the one a decade ago saying we are “closing in on it”, and a decade before that.
So you’re unimpressed with what’s been going on at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory? Where they’ve induced a fusion reaction for a net energy gain? And repeated with better results?
Were we achieving net energy gain a decade ago? The decade before that?
Is net energy gain the goal? If so, does repeatable demonstration of the phenomena mean that we are closing in on it, or does it mean that we are moving further away from it?
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Just 10 more years!
I have been hearing this since the mid-80s.
At least there are plans moving forward and practical tests being done.
To put it in a way I liked from someone else awhile ago, it’s like having the plans for a combustion engine, but not having the details on how large any of the various parts should be.
From the various articles I’ve seen, the research is definitely moving to a net positive energy direction, but there’s still plenty of research to do.
Oh great, another public-private partnership puff piece. What NPR is trying to do here is convey government as “inefficient” and pave the way for more public support to take away the meager amounts of funding that Fusion get’s and give them to contractors that will then give that money to share holders, essentially stealing it from the public.
To put it another way, imagine that this “company” that claims they are close to a fusion breakthrough were lead by Elon Musk, would you believe him?
