| HN Mirror

> I find projections of viable sustained fusion nonsense given 62 years of failure to achieve it. Every last single other energy source tapped by humans, sustained nuclear fission included, had previous exemplars occurring on Earth, and was adapted by humans either before history, or (in the case of fission) within a matter of single-digit years of initial attempts.

We have a precious example occurring not on Earth, and within a few decades had figured out how to make large pulses out of it.

Your summary also does a great disservice to the history of using assorted biochemicals as fuel, from various plant and animal oils through initial study in refinements and use of various technologies to aid in their burning.

You can hardly claim, as your statement implied, that we had full mastery of burning hydrocarbons the first time we tried - or that it was anything like when we tried to scale that technology up.

Given 62 years, we have systems with controlled fusion and systems without energy reclaim that are energy positive. A lot of the lack of progress is due to the relatively low level of funding. (The entire cost of fusion research so far is about the same as one stealth bomber.)

I find it unlikely that over doubling the time, with better technology, won't let us solve the capture problem, especially since the facilities of many studies are actually using old technology which we already know how to do better than. (Example: the ignition laser could be purchased in reduced size and with more efficiency for much less than it cost to initially build the laser.)

Your argument seems to largely be "It's complicated to me compared to what I know about these other methods, so can't happen!"

> Technology is a function of available energy (Tainter, White, Prigogine), not vice versa.

This is super unrelated to what we're talking about, because not even you are arguing that we're going to run out of the ability to produce electricity in <100 years.