Data Source: "A Brief History of U.S. Funding of Fusion Energy", Rachel Margraf, March 27, 2021 (http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/)

U.S. Department of Energy - Fusion Energy Services Program Narrative, June 6, 2021 (https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-06/04%20FES%20Program%20Narrative%206_16_21.pdf)

Tool: Tableau

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Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Energy announced that US scientists for the first time successfully produced more energy from a nuclear fusion experiment than the laser energy used to power it. This is a major scientific breakthrough that will lead to a new source of clean, carbon zero energy. This achievement is the result of decades of hard work from scientists all over the world and several billions of dollars. The U.S. government has been funding fusion energy programs since 1954, enacting hundreds of millions of dollars every year to reach a goal of net zero energy. This chart follows the year over year funding from the U.S. government to fusion energy programs, along with the contributions made to the international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject (ITER).

It has taken 68 years and $18.8 billion ($35.8 billion when adjusted for inflation) to reach this historic milestone that will be sure to change the world as we know it.

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>This is a major scientific breakthrough that will lead to a new source of clean, carbon zero energy.

That's a pretty damn speculative argument passed off as fact. We are still nowhere close to an actual power plant. It's also wildly immaculate to imply the experiment in question produce more energy than it consumed because in reality it consumed 100x as much as it produced.

Yes, fusion will certainly change everything, but it's not going to solve our climate crisis. We need fusion power to address the problems created by climate change. Water desalination and pumping, geoengineering projects, carbon capture/sequestration projects...

I'm not convinced that we'll ever decarbonize as a species. But we will need fusion for cheap power for our bandaids and remediation attempts.

My thermodynamics professor made th3 same assertion. Liquid and solid fossil fuels are just too convenient and efficient for us to transport and store

I can’t wait to see the total cost to fund the research only for a private company to snatch up the patents and monopolize the fusion market.

Fusion power isn't going to be cheap though, the physics involved are insane.

It's probably not the kind of market where private companies thrives, the capital needed and the initial risks will probably be high enough that a few failures would bankrupt most companies. On top of that fusion generation is stable, reliable and predictable, unlike fossil fuel power plants there is not much speculation, so the profit margins will be pretty slim (especially since electric grid are often somewhat nationalized, or at least the government has a strong influence). Lastly ITER is a collaboration between countries, the agreement is that when ITER will archive its goal the results will be shared between the participants, no company will be able to archive a monopoly.

Meh. If you've got enough cheap energy, you can make gasoline from scratch.

New tech is never cheap. Fusion is only "cheap" in the sense that you almost get "something for nothing" at an intrinsic level. There are exactly zero cheap power plants and the renewables that also provide a "something for nothing" type of power are limited by expensive and finite materials. Hydrogen infrastructure and production is also quite difficult and expensive, but it has enough intrinsic benefits to make it a worthwhile struggle. Fusion will be similar.

Let's look back at the major tech in our lives and see which ones started out with insane physics, monstrously expensive machines, and incredible intrinsic value worth pursuing...

• Internal combustion engines
• Chemical reactors and refineries
• Telecommunications
• Powered aviation
• Computers
• Fission (finally reaching the demand for scaled down size)
• Fusion (finally reaching demand for a viable product)

Fusion is many orders of magnitude more difficult.

I'm pretty sure if we don't change our system drastically until it's viable, it's gonna be the same as with nuclear: Public funding for research, lots of government projects, private corporations then build power plants which are largely government funded, the energy gets heavily subsidized in the market and then people are told it's the cheapest form of energy and everyone talks about how the private sector is so much more efficient because the government would not have been able to turn a profit.

Compare these numbers to the annual costs for drilling / purchasing fossile fuels. And for the environmental damage they cause.

Unfortunately, the fusion research funding world-wide are just peanuts. The technology could be much closer to breakthrough if funding would have been better.

This is realistically like no money

Came here to say this. I'm too lazy to look it up but I bet its like <1% of what was spent on US interstate highways over the same period.

We can just make biodiesel, that's easier. We already have transgenic algae that produce useful oil in high concentrations, and they don't need much more than water and sunlight.

Carbon neutral is a very difficult word. Think of, for example, how much concrete you need for nuclear plants, and presumably for fusion plants too, once we have them.

You can't patent physics or fundamental forces of the universe. I like how corporate hate is so dominant in some minds it now extends to atomic particles. Neat.

Why though? Better make hydrogen, it has higher energy density and it’s use don’t create anything toxic.

Liquid batteries also exist now. I know nothing about their volatility or efficiency, but they do exist.

Water... you mean like from the toilet?

Sunlight. IT's what plants crave.

I hear Elon Musk is bidding $44 Trillion for it all

I mean, i guess i can share my stash of Sunlight with a plant. Not sure how the bong would fit. Also, isn't that cannibalism?

> higher energy density

Higher energy density per mass, but much much lower energy density per volume, which really matters if you're building a vehicle. There's only so much room inside an airplane for fuel tanks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#/media/File:Energy_density.svg

But regardless, whether it's gasoline or hydrogen, the point is that with enough free energy you can synthesize any fuel you need.

Nah. A plant eating another plant is like an animal eating another animal.

Could companies still have local monopolies the way America has for most utilities?

Ohgod, so you're saying i'm a cannibal? That's mean.

Life feeds on life feeds on life.

I an amazed, 2021 nasa budget if the internet doesn't lie to me was 25b

Imho the money spent in both space and fusion is worthy but this gives an idea of how little is 35b adjusted for inflation spent in fusion spanning 68 years compared to another endeavours

one wonders what fusion would achieve if they did a Manhattan project of it or sacrifice money as they did like at the beginning of the space exploration and moon landings

Keep in mind that the Pentagon gets close to $800 b a year. Just for sense of perspective.

Well yes, but with a specific energy about three times the one of gasoline and a specific density of about 1/4 of gasoline the reduction in energy per unit of volume isn’t so massive and the benefits on the reduction of negative externalities is very very significant. Please correct me if I am wrong but in theory we would need deposits that are 33% bigger in volume, correct?, the problem is the temperature necessary to keep it liquid of course. And as important volume is, weight may be an even bigger factor for some transport systems, like airplanes.

In any case the point, as you mention, is that with more and cheaper energy we could sintetice the fuel.

Fission is still on the border of being economically viable despite being 70+ years seasoned.

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Anyone who has delusionals about fusion just coming in as "free green energy" any time within this century are completely delusional.

Not at the contemporary levels of technology. How difficult fusion is today is honestly a sixth grade science project compared to how difficult fission was in 1940's.

The Manhattan Project cost was estimated to be $3.3 Trillion. That's $55 Trillion today. Trillion, with a T.

The inflation adjusted fusion investment to date according to OP has been $38 Billion, with a B.

There's really no comparison. Fusion reactors have to withstand 100x the heat and 1,000,000x the neutron Flux as fission reactors. No materials exist which can actually withstand that and there's no clear path forward given the laws of physics. Fission is actually laughably easy. You literally just put enough uranium together in the right geometry and it gets hot. I could make a fission reactor in my basement if you gave me some enriched uranium to fuel it.

Oy. $35 billion. imagine that had been invested in solar research.

Now imagine it in the context of the Keystone pipeline leak in Kansas this week. In the context of the sabotage on the NordStream gas pipeline. In the context of the power grid issues in Texas in a successive winter and summer. In the context of the grid sabotage in N.Carolina last week, and of suspected sabotage attempts elsewhere in this nation over the past couple weeks. In the context of Russia destroying Ukraine’s power infrastructure.

Fusion remains decades out from a practical perspective, and is not local. You’re not gonna have a fusion reactor on your roof.

On the other hand, you could be collecting and storing the energy created by the fusion reactor called the Sun.

Worth.

You can solve literally every problem with unlimited energy. (Except your ex being a slut.)

There are literally actively used methods for material confinement. Most common are magnetic confinements like tokamak and Stellarator reactors. New methods using beryllium blankets by ITER are shown to be effective. Their two problems are they currently need to be actively cooled which eats away at the energy input/output ratio and they contain natural amounts of Uranium, some of which is U-234 and radioactive requiring hazardous disposal at their end of life. Not as serious as.apent nuclear material disposal from fission reactors, but still a major drawback.

There are also companies with successful experiments fusing deuterium and H-3 in lieu of tritium as tritium is costly to produce. Allegedly, this method doesn't require confinement. Since the products are ionized, it actually uses the reactive expansion to power magnetic generators in lieu of heating steam turbines.

But the NIF that just released their announcement doesn't even use magnetic confinements, rather an inertial confinement (ICF) reactor. This means the confinement times can be improved linearly with density of the fuel and it only requires about 10% of the mass of the fuel to reach temperature sufficient for plasma, which also allows for longer reactions. ICF research is way more immature than MCF so it has always been assumed that MCF would be the breakthrough. That's what makes this such an event is that ICF beat MCF to the finish line creating more energy output than input.

Lastly, they didn't just have an experiment with miniscule energy that could only be detected with instruments. They created 3.15 mega joules. That's 875 watt hours. That's enough to power a TV for a day and well beyond enough to prove their confinement technology works

Yeah that’s not how it works

"Hey can I have $35 billion, it's like no money?"

j/k I get what you mean, if we can solve clean, cheap, on demand energy this will seem like a pittance.

So that's how they got a fusion reactor in the basement.

Think of the human and economic impact of those highways over that period.

Spending even 1% of that on a speculative research project is pretty good.

No one has ever achieved a fusion reaction (in a reactor not a bomb) that produced net positive energy. I dont understand why we are investing in this when we can do fission right now. Most nuclear waste can be used by different reactor types to recycle it. The very small amount left over that can be stored by digging a fucking hole.

Yeah, but they used 300MJ to produce those 3MJ. This whole calculation is just a joke. And the containment method worked.. for a trillionth of a second. IRL the expectation is to contain for 60 years with less than 1 in a million chance of failure.

This is a terrible visualization. It’s not at all clear what either chart is supposed to be. The y axes are out of scale. The title is misleading.

The Manhattan project did not cost anywhere near 3 trillion dollars, which would've been far, far larger than the entire world economy at the time, let alone the United States. The figure is closer to 2 billion with a B, or over 20 billion in today's dollars, which is actually backed up in the link.

If it ever works then it will be the greatest investment ever but if not then just another government waste of my money

Ya OP didn't word that well. IIRC the laser put around 2MJ on target and the resulting fusion yield about 3MJ, so if NIFs laser was more efficient than what OP said would be accurate. But in actuality it took the NIF laser something like 200-300MJ for that shot. But when you consider that NIF is getting relatively old and that it's a research center so efficency wasn't at the forefront of design it's not unreasonable to see where this could hopefully lead.

Better said than I said it. I just went for the snarky comment

That 300 MJ was to start the reaction, you don't need to continually pump in 300 MJ. Scaling this up by like 1000x and you surpass that one time input. And the scale would likely need to be far higher for commercialization.

Nobody is saying we're there yet, but to deny how remarkable this breakthrough is, is pretty short sighted. It doesn't mean we decommission any existing fission reactors or even stop planning their construction. It does mean that if $38 billion can produce a net positive (and yes this proved net positive by all practical definitions) reaction, any government subsidies or research into hydrocarbon derived fuel needs to be phased out. That's $20 billion annually for oil alone in the US. God knows how much towards corn for ethanol. This announcement justifies a substantial amount of that phased out and put towards fusion.

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I sort of expect it to be a tech governments will openly steal and sell back on the cheap to competition if anyone tried to truly do that but is unable to roll it out.

I fully support continual use and future investment increases into new fission reactors. But having an "if it ain't broke don't fix it" attitude is laughable when you have Chernobyl, Fukushima, and 3 Mile Island staring you in the face. And don't pretend it's just digging a hole for disposal. Simply transporting spent fuel is an immense cost

Yeah but with unlimited energy we can just turn air into biofuels directly skipping the plant part if we just brute force it

We did it barely at the end of last year and earlier this week we hit 150% return 2MJ in 3MJ out.

Imagine having this much money to spend and buying Twitter instead

/s? We hit 150% return for fairly instantaneous reactions now. We generally are expecting to do fusion sort of like a combustion engine with many short burst of on and off. If we can get a few seconds of sustainable reactions we looking at many orders of magnitude returns.

We broke even last year, it was pretty big news and all this fusion post is in response from latest break through.

They have not even remotely achieved that.

https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1602907470133100547

Its only a net positive if u dont include 99% of the energy.

https://twitter.com/skdh/status/1602907470133100547

Fusion reactions arent even remotely close to viable.

You can assemble different reactor types in close proximity, which has never been done, and eliminate 99% of nuclear waste. Its never been done because we dont build them with this intended we just yeet the stuff into the ground.

No, we got 1% return in reality. It's only 150% in theory if you assume no loses which obviously isn't real.

Her next statement is that commercialization is decades away, which both her and the announcement agreed with.

And thanks for literally ignoring the entire comment you replied to

Her next statement is that commercialization is decades away, which both her and the announcement agreed with. Nothing contradicts my statement.

Also, I have cited nearly every claim I've made and you have not. We're not equally discussing this in good faith. Pretending fission is harmless is a joke. It's worth the risk IMO, but stop downplaying actual nuclear meltdowns

I don't think you understand how thus technology works. There's no way to actually scale it up 1000x without putting 1000x as much energy in to achieve ignition.

And you do?

Your lasers would need to be 100x as efficient and your reaction 100x more powerful to be a useful energy return..

Yes, it's very simple. The lasers impart an insane amount if energy on a tiny area creating the conditions necessary to achieve fusion. Just think of it like using a spark plug to ignite fuel in your cars engine.

The link you provided puts 3.3 trillion as the cost of ww2.

The wiki page for the Manhattan project puts it as 1.89 Billion, or about 22 Billion today.

Anddd? That amount of energy scales up by 10% with mass as.only 10% of the material is required to turn into plasma to start the reaction, as I've stated. Increasing the density lowers the amount of energy required, as I've also stated (and cited).

But is that impossible, I don't think so. I'm not going to say we're 10 years away from it being viable because we've been 10 years away for the past 50 years. But look at how fast every other technology evolves, this is literally the beginning for where it all starts coming together. I'd bet people alive today will see fusion energy become a reality.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh

Stop over hyping reactor metldowns. There have been more deaths per terawatt from fucking WIND POWER!!!

Hmmm, it's more like 1.3 trillion, their own website has a much larger number than what your first Google number says

Seems like a lot of money. We went to an Asian Fusion last night and spent less than $100.

>But look at how fast every other technology evolves

See, that right there is the fundamental error all of you guys are making. That's not how progress works at all. Most of the time progress is painstakingly slow and its actually slower now than almost any time since the start of the industrial revolution. When a new technological front opens up you do indeed get rapid progress, but after 15 years or so progress slows to a crawl again. At the rate fusion research is going it will take 100+ years to actually reach a point it could reach a real net gain end to end. And even if it does so what? The cost in terms of steel, concrete, etc is going to be astronomically high regardless.

I would be incredibly surprised if solar research has received less than $35 billion over the last 70 years. Maybe fusion wouldn’t be decades from being practical if it had been given more funding than a handful of aircraft carriers or three quarters of a social media company.

OK but physics pertains to all forms of energy production and last time I looked Nuclear plants charge people money for what they produce.

Well yeah, there's no uncertainty in whether or not you'll get an energy source after extracting oil from the ground. But there's a chance that after billions of dollars and half a century of research that fusion won't be useful for energy.

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Glad you pointed out the y scale

Fusion will not replace fossil fuels during the lifetime of any human currently living.

Now that government has done the heavy lifting, it's now time for private industry to step forward and take the technology and take credit. As has been done so many times in the past.

Yeah sorry OP but your data is not beautiful this time

We know that fusion power works in the sun and in thermo nuclear bombs. Therefore, I think it is unlikely that it is impossible to make a practical fusion reactor. But it may need to be very large and very precise, requiring large R&D costs.

Not even a billion dollars? For the holy grail of technology? Honestly, I never thought it would succeed, and I’m still skeptical.

$782 bn according to this at least, but I’m not an expert, I’m sure it all depends on what is included and what’s not.

You couldn't even buy Twitter with that.

It'd buy you 1.5% of Apple, though.

Honestly if you told me it was gonna take 200 years to figure out, I’d still probably say it’s worth it from a long term planning perspective.

Yeah gravity works there, too, and people have spent countless hours trying to use it to make perpetual motion machines to create green energy. But we wouldn't be celebrating a graph of that.

I'm just pointing out the difference in spending money on procuring a known source of energy vs research on a potential one. They're really apples and oranges.

I bet Musk would take $35Bil for Twitter right now, lol.

We use gravity to store and generate energy all the time.

Perpetual motion and fusion aren’t really comparable. One we know is impossible and the other we know exists. It’s like comparing cats and unicorns.

I don't see your criticism of the y axis, looks linear to me. I see little reason why the top graph and bottom graph must have the same scale.

On the other hand, this graph doesn't show what the title says it shows, and it is devoid of context: surely research on solar and wind count as "cost of zero carbon". Surely so also does research into emission reduction. And surely the cost of zero carbon is far less than the cost of not reaching zero carbon.

US had a military budget of $1640 billion, just for 2022..!

Someone just posted the actual budget which is around 1.3 trillion because that number of 782 doesn't account for their "awards" which is contract work they dish out. According to their own website their budget is 1.3 trillion

Yeah this is what happens when not enough people are science literate.

There are literally dams used to store energy by pumping up water and converting to energy back on the way down.

Perpetual motion is theoretically impossible (as in violates all the laws of physics). Fusion is practically impossible - the same way nuclear fission was until we solved the engineering problems. They're not comparable.

That’s a crazy number, not that $800 B isn’t already crazy. Thanks for clearing this out.

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I mean they are gonna get a ton right now after the publicity.

It’s roughly half a day of USA GDP in 2021. Edit: or less than 15% of a single day GDP globally.

You might have used perpetual motion to avoid the interjection but its not a fair comparison. The math says perpetual motion will always remain energy neutral. On the flip side, the math says fusion yields an energy positive.

Im just pointing out the difference between spending money on something we know can’t work vs something that we know can work given enough time and resources.

Given how much effort Musk has put into solar energy, I'd consider him anti-nuclear by default.

I wasn't comparing the feasibility of fusion vs perpetual motion. I was using the wasted time and effort put into researching something to demonstrate why it's not a reasonable to compare r&d costs to the amount of money spent on obtaining a known energy source.

Billions are spent on all sorts of energy research. Solar, hydro, chemical, biological. The overwhelming majority will go nowhere. Some end up being outright scams, like perpetual motion devices. Picking one that might eventually work and saying "God we're dumb for not doing this instead of using oil" is like saying people are dumb for having bought stocks other than Amazon in the 90s.

Or are you going to tell me how actually stocks are a financial entity so it's not a fair comparison to energy.

Dude, there's been probably almost a trillion dollars spent on solar at this point.... Costs have barely been reduced in the last decade, when most of the money has been spent. Not to mention hardly applicable to half the world's climate.

If all of Europe had stuck with nuclear power they'd be energy independent right now. The $585 billion Germany spent on solar and wind infrastructure coulda been spent updating their nuclear plants, and Putin would have next to no chips to play with. You have your priorities mixed up.

Also, it wasn’t money invested for zero carbon initiatives. It’s money invested because we knew we’d run out of affordable oil eventually and didn’t want to be completely hosed when that happened.

This year's funding requests suggest that the total national security budget will come closer to a breathtaking $1.3 trillion.

They don't make public their awards budget, it's a staggering amount of our economy. And we all know how messed up those government contracts are. They have no problem shelling out 5k for a coffeemaker

Think about how much cheaper it would have been to spend that money on trains instead.

So you can either buy a social media platform to destroy, or you can subsidise many decades of research into an amazing new, clean energy source, and still have billions left. What a difficult choice!

NREL budget 2020: approximately $500 million, up from $372 million three years earlier.

So no, the federal investment in renewables research has been negligible compared to virtually every other energy technology. Almost all the research has been privately funded.

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Well, yeah, that's by design. What incentive does the government have to spend money on renewables? They can just make policies that incentivize everybody else to do it.

"Big Energy" is down with renewables because they are unreliable enough that the whole grid needs to be backed by oil and gas to 100% capacity. The high principle investment and parts/ repair turnover along with the plentiful eco-contracts to go around make for reliable revenue streams. Energy industry gets to have their cake and eat it too.

You know what doesn't make alot of revenue? Nuclear power. Because it's like 100-1000x more efficient than oil, gas or renewables. My point is if government didn't fund nuclear research nobody would, it's too cheap. Lots of people are willing to fund renewables because it makes them money.

I actually think thats a pretty apt comparison.

Given the hindsight, I think every person who bought stocks in the 90’s wishes they bought Amazon instead.

Just like the people on this post wish that more resources went into fusion research.

Hindsight is important. We need to be able to admit that things need to change and wish that we found the right path first. We also need to acknowledge the path in the first place. We needed fossil fuels to get where we are, but if more money went into green energy research earlier we would be years ahead of where we are now and maybe a lot of the problems we are facing today wouldn’t be as big to overcome.

IMO: R&D is not a waste of time or money when the pay out is a solution to the energy crisis.

One word. Superfund. How much is spent there cleaning up our dirty stuff

So am I, numbnut. No one gives a shit about credentials as a dick measuring contest on reddit. This was a perfectly polite conversation until you responded with this.

Is this supposed to be a joke? This is couch cushion money compared to corporate subsidies and the defense budget. For an important long term investment that will pay off infinitely when it’s figured out

Are you kidding? You think I'm bringing up my science degree as a dick measuring attempt?

>this is what happens when not enough people are science literate

This is what happens when not enough people are literate at all. Did they take the reading comprehension courses out of the engineering curriculums?

Carbon Zero or Zero Carbon?

A government can't just throw money at a super project to increase results. This budgetary allocation may be more in line with perspective than pure fantasy.

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We do, but its for freight because passenger trains in the US are dumb outside of light rail. The US is not Western Europe.

I doubt it, to get Fusion to work other technologies need to be in place and some of the things they will need don't yet exist. Even Ernest Lawrence, the father of "Big Science", understood that. If we look at wind energy the deep shore mega turbines and platforms won't be ready until 2025 for mass deployment but this was known for a decade.

They will have to and it will make sense, do we really need to competing fusion plants in the same city? What's the benefit of this? Energy production is super Cap X intensive and unlike software you can't recover you costs fast.

I disagree, the USA is ideal to be mainly based around train infrastructure for people. I would argue the USA has far better conditions to be mainly train based, than western Europe does.

The size means that it takes incredibly long to travel by car. Trains can be much faster, and are much less of a waste of time. You can literally do anything else when riding a train. If you want to travel long distances without a plane, you could spend several days in a car, doing nothing else but focussing on driving. Or you could travel in a train for a day, in which time you could do anything you wanted.

If you want to see an example of how well trains work in a large country, look at China.

Chinas average train trip is 300km in Germany its 30km, people in Europe are not taking trains from Lisbon to Moscow which is the same distance as LA to NY (4500 km). Western Europe and China don't have to move freight from one coast to another like we do in the US. So either we build an entire second set of rail lines and then hope people would rather sit in a train for extend periods of time (which they won't) versus just flying or we agree that the price of all goods will need to go up because we will prioritize passenger service on rail which means we need to drastically change the safety standards (as example freight trains in Europe can't be over 700m so they can stop fast while in the US 3000m is normal) and hope people will want to sit in a train all day (which they won't). The funny thing is that people on Reddit think they know better then all the people in the US who work in transportation, how fucking arrogant can people be? Europe and China can prioritize passenger service because the don't need the rail for freight due to single coasts, they use water and small trucks to transport goods, the US can't do that.

BTW I like trains but the distances are to great and even in China there are not typical routes that are like San Fran/LA to NYC/Washington DC. Beijing to Hong Kong is only 2000km, half the distance.

Let's make something very clear. At the moment, if you want to travel thousands of km, the best option is planes. If you want to travel tens to hundreds of km, the best option is trains. I'm not saying that All travel from LA to NY has to be via train. I'm not saying that every single journey, no matter how long should be via train. But it is ridiculous how hard it is to travel from e.g. Chicago to NY, which is a journey that should definitely be easily possible by train, but isn't.

And no, this isn't because of freight (which, other countries have too!). The reason the train infrastructure in most of North America (because Canada is just as guilty) is so bad, is because of the car industry. They tried their very best to hinder trains at every turn. they demolished trains, and paid politicians to ensure trains would be defunded, in favour of cars. You can see the result very clearly. They made countless billions by forcing everyone to drive a car, rather than the obvious best option of using trains. There are fewer trains lines now than there were 100 years ago. Just think about how ridiculous that is.

Trains are far more efficient in terms of energy, time, how many people need to focus on driving, space required etc. They are also far safer, and don't destroy the environment.

Yes, the USA needs more rail lines. But even without new rail lines, notice that rails are not used most of the time. The temporal separation of subsequent trains is often many hours in the US. Just think of how many more trains you can fit on the same line. And compare that to how roads are used all the time, not just once briefly every few hours.

You want to talk freight? Sure. Consider how many drivers are needed to drive trucks across the country. Now consider how many train drivers would be needed instead to deliver the same freight. Also consider that trains can go much faster than trucks., are much more efficient. Sure, you might need trucks for the final few km. But apart from that, trains are obviously the best answer for delivery.

You brought up the topic of safety. Yes, trains can't stop easily. But trucks can't stop easily either. Look at the statistics of how many people are killed by cars each year. Now look up how many people are killed by trains each year. Trains are orders of magnitude safer. It's not even hard to see why. Trains are on tracks. Cars aren't. Trains have a single driver. Every car has their own driver. People drive trains for work. People drive cars because they have to. Trains are self driving. Cars aren't. Trains have existing infrastructure to keep people away from where they drive. Cars don't.

You got me, you're so fucking smart. Good look bringing passenger trains back.

We need high speed trains, but I don’t think the cost will allow it.

It’s far cheaper to build trains, than to continue massively subsidizing the car industry, and maintaining car based infrastructure. Countries far poorer than the USA manage to build more trains, so I really don’t understand why there should be any problem whatsoever in the USA. If the politicians weren’t owned by the car industry.

I should have been more clear. I 100% agree with you, but the idiots who run and vote in this country won’t stand for the price tag.