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The more things change...

As a young bloke with a burning passion for science and technology, there was a time when I would be excited by the promise of breakthroughs that would change our lives.

The most oft-published claim a few decades ago was that practical fusion reactors were just a decade or so away from being a reality.

Imagine that, virtually unlimited power with none of the nasty waste products that fission reactors produce. Back in the 1970s, I couldn't wait.

When the '80s came, the story was the same -- practical fusion reactors were still only a decade away.

My enthusiasm remained, I was still eager to enjoy the benefits and soaked up each and every prediction of a radiation-free nuclear future with glee.

It probably wasn't until the late 1990s that I realised we were being fed a line and that there was no fusion-based future close at hand.

Even in the early 21st century, the reality is that sustainable, over-unity fusion reaction is just a pipe dream.

There was a very brief period when even some of the world's most educated minds thought that we may have stumbled onto something with "cold fusion" -- but that turned out to be just as elusive as the hot-fusion scientists had been promising but failing to deliver for decades previously.

So I was not at all surprised to read this Popular Science story on the wires today.

Claims that "Lockheed hopes to have a test model available by 2017, and scale up to regular production by 2022" are to be taken lightly and I strongly suspect that this is more a homage to the long history of incredibly optimistic fusion predictions, rather than a true promise of things to come within the next decade.

However, we are already using incredible amounts of fusion-based power. In fact, virtually all the energy we use (aside from fission-based sources) is ultimately fusion-based.

We have a perfectly good fusion reactor sitting less than 150 million KM down the road, at the centre of our solar system.

This reactor has been spewing out masses of energy for an awfully long time and seems set to carry on until long after you and I have disappeared from the face of the planet.

It is far enough away that its occasional hiccups (CMEs etc) don't pose too much danger to us but it's close enough to deliver all the energy we need, in the form of light and heat.

While the prospect of having our own mini-suns in the basement or harnessing this process to build huge power stations might be appealing in many respects -- why buy the cow when you can get its milk for free?

Imagine if all the money that has been spent trying to build our own fusion reactors had instead been spent on developing the technologies required to harness renewable energy...

Ah... but I forgot. The other "in ten years" headline that keeps resurfacing is the "cheap, efficient solar cell" one. For decades we've been promised that solar cells would soon be cheap as beans. Some have even promised that we'd be able to paint them onto the roofs of existing buildings. Just like fusion -- it's never happened and solar cells remain rather expensive, even despite reasonable price drops due to economies of scale in recent times.

Why is anything to do with fusion (be it creating it or harvesting its energy) given to so many false predictions of breakthroughs and success? Is it just eternal optimism or do the people working on this stuff really have no clues?

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