Comments by "Lepi Doptera" (@lepidoptera9337) on "How close is nuclear fusion power?" video.

  1. In ITER? Nothing. ITER will not solve that problem and it does not have that problem to begin with. It will never achieve continuous operation with neutron fluxes that will destroy the walls. It's still a confinement experiment. In practical reactors that function would be taken over by the breeding blanket, anyway, but so far nobody has solved that problem practically. I am not even sure anybody is working really seriously on it, yet.
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  2. And what a highly reliable and stable one that is. People used to honor it as a god, the life bringer. ;-)
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  3.  @thomasreis4949  ITER is not designed to make EROIE net positive. It is designed to make Q_plasma on the order of 10. I don't know why people don't want to understand that.
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  4. It's sad to see Sabine Hossenfelder setting strawmen on fire these days. She was so much better in the past.
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  5. While technically Sabine Hossenfelder's remarks are true, they miss the point about ITER. ITER is being advertised as an experimental plasma physics facility, not as an actual reactor. They write this on their own website: "ITER will not capture the energy it produces as electricity, but—as first of all fusion experiments in history to produce net energy gain—it will prepare the way for the machine that can." Also "The experimental campaign that will be carried out at ITER is crucial to advancing fusion science and preparing the way for the fusion power plants of tomorrow. " and "Harnessing fusion's power is the goal of ITER, which has been designed as the key experimental step between today's fusion research machines and tomorrow's fusion power plants." Nowhere does the ITER collaboration claim that they can make electrical energy. ITER is a science experiment that collects engineering data for future designs. That's it. Will there be future designs? Probably not using ITER's approach of bigger is better. That is economically simply not feasible. Future machines will have to operate with small plasma volumes at much higher fields (probably around twice of ITER's 12T field). Talking about that would have made for a much more interesting physics piece.
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  6.  @eljcd  And they define for you what they mean by "net energy". They mean Q_plasma. Nowhere do they claim that they mean net electrical energy. So basically the ITER collaboration's true statements are presented as a false claim. That is insincere in itself. Now, maybe you are emotionally disappointed that eighty years of plasma physics research have not resulted in a working reactor... but that is your emotional problem. It is not a problem that the ITER collaboration has to solve with a giant magnet around a donut shaped vacuum chamber.
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  7. To be profitable? Against renewable energy sources? That's nearly impossible with any Q and currently imaginable technology.
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  8. Why would it not be possible? Of course it is possible, just not with a machine that isn't designed to produce electricity in the first place.
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  9.  @danoconnor3720  I did. It says nothing other than what the ITER homepage says. You should read it.
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  10. Sounds good, until you compare the cost of piping heat with that of local electric heat pumps and then you have found just another economic loser.
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  11.  @DanKolis  Sounds good. The next suitable lake is approx. 150 miles from my house and the next power plant is approx. 80 miles away. Let me know when you are coming over to install those pipes for me. How about next Thursday? :-)
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  12. In other words, you don't have a PhD. Not even in stuff. :-)
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  13. Are you envious about scientist salaries? Don't be. They suck.
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  14. These people would be earning far more money in industry, kid. They chose to make less money so they can work on science, which they love. Don't be silly.
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  15.  @guidopahlberg9413  Of course you are a kid. You think like one.
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  16. People who don't know science always say it's about the money. That's their intellectual laziness talking. :-)
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  17. They never said that ITER was going to be a working reactor. They didn't lie about that.
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  18. So you are basically saying that you don't like people who are smarter than you. OK.
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  19. So what happened to you in high school science class? Must have been traumatic.
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  20. So you are basically saying that if a science experiment reaches its own goal, then it was a failure? OK. Walking away from the madman now. :-)
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  21.  @malvoliosf  What makes you believe that walking before you run is pointless? And what makes you believe this money would be spent on "more meaningful projects"? And who is the arbiter of that? You? Please. Aren't we a little full of ourselves here?
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  22.  @malvoliosf  The timing? I have no idea what that even means. How long things should take? That's an immature kid talking about his demands for how long it should take for the cookies to bake. Please. As far as you can tell? That only means you don't know anything about the diversity of the field. Fail. The market? For a science experiment? There are no markets for science experiments. Why not you? Because you are a fool. Next!
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  23.  @malvoliosf  Getting to the moon is easy compared to fusion, kid. Not everything that looks easy in your science themed coloring book is easy in real life. If you want a clean, almost free source of energy, put a solar panel on your roof. Done. Now please excuse me, I have smarter people that I need to talk to. :-)
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  24. We will never fly to the stars with solar and battery power. For that we will need fusion, whether you like that or not.
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  25. Science experiments usually need energy. CERN, for instance, runs mostly on nuclear energy donated by France.
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  26. The only goal of ITER is to produce a Q_plasma of 10. The next machine called DEMO would be producing net energy. I doubt DEMO will be built as advertised (15% larger than even ITER). The design will probably be made obsolete by much smaller high field reactor designs.
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  27. That only tells us that you didn't pay attention. Is that a pattern in your life? If is it, then you should try to change that.
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  28. Pretty much all promises of "simple" fusion devices are false.
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  29. So you are not very good at thinking. So what? So nothing.
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  30. Science doesn't need journalism to begin with. It documents itself. It may need translators for laymen, but that usually does more harm than good.
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  31.  @isntitabeautifulday1648  The problem with science journalism is that it has to reduce ever more complex research to articles that suit people with every shorter attention spans. That's just no a winnable game. As much as it pains me to say this, but society always was and, as long as there will be ordinary humans around, always will be split in two: those few in the know and then everybody else. It would be nice if journalism could bridge the divide even for politically important information, but even that is not happening. The majority of people want journalists to repeat their own opinions. They don't want to be told that their own imagination about the world is completely wrong. Can the average person stay informed about the world? Yes, it's easier then ever. Does the average person want to be informed? No. I am afraid not. One can lead horses to the water, as they say, but one can't make them drink.
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  32. The matter wasn't important to you before she told you this nonsense, so how could it have become important after she did?
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  33.  @SiemaZiomek  You argument basically boils down to the hurt feelings of a spoiled child who doesn't want to share. Please grow up. Society has made it possible for you to live in a well ordered, safe environment with plenty of food, clean water, heated homes and education. You are repaying it by pretending that somehow your tax dollars are yours to do with as you please. No, child, they are not yours. They belong to the commonwealth that has made you into a spoiled brat. We are to do with them as we please, not as you please. If we decide that we want to fund fusion research, then we will spend them on fusion research. If you don't like that, you are welcome to take your ball and go home. Want to know about countries that are not "wasting" money on fusion? How about Afghanistan? I hear it's nice this time of the year. :-)
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  34. Absolutely.
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  35. Because the UK has been singing in the shower a lot, lately. Brexit anybody?
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  36. Who promised you that we were?
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  37. Where have you been misled? Certainly not on the ITER home page. Sabine Hossinger just got into your weak mind. Try to be a bit more skeptical about what you read and see online.
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  38. So you are switching from one lame horse to another? Cool. :-)
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  39. We have been improving them to the point where they are way too expensive to operate. Pretty much everything that is not a nuclear suicide design produces electricity at a cost that exceeds the cost of renewables. Other than that nuclear energy is great.
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  40. Over 30 years ago the cost of fusion energy was estimated to be approx. 5x of electricity generated by coal fired power plants. So that gets us probably closer to 10x for wind and solar by the time that the first actual fusion planet could be operational.
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  41. Yes, and none of this matters to the problem of magnetic confinement fusion devices. They simply suck. It's a borderline case of physics unless you can build 25-40T magnets. Eventually we will do just that and then the physics will stop sucking.
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  42. You are welcome to stick your head into one...
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  43. It's OK, kid. We have lithium for a hundred billion years of fusion power. Don't worry about it. :-)
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  44.  @davidmunro5624  It's not difficult to make tritium from lithium. You need that breeding blanket to shield your reactor from its own neutrons, anyway.
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  45. What is very brave about saying the obvious, but irrelevant?
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  46. Because eventually we want to go to the stars and fusion is probably one of the few propulsion technologies that can get us there. I would almost bet it's the only one.
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  47.  @simian_essence  My best bet would be on much stronger magnets. ITER, and this I believe to be a valid criticism, was conceived ten, fifteen years too early and it is based on the 12T technology that seemed like a safe bet at the time. Once the field is set, the only way to achieve their goals was with enormous plasma volume, so they had to settle on a dinosaur. Machine cost scales, at least, with third power of size, if not faster, while fusion power density goes up with the fourth power of the magnetic field, so the volume bet is an absolute loser in terms of R&D, construction and operating cost. It's a pity that they didn't wait a few more years and didn't invest in magnet R&D first and foremost. MITs PSFC group has a few words to say about high field magnetic confinement fusion. It's well worth reading, even though some of it also comes with large grains of salt, of course. Field alone won't do it, but it's the right start.
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  48.  @fermansmith6042  I am just not attracted to you. Get it? As in "magnetic attraction". :-)
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  49.  @fermansmith6042  Come to me. ;-)
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  50. The field in a Tokamak changes, so the field energy, if not used while ramping it down at the end of the cycle, is lost. One can, of course, reuse most of the field energy with a suitable power supply design, but she is a theoretical physicist and will probably not have thought about that level of detail.
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  51. Yes, there was a lot of bullshit in newspapers and magazines in 1976, just as there is a lot of bullshit on the internet, right now. You need to stop reading it.
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  52.  @slonslonimsky2013  You don't need to listen to all the bullshit you hear. You also don't have to repeat it. :-)
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  53.  @fermansmith6042  Detecting bullshit is not a challenge. :-)
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  54. ITER is not a commercial project. It's a state sponsored science experiment, no different from e.g. CERN or Fermilab. You may want to pay attention to reality.
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  55. What is true for fusion is true for fission of all sorts: it's too expensive. The thorium reactor only give us more fuel, but then, we don't really need a million years of expensive fission energy. We will need a couple hundred years of dirt cheap solar and wind energy. We are deploying hundreds of GW of both annually with exponentially rising investments. In comparison, everything else is a losing proposition, economically speaking.
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  56. Where did scientists misinform, again?
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  57. Nobody went into magnetic confinement fusion research with the expectation that something practical will come out of it in the near term. Nuclear fusion, in general, has "come to fruition" a long time ago. We can make very neat thermonuclear devices with enormous energy gain for over sixty years now.
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  58.  @moonrock41  I don't see any collapse of civilization. I do see a lot of people who aren't thinking rationally, but then... we aren't dependent on them, so it really doesn't matter what you think.
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  59. Until you look at the scaling of a reactor with magnetic field strength and then it becomes utterly doable... at twice the field that ITER will produce.
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  60. Solar towers have been tried. They suck compared to the even lower tech solution of solar panels.
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  61. Nuclear fusion is the energy source of tomorrow... and will be for a long time.
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  62.  @fermansmith6042  Elaborate? Sure. Sell your house and invest all your money in a nuclear fusion company. What can go wrong, right? :-)
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  63. @Philip Saville If you believe things that you are hearing in TED talks, then your father had a sucker as a son.
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  64. @Philip Saville Technically that's a correct statement. Q_plasma will, most likely, be ten or more. What's your problem with that?
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  65. To make electricity at a multiple of the cost of renewables? Yes, all forms of nuclear energy are great at that. :-)
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  66.  @VenomKen  It's not the net energy that is the problem with nuclear technologies. We could make excess nuclear energy for millions of years with the technologies we have. It's just not cost efficient, that's all.
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  67. ITER uses almost 12T magnets. You can't even get the most basic machine parameters right.
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  68. Or you could have read the ITER home page to know that it's a science experiment and not a working reactor. They say it explicitly.
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  69. That's just the next problem to solve and ITER will probably not solve it. Neither is it likely that it will solve the fuel supply problem, which is linked to breeding in the blanket.
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  70.  @slonslonimsky2013  So you are clueless. Who gives a frell? Nobody.
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  71. ITER was never designed to produce energy. That's the end of the real story.
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  72. @Marcus Agrippa It's a science experiment, for heaven's sake. What do people not understand about that?
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  73. @Marcus Agrippa That just shows you that people, on average, have the intelligence of a block of wax that has been in the sun for too long. They don't pay attention to any details. You, for instance, aren't paying attention to the simple fact that ITER was always a science experiment.
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  74. @Marcus Agrippa You are still not paying attention.
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  75.  @alco1592  Nobody at ITER made the promise of unlimited amounts of energy just around the corner, either. Nice strawman burning, though.
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  76.  @alco1592  The point of the video is to make Sabine Hossenfelder money with YouTube advertising, kid. You aren't even smart enough to notice that. :-)
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  77. And there is the local conspiracy theorist.
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  78. Thorium has exactly the same problems as all other fission technologies: it's expensive and leaves too much to clean up (and nobody wants to even talk about the price of that).
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  79. Why who does what? The ITER collaboration never said that ITER was anything other than a science experiment to achieve Q_plasma>10. Only Sabine Hossenfelder pretends that they did.
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  80.  @macicoinc9363  The only people who can speak for ITER are its scientists and they aren't saying anything other than that it's a science experiment. Let's stick to the facts here. We have enough fake news already. And what does ITER have to do with batteries? Aren't you kind of jumping the shark here?
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  81. I doubt that you can find anybody at ITER who said it was. Nice strawman fire, though.
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  82. We have weapons grade plutonium coming out of our rears, already.
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  83. Solar and wind energy: hold our beers. :-)
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  84. People like to spend money on false hope. It gives them false hope. You decide whether selling false hope is a scam or just the supply of a basic human need. :-)
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  85. This is in France, kid. Guess what they are using to make electricity? Mostly nuclear power plants. You could have looked that up, of course, before making your statement. :-)
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  86.  @fuzzfacelogic789  Why don't you look it up? Is your intellectual laziness so overbearing?
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  87. So are you the janitor or the driver? :-)
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  88.  @alexandermarsteller7848  Ah, security. Got it. :-)
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  89. Ah, there is the "investor" who wants to push his own agenda. :-)
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  90. It's not the Tokamak principle that is the problem, it's the weak magnetic field. 12T are simply not enough. It takes 20-30T magnets to make magnetic confinement machines feasible. Plenty of people are already working on those magnets.
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  91. And why is getting very expensive electricity before you die important to you?
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  92. A commercial fusion plant has a breeding blanket that has to absorb almost 100% of the neutrons (otherwise there will be no tritium to operate the plant to begin with). The structural radiation problem is another one of those myths that just won't die.
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  93.  @bobvanwagner6099  The blanket is not structural. All it has to do is to absorb the neutrons. Your engineer was obviously not very good. Engineers should know about separation of concerns.
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  94.  @bobvanwagner6099  Why don't you do a literature search for fusion blanket physics papers, kid? You wouldn't be intellectually lazy, now would you? :-)
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  95.  @bobvanwagner6099  I am not into bullshit, either, and yet, here we both are.
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  96.  @bobvanwagner6099  The tell that you are a troll is that you want me to fetch stuff for you that you can easily find in a few minutes yourself. :-)
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  97.  @bobvanwagner6099  But I do, Love. I have been hunting trolls on the internet for a long time. :-)
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  98.  @bobvanwagner6099  Of course it's the wrong road. Did I say that it was the right one? But how does that make you anything else than a troll? :-)
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  99.  @bobvanwagner6099  I can answer a lot of questions, but hunting trolls is so much more fun. I got one right here.
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  100. Tokamaks are usually cyclical, but one can build them with neutral particle drivers and operate continuously. However, cyclical modes make for easier removal of contaminants in the plasma.
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  101. A practical machine will probably have to run between 20-30 Tesla. ITER is designed for 12 Tesla, I believe. Confinement gets much easier at higher fields.
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  102. Why does it have to be in the next 5 years?
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  103.  @0113Naruto  What's so special about 50? Or ever? You got a fusion reactor that has been running for over four billion years right above your head. Use it.
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  104. ITER is not speculation and she didn't debunk anything. She merely exploited the fact that people don't go to the ITER homepage that says that ITER is a science experiment rather than a commercial test reactor. ITER will prove that stable operation of a Tokamak with sufficient net plasma gain is possible. What it will also prove is that the low field Tokamak is economically not feasible. The machine is way too large, way too expensive and still underpowered to ever get anywhere close to a financially feasible design. Maybe small 20-30T designs will get closer, but even that is a hard nut to crack. It is unfortunate that she didn't spend the time to talk about that. You know why she didn't? Because that would have taken actual weeks of actual physics research for her in preparation. This one she could shoot from the hip. She is getting lazy, I am afraid.
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  105.  @djjfive  Well, the ITER homepage is factual and truthful, something which one can't say about some of the commercial companies that peddle tiny fusion reactor designs. It will be interesting to see if any of them can as much as light a candle. Personally I doubt it. ITER will certainly produce strong bursts of neutrons and heat, which will amount to mostly a radioactivity cleanup problem in my opinion. I found the fusion community to be quite honest about their goals and aspirations in the past. I went on a tour at Garching a long time ago and asked the scientist who showed us the facility what the community thought fusion could accomplish in commercial terms. He responded that a best commercial estimate for the cost of fusion energy was four times the cost of electricity from coal at the time. That was based on JET sized baseline designs without any cost for fuel breeding and processing, of course. With ITER sized facilities plus (as of yet non-existing) blanket physics and the rock bottom cost of solar and wind energy we are probably looking at ten times the cost per kWh now. In other words: magnetic confinement fusion will simply not happen commercially. That doesn't mean it won't happen. I can see it being the power source for future interplanetary and certainly for interstellar spacecraft. We will master 25T, then 30T and eventually even 40-50T magnet technology. Even a child can ignite a fusion plasma in a 50T field with a match (in comparison to the difficulties for a 12T Tokamak). Those reactors will squeeze tens of GW out of a few cubic meters of plasma volume. That's roughly the power of a space shuttle solid rocket booster, but burning for many hours or even days, while the spacecraft will accelerate to hundreds, maybe thousands of kilometers per second. That is where fusion will live. It will not power your LED light bulbs, other than in form of solar panels. And that's fine. Solar panels are great.
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  106. You are clearly having a problem with people who are smarter than you. You want to tell them what they should be doing with their lives. What have you done with yours, if I may ask?
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  107.  @pacobrezel  Please give me examples of research that get too little because of fusion and CERN. And I do not mean just in your opinion and in general. I want to know once and for all which worthwhile, earth shaking, thunder producing science projects are being causally underfunded by the global cabal that supports fusion and high energy physics. Thank you for your intellectual honesty.
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  108. They are doing it now. That doesn't mean anything. People are buying bitcoin... which tells you all you need to know about that.
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  109. Where is thorium? Somewhere between doesn't work well and it's way too expensive?
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  110.  @fermansmith6042  We'll get back to that when appropriate.
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  111.  @fermansmith6042  I still don't care, my friend. :-)
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  112.  @fermansmith6042  Not really.
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  113.  @fermansmith6042  Still don't care. :-)
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  114. This is a state sponsored science experiment. There are no "inventors" and no public investors anywhere around this.
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  115.  @yggtor3961  I haven't seen any credible private effort, so far. Dreaming doesn't get you anywhere in fusion research.
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  116. Of course a global warming troll had to show up. Next up: the flat earther and the free energy evangelist. :-)
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  117. Why would it be intentional? ITER is a physics experiment. The people who are building it want to learn about the behavior of the plasma in the machine. They are not engineers who are building a power plant.
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  118. That's why it's the energy source of tomorrow. You just have to wait a little longer. And then some. And then some more. :-)
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  119.  @NazidreckInDieTonne  Well. They said it was 20 years from now some 50 years ago... so... there's that. :-)
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  120. Except that fusion can easily produce energy gains of hundreds of millions, if not billions. It's called a "thermonuclear warhead". They are absolutely marvelous energy production devices. :-)
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