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It feels like fusion energy is perpetually 50 years away.

by Maken 4y ago

Retric 4y ago
Minimal investment means minimal progress. ITER was basically a Regan/Gorbachev project from 1985 that’s still not built yet. It’s JET’s the current largest device was completed in 1983. Real progress has been made, but the major projects have been extremely conservative by necessity. Early designs for ITER where for a larger device that would have actually produced electricity though not cheaply enough to be economically viable, but it got scaled way down.
- mjhay 4y ago
  And ITER's design is already wildly outmoded now that high-temp superconductors exist (which they have for quite some time). Just a multinational pork project.
  - XorNot 4y ago
    ITER exists to prove that fusion plasma stability can be sustained to extract useful energy. How it does it is irrelevant since the big news is having a sufficiently large tokamak vaccum vessel with instrumentation to study. HTSCs weren't usable when it was designed, and have only just become usable in the last 5 years or so but they are a fundamentally different material. You don't just drop them into a large, incredibly complex machine that depends on it's integrated magnetic containment system: you are functionally building a new device. If you can ITER, then you don't get a refund on spent dollars. You get a loss. And then you get to start another 30 year project to maybe build a new vacuum vessel, which you have to do because you still haven't actually tested plasma stability. "But but MIT skunkworks!"...yeah. It's still going along, and they haven't suddenly churned out a functioning reactor based on HTSCs because oh look, whatever the advantages they're a new material with different properties, manufacturing and handling behaviors all of which need to be developed, measured and inspected before you can use them effectively in a fusion device. If they look good then great: they can be used to make DEMO, the ITER-successor commercial powerplant prototype, cheaper and more powerful.
mrexroad 4y ago
50 is the new 20!
stormbrew 4y ago
As was predicted in the paper that spawned this joke which presented timelines based on funding and then we funded research into fusion even less than their most pessimistic model.

It feels like fusion energy is perpetually 50 years away.

by Maken 4y ago

It feels like fusion energy is perpetually 50 years away.

Minimal investment means minimal progress. ITER was basically a Regan/Gorbachev project from 1985 that’s still not built yet. It’s JET’s the current largest device was completed in 1983. Real progress has been made, but the major projects have been extremely conservative by necessity. Early designs for ITER where for a larger device that would have actually produced electricity though not cheaply enough to be economically viable, but it got scaled way down.

mjhay 4y ago
And ITER's design is already wildly outmoded now that high-temp superconductors exist (which they have for quite some time). Just a multinational pork project.
- XorNot 4y ago
  ITER exists to prove that fusion plasma stability can be sustained to extract useful energy. How it does it is irrelevant since the big news is having a sufficiently large tokamak vaccum vessel with instrumentation to study. HTSCs weren't usable when it was designed, and have only just become usable in the last 5 years or so but they are a fundamentally different material. You don't just drop them into a large, incredibly complex machine that depends on it's integrated magnetic containment system: you are functionally building a new device. If you can ITER, then you don't get a refund on spent dollars. You get a loss. And then you get to start another 30 year project to maybe build a new vacuum vessel, which you have to do because you still haven't actually tested plasma stability. "But but MIT skunkworks!"...yeah. It's still going along, and they haven't suddenly churned out a functioning reactor based on HTSCs because oh look, whatever the advantages they're a new material with different properties, manufacturing and handling behaviors all of which need to be developed, measured and inspected before you can use them effectively in a fusion device. If they look good then great: they can be used to make DEMO, the ITER-successor commercial powerplant prototype, cheaper and more powerful.

mrexroad 4y ago

50 is the new 20!

stormbrew 4y ago

As was predicted in the paper that spawned this joke which presented timelines based on funding and then we funded research into fusion even less than their most pessimistic model.