I'm impatient too, but perspective is important here. Even the leading private efforts don't have plans to put power on the grid for at least 10 years. Also, before this report, there wasn't an official plan of any sort for the US federal fusion program to get to a pilot plant -- so this is progress. (FWIW, I participated in the early community input stages of this report.)
>For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.
Musk has a good nose for what's possible to commercialize in a medium-term (5-10 year) time horizon on a few $bn budget. I have reason to believe he's considered fusion (he has a background in physics after all). Instead, he's made a play in batteries & solar.
Now, if someone had ~$1-5bn to gamble, it might be possible to leapfrog the existing crop of private efforts by ~5 years. Just pick one concept and build the engineering-breakeven experiment (gain ~ 20) without the intermediate scientific-breakeven experiment (gain ~ 1). It would be significantly riskier, but it would save time if it worked.
I'm impatient too, but perspective is important here. Even the leading private efforts don't have plans to put power on the grid for at least 10 years. Also, before this report, there wasn't an official plan of any sort for the US federal fusion program to get to a pilot plant -- so this is progress. (FWIW, I participated in the early community input stages of this report.)
>For all Musk's faults, he recognizes such timelines are untenable, and pushes people to do the 'impossible'.
Musk has a good nose for what's possible to commercialize in a medium-term (5-10 year) time horizon on a few $bn budget. I have reason to believe he's considered fusion (he has a background in physics after all). Instead, he's made a play in batteries & solar.
Now, if someone had ~$1-5bn to gamble, it might be possible to leapfrog the existing crop of private efforts by ~5 years. Just pick one concept and build the engineering-breakeven experiment (gain ~ 20) without the intermediate scientific-breakeven experiment (gain ~ 1). It would be significantly riskier, but it would save time if it worked.