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SPARC already raised $500 million. No one claimed ITER is consuming their budget, if ITER is consuming anything, it's people, actual scientists in academia wor

SPARC already raised $500 million. No one claimed ITER is consuming their budget, if ITER is consuming anything, it's people, actual scientists in academia working on it, instead of working on smaller scale projects. It's an opportunity cost. Look, even if ITER is a success, it still won't even produce electricity, that's require DEMO, a follow on project. We're talking post 2035 just for the first Deuterium-Tritium operation. Now, do you think by 2035+, which is 15 years from now, commercial fusion reactors are going to be run off Niobium-Tin cooled with Liquid Helium? Or do you think commercially available REBCO, which needs only liquid nitrogen, and whose superconductivity doesn't falloff as field strengthen increases, will be used? By 2035, whatever DEMO uses of the ITER design will be 30 years old. Meanwhile, hundreds of smaller scale fusion devices could have been built, with equivalent field strengths, but at far far less cost. Would you rather run one massive international experiment with dozens of bureaucracies, or run hundreds of smaller experiences, and collect a lot of data from many more designs in the mean time? We don't need the kill ITER to fund more startup fusion research in this country. ARPA-E funded Solyndra and Tesla. Solyndra failed, Tesla succeeded, paid their money back, and created a new industry leading car company with a market capitalization larger than all US car companies combined. I'd call ARPA-E and DOE's investment portfolio HUGELY successful. If they were a Silicon Valley VC, all the other VC's would be envious.

XorNot 6y ago
There is no current scaled up artifact of a REBCO magnet. It's highly expected that one can be created, but they're not rolling off a production line right now. There definitely wasn't one 10 years ago, nor were superconducting tapes expected to become viable. So what exactly do you think anyone would have been building if we were investing in fusion 10 years ago? What would "hundreds" of small scale devices be if we tried to build them today? With a technology that is being kept proprietary and this unavailable for use? Again: we have a whole bunch of small scale fusion devices. This is what the article here is talking about! And until very recently all of them suggested the same thing: you need an ITER sized reactor to be able to get suitable mean free paths, and that Q is going to be all about the b dynamic manipulation of plasma at scale (which is what ITER is setup to study).
- cromwellian 6y ago
  Well since YBCO had been known since the 90s, it might have been useful to instead plunge all of their efforts into manufacturing and scaling YBCO, rather than racing ahead with a 30 year project to build a giant reactor with inefficient confinement. Imagine if the Manhattan project decided to build ICBMs and Hydrogen bombs before they had perfected enrichment. Or if the government decided to fund the full scale model of a National Spaceplane (NASP, remember that?) before they had figured out how to make a SCRAMjet, or store slush-hydrogen properly, or deal with hypersonic heating.
  - kortex 6y ago
    If Global Warming were in fact a nuclear-tipped communist regime directly threatening American Way of Life, instead of a creeping international issue jeopardizing food and fresh water, creating distributed violence threatening American Way of Life, we would have had Fusion licked in the 70's or 80's.
  - XorNot 6y ago
    And in the mid-2000s YBCO tapes were stuck in development hell where they couldn't live up to their theoretical promises, and one of the projects I knew about at my local university had got a whole bunch of promising results and then just been dropped because none of it could be replicated. Patented work too. Not to mention, this was purely for power transmission - no one had any idea if they could hold up to mechanical forces of high power magnets, hell, they had a serious problem which was that high temperature superconductors actually would very suddenly stop superconducting if the impinging magnetic field exceeded a critical threshold. All this was true right up to 2010 - is still somewhat true today because again, there is no scaled up artifact proving it's actually possible to use. Everyone who wanted to work on high temperature superconductivity was - it wasn't like this was a field which was struggling. And the story at the time - and in fact still, today - was that it wasn't reliable enough and for ITER definitely would be the wrong technology choice for it's goals - which was to build a facility handling large volumes of plasma in a plausible fusion generator environment. The 5 year timelines being thrown around like gospel here sound utterly absurd on the face of that. A damn CRUD web app takes a year to build, but an experimental fusion plant using essentially nothing but bespoke parts will be done in 5? Cheaply? No.

XorNot 6y ago

There is no current scaled up artifact of a REBCO magnet. It's highly expected that one can be created, but they're not rolling off a production line right now. There definitely wasn't one 10 years ago, nor were superconducting tapes expected to become viable. So what exactly do you think anyone would have been building if we were investing in fusion 10 years ago? What would "hundreds" of small scale devices be if we tried to build them today? With a technology that is being kept proprietary and this unavailable for use? Again: we have a whole bunch of small scale fusion devices. This is what the article here is talking about! And until very recently all of them suggested the same thing: you need an ITER sized reactor to be able to get suitable mean free paths, and that Q is going to be all about the b dynamic manipulation of plasma at scale (which is what ITER is setup to study).

cromwellian 6y ago
Well since YBCO had been known since the 90s, it might have been useful to instead plunge all of their efforts into manufacturing and scaling YBCO, rather than racing ahead with a 30 year project to build a giant reactor with inefficient confinement. Imagine if the Manhattan project decided to build ICBMs and Hydrogen bombs before they had perfected enrichment. Or if the government decided to fund the full scale model of a National Spaceplane (NASP, remember that?) before they had figured out how to make a SCRAMjet, or store slush-hydrogen properly, or deal with hypersonic heating.
- kortex 6y ago
  If Global Warming were in fact a nuclear-tipped communist regime directly threatening American Way of Life, instead of a creeping international issue jeopardizing food and fresh water, creating distributed violence threatening American Way of Life, we would have had Fusion licked in the 70's or 80's.
- XorNot 6y ago
  And in the mid-2000s YBCO tapes were stuck in development hell where they couldn't live up to their theoretical promises, and one of the projects I knew about at my local university had got a whole bunch of promising results and then just been dropped because none of it could be replicated. Patented work too. Not to mention, this was purely for power transmission - no one had any idea if they could hold up to mechanical forces of high power magnets, hell, they had a serious problem which was that high temperature superconductors actually would very suddenly stop superconducting if the impinging magnetic field exceeded a critical threshold. All this was true right up to 2010 - is still somewhat true today because again, there is no scaled up artifact proving it's actually possible to use. Everyone who wanted to work on high temperature superconductivity was - it wasn't like this was a field which was struggling. And the story at the time - and in fact still, today - was that it wasn't reliable enough and for ITER definitely would be the wrong technology choice for it's goals - which was to build a facility handling large volumes of plasma in a plausible fusion generator environment. The 5 year timelines being thrown around like gospel here sound utterly absurd on the face of that. A damn CRUD web app takes a year to build, but an experimental fusion plant using essentially nothing but bespoke parts will be done in 5? Cheaply? No.