3 ms·
That's just not true, and skirts the line of the being a deliberate lie. Fusion has occured in tokamaks, at an efficiency of 65%. ITER, as currently designed an
by drjesusphd 13y ago
That's just not true, and skirts the line of the being a deliberate lie. Fusion has occured in tokamaks, at an efficiency of 65%. ITER, as currently designed and being built, is expected to make a 10-fold return on energy input.
We are precisely at the position of "the math is all there" with regard to magnetic confinement. And so is the engineering and the funding (barely). It's going to happen, hopefully not before it's too late.
- dekhn 13y agoI should mention that in the past, I worked on the software backing research tokamaks. ITER is a research project. It is not designed to produce electricity. It was originally projected to cost over 5 billion pounds to build and has now tripled, but is years from completion. Even if it was successful beyond its wildest dreams, the best result would be that we'd have to spend another $50B to build a plant, and since that one would be the first and only, we wouldn't get much power from it. These are the harsh economic realities of today.
- Gravityloss 13y agoThat's not much. A single modern nuclear plant costs around 8.5 billion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#Unit_3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olkiluoto_Nuclear_Power_Plant#U...
- dekhn 13y agoBTW, ITER isn't even scheduled to be turned on to produce research results at scale until 2027. That's another 14 years before they even do something interesting!?
- drjesusphd 13y agoSo? Are we really that shortsighted? If the payoff was immediate, it wouldn't be research.