If you have the chance, ask her what a better vision of the use of funding would be. Keep in mind that the physics goals are to test high neutron flux divertors, tokamak scaling laws, and burning plasma regime stability.
Re:Physics is stuck
by pantalaimon on Sunday September 13, 2020 @06:06AM
(#24459768)
AFAIK you can’t operate a tokamak continuously, only pulsed.
A stellarator like Wendelstein 7-X looks like a much more promising design.
I know. I work at the first MHD optimized stellarator :)
That doesn’t mean backing out of ITER 15 years ago would have been a good idea. It would be an even worse idea to back out of it now.
Stellarators also have ruinously low volumetric power density, so they're not any less economically dead than tokamaks.
Re:Physics is stuck
by mikhailfranco on Monday September 14, 2020 @12:18AM
(#24466701)
So ITER is an iterator design :)
I'd disagree that they are there to pump money into administrators. Some of these problems are just really hard and requires monstrously large organizations to make headway. At worst, I'd say that they are misguided/focusing on the wrong scientific questions or in the case of ITER stuck on a path that should have been abandoned a while ago.