Should funds be spent on fusion development instead of CERN/LHC?

[JTM³]

I've been pondering, are projects like CERN/LHC wastes of money that would be better spent, IMO, on developing new/alternative energy sources?

 

I'm thinking mainly of fusion.

 

If we funneled all the money we now spend on particle accelerators like LHC and whatnot and focused those funds like a laser beam on developing fusion, couldn't we achieve progress faster?

 

I'm not saying those experiments should never be done, and I as well as anyone am waiting for LHC to be turned on (hoping it doesn't blow us up lol ), but given the current energy crisis (and don't get me started, that would be a whole other thread and probably be in that new political forum), wouldn't the money for these projects be better spent on developing fusion?

 

Thanks

 

JT

[Klaynos]

ITER was argued about for about 10 years. Which was a combination of who will pay and where it'll be.

 

You could argue taht ploughing more money into fusion development would solve all our problems but there's one big problem there... there just isn't the fusion physicists to do it. You'd very quickly get to a point where you've noone to carry out the research you're paying for because they're all already working on other projects.

 

So I'm going to go with, no.

 

I heard a story the other day (unsourced I'm afraid but hopefully someone will be able to help) that the US was building an accelerator about 10 years ago that would have been larger than the LHC, but after about $2billion had been spent on it congress decided that funding should cease, so they just filled in the holes and left it!

[Gilded]

As Klaynos said just spending more and more money on fusion isn't really feasible. Besides, I think that it's great that such grand fusion research projects such as the National Ignition Facility and Laser Mégajoule are actually underway.

[timo]

I see this as a question of fundamental research vs. applications considering that there's nothing really LHC or fusion research specific in the question ("no immediate application to be seen" and "could be damn helpful if we had the application" are generic arguments). In the short run, investing in applications always look better - especially to politicians . On the other hand, you'd not even think about applications if the fundamentals for them hadn't been laid out some time ago.

No real opinion on the topic, except that fusion never really conviced me of being a good idea.

 

I heard a story the other day (unsourced I'm afraid but hopefully someone will be able to help) that the US was building an accelerator about 10 years ago that would have been larger than the LHC, but after about $2billion had been spent on it congress decided that funding should cease, so they just filled in the holes and left it!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_Super_Collider

Edited August 5, 2008 by timo