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Here's what Robert Zubrin has to say about this graph in his latest book "The case for space" (p174): "The national fusion programs progressed well during the
by credit_guy 5y ago
Here's what Robert Zubrin has to say about this graph in his latest book "The case for space" (p174):
"The national fusion programs progressed well during the Cold War because of fierce international competition. They have stopped moving forward in the late 1980s because the decision to consolidate them all into a single global project, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), removed all stimulus for action. Indeed, it too, nearly a quarter century for the bureaucrats in charge of ITER to manage to reach a consensus in 2010 on where tu put it, and it will be another quarter century before the machine even attempts to reach thermonuclear ignition in 2035"
- phreeza 5y agoThat seems like a just-so story to me. It's not like all the smaller fusion research programs stopped existing, the US for example still had the NIF running in parallel, with substantial funding. It's just that it appears that a very large scale project is needed to get above unity fusion with the tocamac approach.
- credit_guy 5y agoI seem to remember that NIF is focused on nuclear weapons research. Which very likely means that most of the results they produce are highly classified, so of limited usefulness for the rest of the world's scientific community.
- phreeza 5y agoSure that is their main focus but I think they also have a fusion power component in their research. The point was more generally that the inception of ITER did not mean the end of all other smaller fusion research programs, as Zubrin seems to imply.