Unfortunately, this tech is already "light years" ahead. https://youtu.be/vmVdPgkudC8
los_kiosk
I'd hate to be the technician who stupidly left a gas cylinder casually leaning against the reactor case! A slight leakage could send the whole thing sky high !!
Chris Coles
Everyone needs to turn back the clock to when we were running a, (for example), coal fired generating station . . . 365 days of the year . . . year in year out. For that is the design threshold that we need for any generator. Fact! . . . We do not have ANY idea of the long term viability of ANY container that holds a fire of 100 million degrees C; moreover, designed to be separated, by a single layer of material such as steel, from a coolant such as water at, say, 700 degrees C and the corresponding pressure . . . designed to transfer that pressurised steam to drive a revolving turbine to deliver . . . constantly . . . say, 500MW of electricity to the surrounding communities. In 1960, 60 years ago, as an apprentice, I came into contact with people working on the first designs for such an apparatus, if I remember correctly called ZETA. Now it has taken 60 years to reach 20 seconds. How many more lifetimes to reach, say, one hour?
sidmehta
Fingers crossed...almost free energy will bring new prosperity to our planet.
FB36
A lot of money is spent for fusion research but it is for an extremely worthy goal for whole humanity! Keep in mind the problem is not just clean energy! Fusion power can take humanity to a whole new level, which can never be done using solar & wind power etc! (Because they would be too weak! Imagine trying to run an electric car using a toy car battery!) For example, imagine humanity doing seawater desalinization at global scale & pumping plenty of water everywhere needed! (All deserts could be turned to forests or agricultural fields, for example!)
Surely the progress is slow but it just means there are still a lot to learn about fusion before it can become a practical energy source! Complain when nothing new is learned & progress is truly stuck!
Keep in mind many other important tech took a lot of time to truly become common/practical! Compare first cars to cars of today or first airplanes to airplanes of today or first computers to computers of today, etc (& consider how long it took for each)!
michael_dowling
For god's sake,fusion reactors of the magnetically confined type are never going to bring us an energy utopia,and even if they could be made to work,it would be far too late to stop climate change,while also being economical: https://thebulletin.org/2017/04/fusion-reactors-not-what-theyre-cracked-up-to-be/
Kpar
Big deal. Nowhere near break-even.
Besides, there is no mention of how to convert the plasma energy into a useful form (electricity).
Current proposals use fast neutrons to heat a stainless steel cooling jacket, which then powers a steam turbine- just like our current generating systems.
Problem one: Fast neutrons will blister and ablate the stainless steel jackets, requiring replacement every few years.
Problem Two: How does one dispose of the now highly radioactive steel? Lots of it. You can't recycle it, like with most iron products.
bwana4swahili
"harnessing the power of the Sun has progressed in leaps and bounds in recent years"
How about in the past 50 years!? With yet another 50+ years to produce net energy, if ever!
Douglas Bennett Rogers
This is a small machine. The Q of a tokomak varies as r**4. As such, this machine gives very promising results. The Q of ITER is about 10.