by DrEvil » Mon Oct 14, 2019 6:20 pm
We're almost four years on from the OP, and LENR is still just a pipe-dream and Rossi is still a fraud, and I think that last bit is why so many people are skeptical: there has been a whole raft of various people claiming to have solved it over the years, but they always just disappear off into obscurity after they fail to produce excess energy, refuse to let others vet their setup, get caught in outright fraud or any number of other stupid reasons. And they still can't explain exactly how it's supposed to work.
On the other hand there's slow but steady progress on "proper" fusion, which is well understood (and doesn't break physics) and just a really hard engineering problem. I know which one I'll put my money on.
Also, regardless what you think of ITER itself, it warms the heart to see practically the entire world get together to solve a hard problem over a time frame of decades. Started in 1985, expected full start of reactor in 1935. The follow up DEMO reactor is supposed to start delivering electricity in 2048. Even without slippage there will be scientists who spent their entire lives on this project and died before it was completed.
All that said, Peter Watts has an excellent analogy for our current understanding of science and potential ways to advance it:
Our current understanding is a mountaintop, and standing on it we can see far and know a lot of things. Waaaaay off in the distance we think there might be another peak, even higher than the one we're on, but to get there we first have to climb back down from our current peak and trek across the landscape and climb the other one, and we won't know if the other peak is higher and has a better view until we get there and look for ourselves.
"I only read American. I want my fantasy pure." - Dave