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The Chinese seem to be taking strides in the development of a possible working system

I've been miserable about fusion for at least a decade.

If they spent a small proportion of the money invested in fusion research into tried-and-tested wind/solar/storage then we'd be there by now.

I saw something saying the US was spending $400 million a year on fusion research. That is a lot of solar/wind they could be installing instead!

You meant "squandering" 400 million, a slip of the typewriter tongue I think Stinsy.

Stinsy wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 2:03 pmIf they spent a small proportion of the money invested in fusion research into tried-and-tested wind/solar/storage then we'd be there by now.
I saw something saying the US was spending $400 million a year on fusion research. That is a lot of solar/wind they could be installing instead!

Sounds way too high. JET (a much bigger machine than anything the US has) is approx £50 million/year. If you include NIF you might get there, but that's explicitly about supporting their nuclear weapons stockpile with a few side-projects on fusion energy. By comparison the three Dogger Bank wind farms (first ones I checked) are £9 billion - about half the build cost of ITER, which is a joint venture between just about every advanced country out there. In the grand scheme of things fusion funding is naff all.

We cannot avoid trying to develop this process. It may be the saving of the planet for the next few centuries, even millennia.

I fear there is insufficient cooperation between different parties. Understandable from a commercial viewpoint, I suppose, but this is a huge challenge and should be at the top of humanities priorities.

Renewables are great. It would be good if it was a universal cure for energy use by humans. I don’t follow fusion progress closely, but we must be closer to the solution - if it is possible - even if it is still “30 years in the future”.

Fusion has been a decade away for at least the last 3 decades.