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A comment on NASA Has Decided to Start Building the Lunar Gateway Using the Falcon Heavy. Parent comment

Re:NASA Has Decided to Start Building the Lunar Gateway Usin... by jiggawatts on Sunday February 21, 2021 @07:50AM (#26213101)
Precisely. Instead of one sunk cost fallacy after another used to justify ITER and its enormous bureaucracy, there should be a billion each thrown at a couple dozen likely alternative ideas.

I read a paper recently that basically said that the best bang for buck is to just work on better superconducting magnetic tape. Stronger fields make everything better, and the scaling law is cubic!

Even if such a tape is developed but doesn't lead to fusion, we'd have better MRIs and DC power lines as a side effect, so it's not even wasted effort!

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Re:NASA Has Decided to Start Building the Lunar Gateway Usin... by pfdietz on Sunday February 21, 2021 @12:49PM (#26215451)
Even the best HTS tapes won't make fusion competitive. Limits on power/area through the first wall guarantee fusion will have bad volumetric power density compared to fission, even at high magnetic fields.
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Re:NASA Has Decided to Start Building the Lunar Gateway Usin... by ncmncm on Sunday February 21, 2021 @04:40PM (#26217517)
It is my understanding that FRC fusion could make good use of HTS tape.

We can still say that no amount of HTS tape, or of anything else, will ever make Tokamak hot-neutron fusion competitive. But that is not a reason to abandon HTS tape development.

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