Alex Tabarrok recently posted on Marginal Revolution about properties necessary to the success of “Operation Warp Speed,” which was an effort by the US federal government to roll out mRNA vaccines in response to COVID.

His thesis boils down to 4 points:

what do we need for another [Operation Warp Speed]? 1) Known science—scaling not discovering, 2) Lifting of regulations 3) Big externalities, 4) Pre-existing motivation.

This got me thinking about potential gains we can accelerate with federal funds. Solving the climate problem is always on my mind, and we’re not going to do that without a substantial refactor of our electricity generation system.

The Biden administration recently announced a fund devoted to fusion research which, if successful, could solidify America’s energy independence and open the door to other applications currently constrained by energy availability like desalination and carbon capture. The question is: will this work?

The first thing we can do is evaluate the project on Tabarrok’s criteria. Fusion clearly knocks the last three points out of the park:

  • Nuclear power generation is extremely regulated in the US which turns most experimental research into a bureaucratic headache severe enough to compel work to move elsewhere. We need big changes if we want to make a breakthrough on US soil
  • The external benefits are huge and obvious: practically infinite, (theoretically) low-cost, clean energy
  • We’ve been energy constrained since the industrial revolution (and arguably before that), and the political benefit of energy independence is more relevant than ever

Unfortunately the first point is a miss: fusion energy is definitely more than a scaling problem. We’ll need to address the technical problems associated with stability before we can expect to reach industrial scale. Nonetheless, I’m optimistic we can do it. Here’s (part of the reason) why.

Let’s look at some other historical successes in federal acceleration of groundbreaking projects:

  • moon landing
  • atomic bombs
  • the internet

Most people will be familiar with the government’s role in the former two examples, but some may not know the story of the internet so well. The full story is described phenomenally in M. Mitchell Waldrop’s The Dream Machine, and the tl;dr is that networking projects were funded by ARPA (through the pentagon) under the direction of creative geniuses like JCR Licklider and Bob Taylor (Bob Taylor went on to run the legendary Xerox PARC), which amounted to the creation of the ARPAnet and ultimately the internet.

The point here is that all three of these projects were successful despite the obstacle of discovery: new science had to be created to make them work. Accordingly, like fusion, these projects would have missed the first point in Tabarrok’s criteria.

So why did they work? I’m still not convinced I understand my thoughts on this well enough to formulate a thesis, but a common thread is that all of these projects had an element of international competition associated with them. The case of the internet is perhaps the most subtle—though threats from the Vietnam and Cold wars indisputably influenced America’s decision to fund the initiative as superior communication and computation tech is a huge advantage in wartime. Of course the moon landing precipitated from the Soviet/US space race and atomic weapon primacy secures the deterrent effects they’re designed to have.

The Biden administration is in a great position to frame fusion research as a matter of international competition since:

  1. The war in Ukraine (and corresponding threat to the world’s natural gas supply chain) validates the importance of energy independence from Russia
  2. China, Russia, and Japan have all recently initiated their own hunts for sustainable fusion

Other thoughts

It’s usually a poor bet that funds alone can produce scientific breakthroughs. Fortunately, research into magnets has been promising and simulations show that near-term reactors have the potential to be energy producing on the net. At this point, a sustained net-positive reaction would be a Wright Brothers moment that proves the concept of fusion energy. Even though we’d still have a lot of work to do making fusion reactors commercially viable (by increasing safety and operating lifetime), we’d have a lot of tailwind once we get the energy going positive.