Can someone explain why this team is confident that they can build a commercially viable reactor in 3 years? Conventional wisdom is that nuclear fusion is "decades away". What does this team know that others don't?
(1) They have a solid lead we don't know about; or
(2) Saying you are 3 years away generates hype and interest that keeps netting you the funding to work on something as long term as decades away.
Even if they secretly think it is exactly one decade away, it is in their interest and the interest of the current investors to say it's only a few years away since they will depend on other investors to get piling in on this investment in 1-2 years time.
My advice to anyone working on inventing something truly new instead of putting a startup together from off the shelf parts: Never under-estimate the value of optimism in your time frames and communicating that optimism and timeframe often. Every truly big idea I can think of has depended on a similar optimism since it's the only way to actually net you the amount of money needed to accomplish something truly novel.
Even Kennedy did this when he talked about putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. It took 8 years, one month and 26 days from the date of his speech to accomplish something that was pretty far fetched in 1961. Only those willing to make bold claims are capable of taking such bold claims to fruition. That's how you raise the money you need and recruit the people you need to make that a reality. Moonshot startups require a moonshot attitude.
This is something I've struggled with - I am always the cautious type. This is good advice I think for many projects , even those that are not quite moonshots.
The type of Nuclear Fusion they are talking about is quite different than what ITER is working on. It's on a much smaller scale - around 50 MW, which is on the scale of a large diesel generator. The cost is also not that ground breaking - around $0.04/kWh, which is around where Natural Gas and Coal plants are.
And since this will be magnitudes cleaner than natural gas/coal, you might be able to get some "green" alternative energy subsidies from various governments, which might make it more cost effective.
Because it is so small that you could actually control most of the variables.
E.g they generate a magnetic field and they recover the energy from the same magnetic elements generating electricity instead of having to add a completely independent turbine generator with all the heat and radiation problems associated with it.
Even if they don't reach the goal, they could discover something useful.
