The announcement today about one more step towards fusion power is great news.
While this is definitely progress, it is a running joke in the physics community that fusion power is always a decade or two into the future, and has been for about eight decades.
Still, progress is progress. So congrats to the teams involved!
I got to visit a fusion experiment back in 2014 at the Max Planck site in Greifswald, Germany. The photo is a part of the reactor behind some scaffolding.
This Politico article makes a good point about this not being a solution to climate change. Fusion power is nowhere near ready for application.
https://www.politico.com/newsletters/power-switch/2022/12/12/fusion-energy-reality-check-00073463
@veronica The folks at CFS are confidently spinning up supply chain to crank out superconducting magnets for a fleet of magnetic-confinement fusion reactors (entirely different tech from NIF's inertial confinement).
They are still 2 years shy of having their prototype online and generating, but putting their money where their mouths are in terms of readiness for commercialization...
@elfprince13 There's been a lot of prototypes. Is this a design expected to generate sustained fusion? Or just a research reactor?
@veronica It's expected to be online in 2025 and generate sustained fusion, and they're actively working on siting grid access for the commercial scale version a few years down the line. If you haven't been following their work, I highly recommend checking it out.
@elfprince13 Thanks, will do. I'm mostly checking in on ITER and the stellarator at Max Planck from time to time.
@veronica CFS is an *incredibly* well-funded ($2B) spinout from the Alcator C-Mod team at MIT with productized 20T high-temperature superconducting magnets.
https://cfs.energy/technology/#sparc-fusion-energy-demonstration
@elfprince13 20T, that's impressive. I was a fellow on the HiLumi LHC project at CERN, and when I left they were still working on the 11.4T magnets needed. Granted, that was in 2019.
@veronica I was in the DOE's National Undergraduate Fellowship program at PPPL back in 2012 and ended up deciding I'd rather do grad school in CS so I didn't have to spend the rest of my life implementing PDEs in Fortran, but one of the guys from the program who stuck with it is now their (CFS's) Head of Tokamak Operations.
@elfprince13 If I recall correctly, a major challenge with our magnet design was the superconducting wire for the 11.4T. It was incredibly brittle compared to the type used for the current magnets in the LHC.
I mostly worked on simulations for the radiation in the magnets from the experiments, so I wasn't directly involved.
And yes, I worked with Fortran 😊
@veronica brittleness definitely seems like an annoyingly undesirable property for "wire" 😅
@elfprince13 Ah, the CSF one you mentioned is the one called SPARC. That one I've heard of.
@veronica yeah, SPARC is the (still intended to sustain net-energy-positive fusion) prototype, and then ARC is the intended commercialized follow-up
@veronica and yeah, the 20T demo last year (and subsequent reveal they already have supply-chain in place to crank out more) was when I suddenly got optimistic about fusion again.