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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

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.

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.