Sounds about right.

Has there ever been a technology that humankind has tried to master that has taken 100 years of engineering to pull off? The only things I can think of are the aborted attempts by Da Vinci on some of his ideas like the helicopter. I think it's safe to write off fusion as a peak oil mitigator at this point.

Darn it.

All these decades I've been sayin' it's at least 20 years away. Read that 20 year forecast somewhere in the early 70's and thought the '20 year' thing was a permanent part of the long range plan. Now it's a 100 year plan? Ok, I suppose I can stop talking about it then. 100 years sounds good to me.

Then it will never happen

for a hundred years from now the survivors will be living with 19th. Century technology at best.

Steam took a couple of thousand years between the early proto steam engines in Egypt and other civilisations that were little more than toys until James Watt produced the an engine with a seperate condenser and founded Boulton and Watt.
Electricity also took a very long time between the initial experiments and working electric motors.

+1

We're more likely to have warp drive in 100 years than fusion...

If fusion wont power up then we need to begin managing the power down.

Isn't "20 years" kind of the standard number thrown out when people are still doing the basic research on a technology? Perhpas it should be replaecd with "20+ years."

Realistically based on what I know of science and engineering, when and if the basic knowledge is gained on how to do fusion, it will take 20 years to design and construct the first sucessful fusion powerplant.

Like a lot of you have said over and over, the 20 year mantra has been repeated for 50 years and we are still 20 years away. Who knows, it might not be possible to use fusion as a powersource here on earth, maybe there is some constraint we have not recognized yet that will prevent it.

What's the bottom line on when we will have fusion power? Somewhere between 20 and infinity years.

TF

I still think fission breeder reactors are adequate. They are the only thing with greater EROEI than fossil fuels. I think managing powerdown with renewables alone is next to impossible. Perhaps the only way to displace fossil fuels without a dieoff (as well as cope with climate change) is through a huge nuclear scaleout, which is largely a political and cultural challenge, not so much technical.

I'm most hopeful about MIT's levitating magnetic dipole fusion technology, which is about 500 times simpler.

They seem to keep a low profile.

But the simplicity of the project lends itself to seat-of-the-pants experimentation versus the carved-in-stone planning that goes with more elaborate technology.

I don't think the ancient world was spending the equivalent of today's R&D budgets working around the clock to build steam engines and electric motors. The closest we've had to that sort of thing was the Manhattan Project, and that didn't take 100 years from theory to reality even if you roll the clock back to science fiction like Captain Nemo and the Nautilus.

I just think with fusion that we're attempting to do something in a small scale that just can't be sustained. Fusion requires the gravity of stars to keep the process going. it's a fundamentally flawed concept, perhaps just as unattainable as antigravity and warp drive.

Call me a "technocopian" but probably none of us knows if there isn't a Nicolai Tesla level genius/doer out there right now. That's the kinda wild cards the future probably holds- for both good and bad...

Many speak of fusion as if a breakthrough is just around the corner; this is tantamount to faith, not demonstrable exercise of reason; it's predicated on the assumption that the universe will deliver us the goods, ultimately because the Higher Being loves us and wants us to tame any power source we set our eye on. This is the sort of mindset John Michael Greer has done some exemplary analysis of, along with Doom-as-Modern-Day-Apocalypse, of course.

Agree with mos that fusion's been awfully long time coming, the complexity perhaps is just overwhelming here. As another example the Chinese were building bamboo NG pipelines 1000 years ago; our modern applications of NG simply requiring a bit of insight and a customer base. Others have pointed out that we've had ethanol for thousands of years, just waiting for the development of engines for it to power.

Perhaps someone's done a life-cycle/viability analysis of various techs.

Yes. In fact, that article I linked to includes this quote, "In Provence, the scientists working on Iter say they have faith that the project will deliver the most effective path to fusion."You must have seen all the optimistic stories; for decades, I kept reading it was 40 years away. Even when Iter was mooted, commercial use was 40 years away. That raised some warning flags for me. But now that some scientists are talking about 100 years, one can't help but think that $16 billion is a complete waste of money. And that's from someone who shared the dream for 30 years.I hear varied stories about fission. A common thread is that it's a money loser (which indicates to me that, overall, the EROEI is not that great). But fission is unsustainable, anyway. Powerdown can be managed with what we have now plus renewables going forward. Powerdown, however, seems to be more a state of mind than a technical problem. Some are determined never to accept what they see as reduced standards of living, so powerdown, for them, has to entail no lifestyle changes, just more efficient energy and resource use.