Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scientists

Re:Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scient... by sgt101 on Friday March 09, 2018 @04:46AM (#16550739)

The argument is that they can make it small - room sized, with the new magnates. This reduces the every one of the subsidiary technical challenges to doable, basically you don't need big machines to dig big holes, you don't need 30000m^3 of concrete here, there and everywhere, you don't need a supply chain that involves 20000 people in 40 countries... so the co-ordination costs go away as well.

It's pretty like the idea with data analytics or software ; if you can do an iteration / update by yourself in 10 minutes you will be able to solve the problem (for reasonable problems) in a few weeks for sure. If you need to spend a month assembling the data and compiling the code before you can commit a change you are simply not going to ever be able to make progress.

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Re:Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scient... by vidanay on Friday March 09, 2018 @04:52AM (#16550771)

I think the "for reasonable problems" is the question for fusion.

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Re:Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scient... by sgt101 on Friday March 09, 2018 @09:55AM (#16552107)

I have no idea of the value of my impression of the work - I saw the MIT PI present on this a year ago and have read up since, but well - that's it. However, I think that they think that the main challenges are solved as per ITER and that they are on a mission to resolve the engineering; and this is the way to do that. They don't think that there is anything left which is a show stopper apart from the need to trouser $50m++ to build the proof of concept.

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