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by willis936 1794 days ago
SPARC is great, but I'm under the impression that a gen 1 DT MCF reactor will almost certainly need to be a stellarator to work around the engineering challenges and pulsed nature of tokamaks. Optimization, HTS magnets, and clever coil winding enable them. Tokamaks are easier so SPARC should certainly be made to make its splash.

The real problem is that DoE's Office of Science is relatively reducing funding of Fusion Energy Science. It's barely enough to meet the US' ITER contribution. The very few existing projects are running on fumes. No one in the US is making a machine and hasn't been for over a decade.

https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/2021-05/doe-fy202...
1 comments
DennisP 1794 days ago
People are making machines, it's just with private funding. This includes SPARC, which MIT spun off into Commonwealth Energy. As of a year ago they'd raised over $200M.

https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/26/with-84-million-in-new-cas...

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willis936 1794 days ago
The context is US publicly funded projects.

The reason I used this context is because fusion is not profitable, won't be for at least 30 years in the optimistic estimates, and may very well never be profitable. It is exactly the kind of thing that should be public works.

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DennisP 1794 days ago
Maybe it should, but since the government is not doing it, we're lucky that investors disagree with your assessment. CE, Tokamak Energy, Tri Alpha, General Fusion, and Helion have all gotten substantial private funding. Tri Alpha was over $700M last I checked. One of Helion's investors is YCombinator.
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willis936 1794 days ago
It's a matter of perspective and wager. I wager that the public image cost of failed startups leads to a reduced likelihood that fusion will be properly funded in the next 100 years. Fusion already has a public image deficit to overcome.

One could be optimistic and say the few potential successful startups such as SPARC or potentially successful moonshots such as Helion will lead to more private investors and/or public funding, but it's a community betting its public image when it's already down. I don't have a safer alternative to suggest.

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ncmncm 1793 days ago
Not just a public-image deficit. The $billions already poured down that rathole would take decades for the first fusion plant to pay back, if it had to, before ever achieving the break-even that actually counts. Especially so, when running it only at night after cloudy days when the much cheaper wind, solar, and storage flag.
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