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by WorkLobster
2050 days ago
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I am used to hearing this from software engineers who are secure in the knowledge that when they want to try out a concept, hardware time to do so will be cheap and readily available. At some point, you are going to have to take all of your shiny materials science and turbulence simulations, and actually build a piece of apparatus to test it out on the scale that your chosen application (in this case, power generation) will require. The universe is under no obligation to make sure that it will cost less than billions to do so; hence ITER. Having said that, there's been a lot of extremely promising recent progress in high field superconductors and fusion designs based on them (MIT ARC, Tokamak Energy, etc) that could shrink the necessary scale for a working reactor, so perhaps it will turn out we're lucky with the physics on this one after all. |
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