In the seventies, I visited the National Bureau of Standards in Gaithersburg, Maryland. And while there, I saw my first Tokamak reactor. It was a small device – about the size of a large room. But I saw a real world example of the fantasies that I had read about for several years. So I started to get really excited.
That excitement waned. Over the decades since then, the sci-fi fantasies continued to be fueled while the real science seemed to be flagging. And the “cold fusion” idiocy didn’t help things much.
But there have been waves of breakthroughs. Each new experimental wave brought about another wave of anticipation. Today, plasma has been contained for multiple seconds. In fact, we can easily see the time when we can indefinitely sustain a usable plasma. Of course,the real trick is to get more power out of the reaction than we put into the process.
At 10:30 in the above video, Joe Scott lets us know that there is a real difference between fusion reactor claims of the past and the progress that is anticipated in the relatively near future. His conclusion is that the addition of private industry will propel fusion reactors from the university to the power plant. Given what Elon Musk and SpaceX have done to spur interplanetary expeditions, I tend to agree with Joe. And if we can just increase the competitive pressure further, we may see sustainable fusion power in our lifetimes.