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ITER is designed to make more power than it requires, it's now just an engineering problem rather than a theoretical one. You said we've made no progress; that
by gnaritas 11y ago
ITER is designed to make more power than it requires, it's now just an engineering problem rather than a theoretical one. You said we've made no progress; that is progress, a plant is in construction, yes these things take time but to deny progress is being made is simply incorrect. Having useful fusion, i.e. producing more power than being input is a matter of scale, it can't be done without building a full sized reactor and that's what ITER is, the first full size reactor. That's called progress.
- Grishnakh 11y agoThis doesn't sound right to me. The ITER is going to (supposedly, which of course is probably optimistic) take another 10 years to finish. When you have a workable design for something, it does not take multiple decades to build it, unless it's something on a really gigantic scale (like a continent-spanning highway system). It doesn't take remotely as much time to build a full-scale nuclear fission power plant producing many megawatts of power. That means this thing is not a real design, it's still an R&D project where they really don't know if it's going to work as planned or not, and they're going step by step, collecting data, seeing what works and what doesn't, etc. So, sorry, you can call it "progress" if you want, but there's no evidence that it's going to work as planned until they actually can demonstrate it doing so.