Sarcasm aside, I really can't badmouth the effort, if only because I avail myself of the wonderful winter lecture series at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the "Science on Saturday" series.
The ITER in France, an international cooperative effort, is supposed to fire up relatively soon. It is not designed as a power reactor, but it designed to produce more energy than the maintenance of the fusion plasmas require, a chimeric hope of the last twenty years.
Fusion systems involve fascinating science, and as I review the faculties of major US Nuclear Engineering Schools to help steer my son, I note that every major department has fusion people in them.
The Science on Saturday series usually has two or three lectures out of ten or so, involving plasma physics and the development of fusion energy systems. I've been attending these lectures for more than ten years. While stabilizing plasma with a net energy gain is the goal of the ITER, there's a long way between that and a power reactor. It does seem to me that they have serious materials science issues, although clearly advances have been made. My feeling is that the issue of heat exchange is not one that has even been approached. I could be wrong about that, but that's my general impression.
The fusion rhetoric always presents itself as being superior to fission, calling up the usual bugaboos, the so called "waste" issue, and the "safety issue" and the "non-proliferation" issue. I had a rather absurd conversation with one of their material scientists after a talk where he acted like they couldn't use zirconium based thermal barrier coatings "YSZ," because of zirconium-93, because, um, radioactivity.
One thing is very, very, very, very clear. Fusion energy will not be available on any scale worthy of addressing climate change within half a century, if then. It's too little too late. It's not even remotely clear what the economics of these reactors might be or what their lifetimes might be, given that the neutrons are more than an order of magnitude more energetic than fission neutrons.
By contrast, fission works, and has been saving human lives for more than half a century. There is no better form of energy now than fission. We can all speculate about fusion, and will speculate about it. Plasma physics has many valuable aspects that have technological applications, some of which are already in use and many others worthy of development. In fact, I often consider plasma related issues in considering certain types of fission reactor heat exchange systems.
Overall, I support fusion research, but I'm skeptical that it will be as readily available or as sustainable as fission energy or as affordable.
The consequences of climate change are here now. They are not ten years from now, twenty years from now, 50 years from now, they are now.
Fusion is cute, but fission is the last best hope of the human race, seriously.
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