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In the early 1970s, nuclear experts were convinced we would likely have commercial fusion reactors by 2000, and most definitely by 2020. Fusion energy research took off in the 1950s, and the path towards it was already well-understood by 1970.
This is disappointing in the sense that, unlike for AI research, which is dominated by unknown unknowns, fusion energy is a problem where an Apollo-scale project (2-3% of US GDP yearly for a decade) could have made meaningful progress -- perhaps even cracked it.
I am sorry to disagree. Fusion is not only an engineering problem. Fusion was not understood in the 50s. H-Mode, which is high confinement was discovered in the 80s. At the same time a bunch of instabilities was discovered. There are theoretical and experimental issues as well.
But I am curious to understand why you believe that it is only an engineering problem? Probably the public relation politics of ITER, NIF and the startups which claim can do it in 5 years.
I'm just a bystander looking in, but isn't the problem of commercially viable fusion, materials science aside, mostly computational?
Yup, process control.
Agreed with @destop. There are a lot of unknown unknowns that come up when pushing the models to new physical regimes. The types of problems are very different than general AI, but progress hasn't really been effort limited. It's just harder than expected at each step.
An Apollo-scale project would clearly help - even now - because one could looks into different approaches in parallel. The 1970s were a pretty exciting time, people from different countries came together, designing & building large international devices like JET....
... but we were far from really understanding what is going on. The design of ITER for example was back then partly based on scaling laws without really understanding all the physics. Fusion was actually in a crisis in the 1980s until the H-mode was discovered, strongly....
... improving the confinement of the hot plasma due to a still not fully understood self-organizing process. Yes, an apollo-like project would have helped, because all the major research institute across the world turned to the tokamak concept, some were in addition looking....
....into the stellarator. But only since a few years some of the more exotic, smaller and cheaper concepts are "revived" by privately funded companies. Although they are strongly behind in terms of fusion performance (the so-called triple product) but the whole community....
.... can only benefit from their results. The only problem is that some of those companies are making very "brave" estimations and predictions (extrapolations) about the performance of their concept (but I guess some of them have to convince investors). Those extrapolations ....
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