| Fusion watchers on 10:20 - Dec 20 with 656 views | itfc_bucks |
I used to work in this field.
It's over optimistic, nobody has managed anything approaching a commercially viable level of output yet.
The Americans are pursuing a weird inertial confinement system, which seems fundamentally flawed. The rest of the world are using magnetic confinement and Tokamak based technologies, which seems a much more obvious and sensible solution. |  | |  |
| Fusion watchers on 11:18 - Dec 20 with 554 views | CoachRob |
| Fusion watchers on 10:20 - Dec 20 by itfc_bucks |
I used to work in this field.
It's over optimistic, nobody has managed anything approaching a commercially viable level of output yet.
The Americans are pursuing a weird inertial confinement system, which seems fundamentally flawed. The rest of the world are using magnetic confinement and Tokamak based technologies, which seems a much more obvious and sensible solution. |
Are these things written for investors rather than being science news?
A Q value of 10 seems very high depending on how they have calculated that number.
There was a paper out in Nature last year that caused a stir about room temperature superconductors, I think it got retracted, but these stories are often misrepresentations by science communicators or turn out to be errors in the methodology. |  | | |
| Fusion watchers on 11:23 - Dec 20 with 541 views | itfc_bucks |
| Fusion watchers on 11:18 - Dec 20 by CoachRob |
Are these things written for investors rather than being science news?
A Q value of 10 seems very high depending on how they have calculated that number.
There was a paper out in Nature last year that caused a stir about room temperature superconductors, I think it got retracted, but these stories are often misrepresentations by science communicators or turn out to be errors in the methodology. |
A return of 10 or more is widely viewed as the minimum threshold for viability.
That's a straight conversion too. So you then need to do something with that energy, IE convert to steam, turn a turbine somewhere. That's the big challenge.
My two pence - this is a fluff piece to try and get investment from somewhere. Most of the easy money for fusion has already been fleeced.
Smart money is on fission for the next 30 years, with SMR systems.
Fusion will work, we're just not there yet. ITER, in France, is the next big experiment and that will generate a return of 10, simply due to scale alone. | | | |
| Fusion watchers on 11:25 - Dec 20 with 536 views | StokieBlue |
This start-up is backed by Gates and Bezos so whilst they might not lack funding they also have to push optimistic views with those backers.
We are still a bit away from anything realistically commercial. Even the recent laser ignition experiments in the US which claimed to get more energy out are massaging the figures to get to that conclusion.
Hopefully we will get there though, just going to be a while. It's a complex problem.
SB |  | | |
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