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Yes, I have a friend who left plasma physics and is still salty about the situation with ITER. She also said that by the time they're done, the technology is g
by djaque 6y ago
Yes, I have a friend who left plasma physics and is still salty about the situation with ITER. She also said that by the time they're done, the technology is going to be outdated since it all began in the 80's.
I'd disagree that they are there to pump money into administrators. Some of these problems are just really hard and requires monstrously large organizations to make headway. At worst, I'd say that they are misguided/focusing on the wrong scientific questions or in the case of ITER stuck on a path that should have been abandoned a while ago.
- willis936 6y agoIf you have the chance, ask her what a better vision of the use of funding would be. Keep in mind that the physics goals are to test high neutron flux divertors, tokamak scaling laws, and burning plasma regime stability.
- pantalaimon 6y agoAFAIK you can’t operate a tokamak continuously, only pulsed. A stellarator like Wendelstein 7-X looks like a much more promising design.
- willis936 6y agoI know. I work at the first MHD optimized stellarator :) That doesn’t mean backing out of ITER 15 years ago would have been a good idea. It would be an even worse idea to back out of it now.
- pfdietz 6y agoStellarators also have ruinously low volumetric power density, so they're not any less economically dead than tokamaks.
- mikhailfranco 6y agoSo ITER is an iterator design :)