I encourage anyone curious to look up videos on SPARC on YouTube. It’s very encouraging! It seems honestly very reasonable that they will see sustained net energy gain for their entire power plant before 2030 (tho SPARC is still a demonstrator not designed for continuous service, so “sustained” means like one minute).
Here’s some videos:
8 years ago:
2 years ago:
Latest update posted yesterday:
https://www.axios.com/pro/climate-deals/2024/05/01/commonwea...
That's a good plan, but ultimately, it's going to be a state backed (that's why I have "non-state backed ones" qualifier). CF is going to have a reactor with fusion with Q>1, but commercial product?
China is working on MSR. It has employs something like 700 Phds and 700 support personel for over a decade and has only recently made a research reactor. That's what I consider a serious effort (and that's for far simpler technology).
In my opinion, people underestimate how brutally hard it is to make new technology to work reliably. E.g. Superphenix, sodium cooled reactor had a capacity factor of 7.9% over a decade of production. That was after they had a demo reactor Phoenix with capacity factor 65%.
For past 50 years, we had ["fusion never" level of funding](https://imgur.com/u-s-historical-fusion-budget-vs-1976-erda-...). Because of climate change, there is a sleuth of nuclear startups.
I wouldn't hold my breath for any of the startups. None of them (at least non-state backed ones) seem to have realistic way to the goal.
I remember reading a post from one of startups after rejection from NRC. It read like a blog post after being dumped by a girlfriend written at 3 AM, drunk.
On the other hand, it's not like nuclear is going away, e.g. Uganda and Kenya are planning on nuclear reactors. Maybe we should have a better option to offer than the light water reactors.