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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

This is a disingenuous argument. JET was not designed as a power plant. Those flywheels are used exclusively to transiently power the copper confinement coils. Since superconduction was discovered, no reactor study has had non-superconducting confinement coils because they are (very obviously) impractical.

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Remember, the easiest way for uninformed people to appear scientific is to lob high-level criticisms about the topic. In this case, it's "But it only doubled the output!" or something similar.

We see this pattern on every single piece of science news that comes across the front page of HN.

The only purpose of my comment was to provide context for the numbers in the article via a thought experiment involving doubling.

Since the calculation involves taking log_2, even if the estimate for the "used power" is off by a factor of 4 the result will only change by 50 years.

Can you make your qualitative comment quantitative and update the numbers in my doubling thought experiment?

I would be curious about what you think is more realistic.

A quantitative approach is no virtue here, just a more convincing way to lie.

ITER will use roughly the same amount of power as JET, produce 10x the power 40 years later. Even using poor metrics such as Q you have enough data points to p-hack whatever incorrect timeframe model you want.

ITER isn't even using HTS coils.

If you really want a quantitative projection of MCF performance over time, here you go. Don't lie with numbers if you don't know what you're talking about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fustion_triple-product_di...

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