I mean that is how steps work, no?

This is how R&D projects work. It’s extremely difficult to estimate timelines. Someone might have said the same thing of, for instance, image recognition - we kept getting “one step closer” for years and years. You could look at Fei-Fei Li making ImageNet in 2006 and go, “she didn’t really solve anything - they keep saying we’re one step closer to image recognition but this is just some new dataset.” Of course that actually was a very significant step, it was crucial groundwork for AlexNet.

There is absolutely no way to know whether getting to 100M in a spherical tokamak is really significant. Maybe this design is a dead end that will never see actual use. Maybe you will have a tiny one in your tea kettle by 2050.

What’s clear, though is that the pace of fusion research is really much faster than it was. That should be exciting to everyone except oil barons.

If it was anywhere close to being commercially feasible, you'd first see it in oil/gas futures. Money will know long before you or I or any news outlets will know.

This doesn't sound right to me. How many years out do oil/gas futures project? Even if someone from the future arrived today with blueprints of a perfect fusion power plant design, it would take many years to build up enough fusion power plants to make a dent in the world's oil/gas consumption. You'd not only need to switch over power plants, but replace every car, truck, house, ship, smelter, xxxx to use electricity.

The poster is saying the stakes in oil/gas are high enough that someone IS already paying millions of dollars to have dedicated staff follow projects and give people a heads up if anyone seems actually close (or it seems remotely feasible) - and you'd see it reflected in various market moves, either by hedge funds or by the companies themselves in how they invest on projects.

Which is probably true.

I've heard from friends of some of the typical shenanigans played among state actors involving oil and gas, and that would be the least underhanded thing going on.

I understand what they are saying.

I am saying that the timeframe between a breakthrough in fusion, and it having a measurable effect on energy usage is so large that "money" will not reflect it with immediate and large moves in the market.

Then you don’t understand what they’re saying?

‘Breakthroughs’ like fusion typically does are useless. Something viable is not.

When something viable happens, you’ll see markets move, because market pricing is based on expectations of future performance, not current performance.

The comment I was responding to was specifically talking about oil and gas futures. Not general stock prices, or which projects are started.

My non-expert understanding is that Futures are a specific financial instrument with set expiry dates, and are about locking in prices for these commodities at a certain date. The vast majority of these would be expiring in under low digit years. I am arguing that the ramp up time for fusion to go from "feasible design" to "having a significant impact on the the amount of oil/gas consumed" is much longer than most futures expiry dates, and would therefore have little impact.

That said, I guess people can (and do) buy futures with expiry dates for more than 10 years out, presumably they just have to find a counter party. Is this a significant amount invested? Bringing me back around to my original (and honestly asked) question: How many years out do oil/gas futures project?

Ah, I see what you mean.

For me, I'd take 'viable' to mean something like a demonstration plant actually working somewhere, a team with the ability (somewhat proven) to reproduce it at scale, and after that exists the math pencils out it's profitable even on a risk adjusted basis.

At which point, it's a real thing that will happen, and prices will start to adjust based on the likely adoption curve (with various speculative values of the curve of course too).

Which yes, may or may not change future values for delivery depending on the timeline.

Just for example, I have seen strong market movements days before Ukraine war, clearly indicating that war will happen. Even some buying mar and April put in December. Money is where the news reach first.

I’m not sure that is true. GM isn’t a penny stock when it should be, and Neo or Xpeng should be bigger, and they are not.

Sometimes money wants to deny the future that is coming.

Clearly the market disagrees with you. I’ve never heard of neo or xpeng and GM has a long history of manufacturing vehicles to North American safety standards. Whatever neo or xpeng do is GM incapable of hiring some engineers (they might already have some) to copy it and then build it in their existing factories?

No, GM are incapable of doing it. For a whole bunch of reasons:

- ICE factories can't just be switched to be EV factories, so having an existing ICE factory is a burden not a benefit.

- They don't have capacity to build batteries

- Even if they did, they don't have the raw materials

- Even if they did, they don't have the raw materials processing capacity

- Even if they did start securing the capacity now i.e. Building Lithium mines, battery factories, EV car factories etc. By the time they come online... GM will have run out of money, because no one will be buying their cars anymore, but they'll still be paying for ICE factories/workforce/etc.

Xpeng and Neo are kind of Tesla clones, but they have home ground advantage in that they are Chinese based which is where the majority of the EV market is right now, it's also where all the battery supply is. You haven't heard of them, because they haven't entered the US market yet.

So GE is doomed because their strategy is to buy battery cells instead of manufacturing them themselves? There are a lot more parts in a vehicle than the cells.

There aren’t any cells to buy. And no, there is no way to make an EV without a battery.

GM don’t have a strategy, it’s clear they are just hoping for a miracle. Hence: Penny stock.

The market agrees with me (look at the growth rate of EV sales globally). The stock market disagrees with me… but it’s clearly irrational… again look at the growth rate of EVs.

Oil and gas are investing in fusion startups, so maybe it already does. Equinor and Eni have both invested in CFS, Chevron has invested in Zap, and Cenovus has invested in General Fusion.

The context here is that this is a private company who have hit an important milestone. They have managed to raise capital, hire people and build a plausible foundation for a viable reactor without billions in government subsidies and done it in a little over ten years. They are claiming grid-connected reactors will be online by 2030.

It is almost like these 'another winning step towards fusion' announcements arrive on a schedule meant to make sure that the funding isn't pulled.