I didn’t keep links when I read these things, so this is the result of a quick Google search for ‘fusion “years away” “dollars away”’:
The actual reason is mainly funding.
People always use the “twenty/thirty/fifty years away” comment as an insult, a way of showing how fusion (or science in general) is unreliable.
The reality is that when those predictions were first made in the 1970s in the wake of the Oil Crisis.
What happened during the Oil Crisis? We freaked out (rightly so) and planned to allocate a huge amount of money towards fusion research.
What happened after the Oil Crisis ended? That money disappeared.
Essentially, scientists were promised X billions of dollars to make fusion work, and said they could do it in a couple decades. Then that money was taken away, and people expected them to stay on schedule.
Of course, fusion power turned out to be a lot more complicated than we expected.
But the real reason is we simply aren’t paying for it.
Its not “30 years away” its more like $80 billion dollars away.
http://imgur.com/sjH5r
Note that these predictions didn’t start in the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s similar predictions were made with “20 years away” which is an even shorter timespan. See for example here.
Your link is to Life, as mainstream a publication as you could find in 1950s. We are all here first-hand familiar with how reporters simplify, misunderstand, and misreport technical matters.
As for your specific quote: I assume you’re referring to pg180, the Bhabha quote? The reporter says specifically “a controlled thermonuclear reactor” was <20 years away. He didn’t say economical power, power too cheap to meter, break-even or net power, or anything. Was this version of what Bhabha said actually wrong? By 1976, was there nowhere in the world a research tokamak or something which created thermonuclear reactions under controlled non-bomb conditions? I suspect there was.
Those are very good points. The first point isn’t that convincing by itself since there are other similar example statements from the 1950s and 60s (although I don’t have them available off-hand), and while we do frequenly criticize reporters for misreporting on science matters, most of their statements are not very far off from what is being described. Misreporting is while egregious, a small fraction of most science reporting.
Your second point seems more persuasive. By 1976, not only were there functioning tokamaks, but there were other fusion devices also such as fusors. So the prediction of controlled thermonuclear reactors in 20 years did come true, not just for tokamahs but for other fusion methods as well. This substantially reduces the validity of my point.
and while we do frequenly criticize reporters for misreporting on science matters, mos of their statements are not very far off from what is being described
I dunno, sometimes they are completely wrong. A few days ago I got the writer of http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/fbi-halted-one-child-porn-inquiry-because-tor-got-in-the-way/ to massively edit the middle of the article because the original source document explicitly said the child porn was not on Silk Road… and his article said the child porn was on Silk Road. Which is about as wrong as possible. And this is far from the first example of the media getting technological or scientific things completely wrong, which is why you need to read the comments or read the original papers if you’re going to base any beliefs on what you’re seeing.
It’s not hard to make the reported versions of stories or predictions be completely wrong, especially in the context of fusion where we were originally discussing the claims of fusion reporters that the credible published official estimate from the government report of 20-30 years were indeed real but had been made explicitly on the basis of enormous funding increases which never materialized, funding was cut substantially, and actual progress has been better than predicted by the low-funding scenarios. (I put a request in the research help page for a copy of the original report to see if the presented graph is accurate but it hasn’t come yet.) It’s very easy to slide from the apparently accurate version of the conditional prediction “We predict economical fusion in 30 years if we get the planned funding of $80 billion” to the version “they predict fusion in 30 years”.
I didn’t keep links when I read these things, so this is the result of a quick Google search for ‘fusion “years away” “dollars away”’:
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1bqxaq/scientists_develop_fusion_rocket_technology_in_lab/c99nvl8
I learned something. Excellent.
Note that these predictions didn’t start in the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s similar predictions were made with “20 years away” which is an even shorter timespan. See for example here.
Your link is to Life, as mainstream a publication as you could find in 1950s. We are all here first-hand familiar with how reporters simplify, misunderstand, and misreport technical matters.
As for your specific quote: I assume you’re referring to pg180, the Bhabha quote? The reporter says specifically “a controlled thermonuclear reactor” was <20 years away. He didn’t say economical power, power too cheap to meter, break-even or net power, or anything. Was this version of what Bhabha said actually wrong? By 1976, was there nowhere in the world a research tokamak or something which created thermonuclear reactions under controlled non-bomb conditions? I suspect there was.
Those are very good points. The first point isn’t that convincing by itself since there are other similar example statements from the 1950s and 60s (although I don’t have them available off-hand), and while we do frequenly criticize reporters for misreporting on science matters, most of their statements are not very far off from what is being described. Misreporting is while egregious, a small fraction of most science reporting.
Your second point seems more persuasive. By 1976, not only were there functioning tokamaks, but there were other fusion devices also such as fusors. So the prediction of controlled thermonuclear reactors in 20 years did come true, not just for tokamahs but for other fusion methods as well. This substantially reduces the validity of my point.
I dunno, sometimes they are completely wrong. A few days ago I got the writer of http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/06/fbi-halted-one-child-porn-inquiry-because-tor-got-in-the-way/ to massively edit the middle of the article because the original source document explicitly said the child porn was not on Silk Road… and his article said the child porn was on Silk Road. Which is about as wrong as possible. And this is far from the first example of the media getting technological or scientific things completely wrong, which is why you need to read the comments or read the original papers if you’re going to base any beliefs on what you’re seeing.
It’s not hard to make the reported versions of stories or predictions be completely wrong, especially in the context of fusion where we were originally discussing the claims of fusion reporters that the credible published official estimate from the government report of 20-30 years were indeed real but had been made explicitly on the basis of enormous funding increases which never materialized, funding was cut substantially, and actual progress has been better than predicted by the low-funding scenarios. (I put a request in the research help page for a copy of the original report to see if the presented graph is accurate but it hasn’t come yet.) It’s very easy to slide from the apparently accurate version of the conditional prediction “We predict economical fusion in 30 years if we get the planned funding of $80 billion” to the version “they predict fusion in 30 years”.