This news is either based on misleading the public, or I am about to be updated with where Fusion is?
Watch this clip with Prof. Whyte from 8 years ago. It’s the team behind CFS(then still at MIT). Highly interesting. He will explain exactly what they will do(now doing), how they will do it, and why they will do it they way they are doing it.
Please note that they are pretty much on target since. I have been following CFS closely.
Essentially the breakthrough has been the ability to manufacture more powerful magnets. CFS makes the most powerful magnets in the world.
That was always the main issue, how to contain the plasma.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&pp=ygUrYnJlYWt0aHJ...
In a Nov. 17, 2021, news story, Ball wrote that scientists working with the MIT/CFS collaboration are planning to deliver the “first fusion machine expected to generate more energy than it uses” in 2025.
Actually, the MIT/CFS SPARC reactor is designed only to produce a fusion plasma that produces power at a higher rate than it consumes power. That measurement does not account for the input power required to operate the reactor. It’s the same trick that fusion promoters used to sell the idea of ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor."
I don’t know exactly what went on in that interview. I have not read it.
It’s a complex topic and easy to misunderstand.
> Please note that they are pretty much on target since. I have been following CFS closely.
And their credibility.
The predecessor, the ARC reactor in the 2014 paper, had a power density of 0.5 MW/m^3.
In comparison, a commercial PWR, which you can buy today, has a power density of 20 MW/m^3.
So, even with all the HTSC hype, their machine is still a factor of 40 worse than existing proven fission technology.
How is such a bloated, much more complex machine even going to compete with fission, never mind the alternatives that have sidelined new fission construction? The capex will be completely out of bounds.
If they get ignitions, all the other problems will be solved very fast, because there will be an enormous rush from investors wanting to invest billions.
"Necessarily" being your Zeno's Arrow. Necessary to what threshold? I can literally argue against anything to an arbitrary level of necessity. (Breathing doesn't necessarily ensure living.)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4&pp=ygUrYnJlYWt0aHJ...