De85 said:
That's not even the last hurdle either. ITER should be sufficiently large/powerful to achieve scientific break-even, but economic break-even will be even further down the line, probably not before most of us are retired... |
Once we achieve the former though, there will be massive commercial interest. I think there will be a rapid pace of development, because tens of companies will realise it is viable if only they manage to make it cheap, and they'll all want to have a monopoly on fusion, since it is green and renewable and reliable and scales well, so it would replace every other form of energy generation (which have at most three of the four).
Look how big the oil market is. What company wouldn't invest a few billion for the certainty (once it's shown to be viable by ITER) of 10% of that revenue?
