Isn’t there some meme about fusion always being right around the corner, but never materializing? Of course, I think it may be reasonable to expect fusion some time this century, but a “within 5 years” headline seems really bullish.
I think a few things that are different this time are that
It’s a company, not just a research group.
The timeline is actually 2 years. They could be lying or over optimistic, but assuming they aren’t lying, they probably have a somewhat concrete path to net electricity in mind, or at least have good reason to believe they’re very close. They haven’t given themselves a lot of time for further R&D. Previous projections probably naively extrapolated 10+ years out.
I remember hearing in 2018 about orders of millions of potentially autonomous cars by some companies (Intel?) intended for autonomous use in 2021, and we’re not even close to that now. Fusion in the near term on some scale seems plausible, but the fact that a company is claiming a very close timeline isn’t very indicative of the actual timeline, I think.
Isn’t there some meme about fusion always being right around the corner, but never materializing? Of course, I think it may be reasonable to expect fusion some time this century, but a “within 5 years” headline seems really bullish.
I think a few things that are different this time are that
It’s a company, not just a research group.
The timeline is actually 2 years. They could be lying or over optimistic, but assuming they aren’t lying, they probably have a somewhat concrete path to net electricity in mind, or at least have good reason to believe they’re very close. They haven’t given themselves a lot of time for further R&D. Previous projections probably naively extrapolated 10+ years out.
I remember hearing in 2018 about orders of millions of potentially autonomous cars by some companies (Intel?) intended for autonomous use in 2021, and we’re not even close to that now. Fusion in the near term on some scale seems plausible, but the fact that a company is claiming a very close timeline isn’t very indicative of the actual timeline, I think.