That interview makes it pretty clear that the MIT project is not the obsolete boondoggle that the NYTimes portrays it as. They've made significant recent advances. Something I don't think they mentioned: the Alcator C-Mod has the strongest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, several times stronger than ITER will have.

Aside from that, comparing it to ITER is a bit silly since ITER won't be operating for another eight years. We shouldn't just shut down research while we wait.

A note on Focus Fusion, mentioned in one of the questions: in 2012 they published a paper in Physics of Plasmas, the leading fusion journal, showing they'd reached the temperature and confinement time necessary for boron fusion. Right now they're on the front page of Indiegogo (in the "trending now" section, hit the right arrow) with a $200K campaign for the next piece of equipment they need, a beryllium electrode that they think will improve the plasma density.

> Soulskill posted more than 2 years ago | from the and-are-awesome dept.

I see that you noted this, as well. I hope Slashdot will reverse this. Some older posts are still very useful and relevant; however, knowing their context including timing is an important part of this.

Slashdot used to cater to "technical people", i.e. people who can cope with dated material that is older than e.g. "last week", and that is still specific -- some of us still remember calendars more than a year old and what was happening at specific times of those years.

I hope that is not changing. Such a change is not the kind of "social" that I want...

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P.S. From the non-beta version of the site:

> Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday April 11, 2012 @10:52AM