The largest project in the history of humanity is about to enter a key phase: the final assembly of the reactor core, led by an American giant.
The largest project in the history of humanity is about to enter a key phase: the final assembly of the reactor core, led by an American giant.
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I once created a character for a superhero game who had been a welder who fell into an experimental fusion plant while they were testing the coils. This is pretty much how i envisioned it.
I live in the city that was up for this project back, 25-30 years ago. Short sighted idiots afraid of black holes and such voted it down. So stupid, this would be amazing to have in my backyard right now. City could be a hub of nuclear research, jobs would be created, our nuke plant wouldn’t be on its last legs. But this is the problem when you leave big decisions to the uneducated.
More and more I’m starting to think the famous French smugness is actually well-earned: they’re notoriously intellectual, on a mass cultural level in the same way the americans are anti-intellectual. This French intellectualism is overshadowed only by their notoriety for aestheticism.
What I’m saying is, it’s frankly a good thing to have a nation with such priorities as one of the EU core. Unlike a certain other nation I could name, whose energy policies are driven largely by past trauma.
It’s going to be fascinating watching how the fusion power race turns out. We’re watching something in our lifetime that will be talked about by historians a thousand years from now.
I think Helion Energy will have a working fusion plant first.
One huge problem with tokamak is that it is not scalable. For most things, you build a small demonstration prototype. Like build one wind turbine and show how well it works before building a thousand wind turbine wind farm.
Why is ITER so big? Cuz it has to be, to demonstrate the physics in question.
It’s a 500MW thermal reactor. It will not be used for electricity production.