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A comment on MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy. Parent comment

Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by bigyikes on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:27PM (#28463820)
How do projects like LIGO ever get completed? I’m probably totally naive here, but I thought LIGO is physically larger and has many difficult constraints. The LHC comes to mind as well, and that absolutely dwarfs ITER in physical size. What’s the difference? Dealing with heat output? Superconductors are really hard maybe?
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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by sbierwagen on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:36PM (#28463898)
LIGO did take decades to construct, like the LHC. According to LIGO's wikipedia article, it was the most expensive project ever funded by the NSF in 1994.
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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by neltnerb on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @06:49PM (#28464032)
LIGO's size is also deceptive, the legs are kilometers long but the design is an L with the important bit being to vibrationally isolate things, maintain dimensional stability, and maintain vacuum.

ITER is likely bigger in terms of volume of concrete or actual footprint.

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by lambdatronics on Thursday September 09, 2021 @11:36PM (#28477541)
Hmm, looks like ITER and LHC both use about the same amount of superconductor: around 500 tons.

[0]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1018583 [1]https://www.iter.org/mach/Magnets

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