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.@Conservatives have ‘announced plans to design, develop and build…a commercially viable fusion power plant by 2040.’ For, er, <checks notes> £200 million! Funding for fusion is good news, but this is so ridiculous as to be a simple lie. press.conservatives.com/post/188017980…
@Conservatives This is particularly absurd because Brexit is going to cripple our fusion research capabilities. When we notified Article 50, we additionally notified that we’d be leaving Euratom, which behind most of the UK’s fusion research: instituteforgovernment.org.uk/explainers/eur…
@Conservatives There was no good reason for this except possibly Theresa May’s negotiation-crippling ‘red lines’, and as far as I know we still haven’t been told what this will mean for UK participation in fusion research.
@Conservatives It looks like the Government pledged to continue paying…until the end of 2020. Hahaha. But here’s £200m guys, or three years’ running costs. Could you just sort fusion out for us? Ta. gov.uk/government/new…
@Conservatives Estimates of the cost of developing fusion are typically in the tens of billions. I usually use £50bn as the ballpark. £200m, even as an ‘initial investment’ is just laughably insufficient for this stated goal. scienceogram.org/in-depth/energ…
@Conservatives It’s possible that some more out-there ideas could get fusion working for a lot less investment—and the STEP ‘spherical tokamak’ they’ve pledged this cash for is one of those—but £200m (£3 per person in the UK, vs a > £2000 per person annual energy spend) is still peanuts
@Conservatives I mean developing a commercially viable fusion power plant is probably easier than ‘getting Brexit done’… But, as ever, the Government has under-promised the difficulty and over-sold the benefits.
