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Comment by beambot | Hacker News Reader

Let's also be really explicit... CFS is targeting Q>1 by 2027 for nuclear fusion via the SPARC reactor, but not Q>1 for electrical generation. The latter is slated for sometime in the early 2030s via the subsequent ARC reactor.

All of this is driven by HTS. Fusion reactors (generically) scale to the inverse^4 of magnetic field strength. HTS doubled the achievable magnetic field strength of electromagnets, which means that ITER-like performance can be achieved in university-scale reactors at comercially-viable, lower costs.

Dr. Dennis Whyte (MIT Nuclear Eng Prof) gave a great seminar at Berkeley that covered some technical nuances. It's mandatory watching if you want to geek out and understand the fusion hype: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM

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> that ITER-like performance can be achieved in university-scale reactors at comercially-viable, lower costs

Are they going to upgrade it or it’s already obsolete before it was even finished?

“Obsolete” probably isn’t the right word but they’re continuing as usual on ITER.. they’re aiming for 5.5T compared to >9T field strength on ARC. There’s still a ton of science to be learned, so it makes sense to keep pushing ahead but it’s clear any eventual commercial design will use HTS magnets instead of the NbSn ones in ITER.

I'd be ready to bet that the boring, international, big gouvernement funded ITER will be the only place to reach anything meaningful, long before the hip VC-backed startups ship anything.

Source : I generally don't believe VC-backup startups anymore, but that says more about me than about them (thankfully, sometimes they do stuff, like, 140 chars and useful tools for Russian trolls.)

But let's see how it goes !

Do you believe MIT? They used to run the Alcator C-Mod, which had the highest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, did preliminary work with the new superconductors, and based on all that they designed ARC before they spun off a company to actually build it.

I'll believe whoever first powers a light bulb from fusion.

I can completely imagine that it goes through stages like

Half a century of painful research at universities -> decades to build multiple prototypes -> years to build a POC -> decades to industrialize the POC -> years to connect the POC to the grid -> ???? -> light bulb moment -> ???? -> profit

I'm not sure we much further than the beginning of step 2. Indeed, (sorry to say that), I'd trust an MIT startup to do that more than a YC startup. But real life will serve as evidence.

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