Re:ITER fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050
by WorkLobster on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @07:58PM
(#14801055)
> IMO its much better to spread the resources into these efforts rather than dumping a bunch of money into monstrosity like ITER
It's great to have a diverse approach in the R&D phase, but sooner or later you're going to have to build a viable machine to study it, and that's when you run into the problem of scale. Confining a plasma of hundreds of millions of Kelvin is no joke even with superconducting magnets, so to get any sort of useful confinement it will have to be at least as big as ITER. And since neither individual governments nor the private sector want to unilaterally fund something so big without a guaranteed ROI, if we want the progress then there's really no way around this stepping stone of a huge, expensive, politically-charged multinational project.
Re:ITER fusion energy pushed back beyond 2050
by resf on Wednesday July 19, 2017 @06:54AM
(#14803376)
ITER is an almost pointless project, because its design is already outdated even before it has completed. DEMO, if it ever exists, will almost certainly have more in common with ARC than with ITER.
It's great to have a diverse approach in the R&D phase, but sooner or later you're going to have to build a viable machine to study it, and that's when you run into the problem of scale. Confining a plasma of hundreds of millions of Kelvin is no joke even with superconducting magnets, so to get any sort of useful confinement it will have to be at least as big as ITER. And since neither individual governments nor the private sector want to unilaterally fund something so big without a guaranteed ROI, if we want the progress then there's really no way around this stepping stone of a huge, expensive, politically-charged multinational project.