I really don’t understand the stock market but I understand cars and Teslas are just horribly built.

I would say its more due to general recession fears, inflation, and energy prices increasing so much that its becoming too costly to make electric car batteries. Also Tesla is correcting after the euphoria of the Covid boom.

For what is worth Musk has already made twitter profitable, it seems he is doing good work there.

This is realistically like no money

Compare these numbers to the annual costs for drilling / purchasing fossile fuels. And for the environmental damage they cause.

Unfortunately, the fusion research funding world-wide are just peanuts. The technology could be much closer to breakthrough if funding would have been better.

You were 0.1% away from being hot and steamy in your basement.

I'm pretty sure if we don't change our system drastically until it's viable, it's gonna be the same as with nuclear: Public funding for research, lots of government projects, private corporations then build power plants which are largely government funded, the energy gets heavily subsidized in the market and then people are told it's the cheapest form of energy and everyone talks about how the private sector is so much more efficient because the government would not have been able to turn a profit.

Fusion is many orders of magnitude more difficult.

New tech is never cheap. Fusion is only "cheap" in the sense that you almost get "something for nothing" at an intrinsic level. There are exactly zero cheap power plants and the renewables that also provide a "something for nothing" type of power are limited by expensive and finite materials. Hydrogen infrastructure and production is also quite difficult and expensive, but it has enough intrinsic benefits to make it a worthwhile struggle. Fusion will be similar.

Let's look back at the major tech in our lives and see which ones started out with insane physics, monstrously expensive machines, and incredible intrinsic value worth pursuing...

• Internal combustion engines
• Chemical reactors and refineries
• Telecommunications
• Powered aviation
• Computers
• Fission (finally reaching the demand for scaled down size)
• Fusion (finally reaching demand for a viable product)

Meh. If you've got enough cheap energy, you can make gasoline from scratch.

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It's probably not the kind of market where private companies thrives, the capital needed and the initial risks will probably be high enough that a few failures would bankrupt most companies. On top of that fusion generation is stable, reliable and predictable, unlike fossil fuel power plants there is not much speculation, so the profit margins will be pretty slim (especially since electric grid are often somewhat nationalized, or at least the government has a strong influence). Lastly ITER is a collaboration between countries, the agreement is that when ITER will archive its goal the results will be shared between the participants, no company will be able to archive a monopoly.

I was at cracker barrel on new years day one year and this group of old bitties complained to the server and manager (very seriously) that they didn't have black eyed peas. Ma'am, you are 246 years old. I doubt this was your first trip to cracker barrel and you knew they didn't have black eyed peas. It was so over the top

all the dots are connected..

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Fusion power isn't going to be cheap though, the physics involved are insane.

I can’t wait to see the total cost to fund the research only for a private company to snatch up the patents and monopolize the fusion market.

My thermodynamics professor made th3 same assertion. Liquid and solid fossil fuels are just too convenient and efficient for us to transport and store

Can confirm temperature has remained consistent day to day - the space is heated with the thermostat to maintain target temps to the same schedule. If more useful for comparison the dew point has been dropping and VPD increasing in line with the above which would indicate an actual decline in moisture.

If you mean in the US, no. I mean some think that, but the majority don’t think it’s tacky. They just don’t care or are the ones driving them lol

Yes, fusion will certainly change everything, but it's not going to solve our climate crisis. We need fusion power to address the problems created by climate change. Water desalination and pumping, geoengineering projects, carbon capture/sequestration projects...

I'm not convinced that we'll ever decarbonize as a species. But we will need fusion for cheap power for our bandaids and remediation attempts.

>This is a major scientific breakthrough that will lead to a new source of clean, carbon zero energy.

That's a pretty damn speculative argument passed off as fact. We are still nowhere close to an actual power plant. It's also wildly immaculate to imply the experiment in question produce more energy than it consumed because in reality it consumed 100x as much as it produced.

what even is this

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Data Source: "A Brief History of U.S. Funding of Fusion Energy", Rachel Margraf, March 27, 2021 (http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/)

U.S. Department of Energy - Fusion Energy Services Program Narrative, June 6, 2021 (https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/04%20FES%20Program%20Narrative%206_16_21.pdf)

Tool: Tableau

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Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that US scientists for the first time successfully produced more energy from a nuclear fusion experiment than the laser energy used to power it. This is a major scientific breakthrough that will lead to a new source of clean, carbon zero energy. This achievement is the result of decades of hard work from scientists all over the world and several billions of dollars. The U.S. government has been funding fusion energy programs since 1954, enacting hundreds of millions of dollars every year to reach a goal of net zero energy. This chart follows the year over year funding from the U.S. government to fusion energy programs, along with the contributions made to the international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject (ITER).

It has taken 68 years and $18.8 billion ($35.8 billion when adjusted for inflation) to reach this historic milestone that will be sure to change the world as we know it.