Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[asymmetric_implosion]

I thought it was pretty fair. Fusion has been “our future” for over 50 years and it hasn’t delivered. That doesn’t mean it won’t someday. There are certainly political issues around ITER and NIF. One would expect that given the scale of the projects. My opinion is ITER has more political problems than NIF because of the number of countries involved. Scientists certainly participate in it (more by force than by choice in most cases), but the few fusion guys I know well are serious scientists that recognize the massive technical challenges before them. They are have no intent on wasting money or misleading anyone. They want to figure out if their solution works or not. My opinion is that ITER will not be built to full scale if at all while NIF enjoys funding for years to come.