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China’s ‘artificial sun’ breaks nuclear fusion limit thought to be impossible
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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If China's economic ascendancy happened 50 years sooner we would probably already have it. Democracies are allergic to massive capital investments that take decades to pay off.
Obviously the graph is very out of date, US funding is around 600 million 2012 dollars annually and China's is double that.
A graph is not proof of fusion energy. Yelling at clouds would probably generate more net energy than all fusion research has to date.
It's a dead end. It will never ever work. A combination of civilizational die-back and concomitant reduced energy use and a hodge-podge of renewable sources is the likely future for humanity.
And that's my optimistic take.
My more realistic take is that we are running out of cheap easy energy. The kind of monstrously massive contraption filled with high-tech exotic materials that is a fusion reactor is exactly the kind of thing we will NOT be able to build anymore in the future.
It's the same impasse that kills all the space fantasies (like people who think Avatar is just around the corner). If we HAD the resources to build fusion reactors or mine asteroids, we don't HAVE a resource problem!
And if we have such a resource crunch that we think fusion/space is the only solution, we don't have the resources to do it.
The future is horses, not Star Trek.
Get used to it.
Oh shit somebody who can accurately be called a doomer. This feels like the time I ran into an actual naz-bol in the wild. I thought they were more of a rhetorical device than actually real.
'it hasn't happened yet so it must be impossible' L take.
The graph is showing DOE experts in the 70s' best guess at when we could have had a successful reactor project with various levels of funding. You'll notice the line for 'actual funding' is roughly half of the estimate for 'functionally never' levels of funding.
The 'fusion is always 30 years away' stupidity ignores the fact that fusion is only 30 years away, if you actually spend the damn money to invest in it which we largely haven't.