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That's kind of a tautology - because there's no substantial progress. The real problem is that every time the fusion community has tried something some unexpect
by sgt101 7y ago
That's kind of a tautology - because there's no substantial progress. The real problem is that every time the fusion community has tried something some unexpected effects and behaviours have emerged derailing the technical approaches and sending the community back to the drawing board.
- simonh 7y agoYep, if governments had committed Manhattan project scale funding to Fusion say 30 years ago, it would almost certainly have gone into a technical approach that is now thoroughly obsolete. It simply wouldn’t have worked, because we just didn’t understand the problem domain well enough. IMHO we still don’t. The pragmatic approach is to fund a variety of research projects enough to keep making progress, but not so much that too many resources get wasted on dead ends. A dead end is fine if we learn from it, but we should only commit the resources needed to learn the lesson, and as little more as possible.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- sien 7y agoProgress on the triple product : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion has gone up faster than Moore's Law : https://i.imgur.com/BN0pz.png https://i.imgur.com/BN0pz.png The problem is that the next device costs a lot more because it has to be much bigger, that is unless you have much stronger magnetic fields. The cube of magnetic field is proportional to the energy gain in a Tokomak. See this video at at 46 minutes to get the equation, watch more to understand why people are now doing this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk Tokomak Energy and Commonwealth Fusion Systems among others are looking at smaller reactors that use High Temperature Superconductors.