By those kinds of metrics, Tokamak Energy haven't "achiev[ed] anything useful" either.
Note that both companies are aiming to build a tokamak using high-temperature superconducting coils, which will facilitate energy gain in a small, high-field tokamak. CFS has built the coils, but no tokamak yet. Tokamak Energy has built a tokamak, but it doesn't use HTS coils yet, it uses standard/super-inefficient copper ones (they're developing the HTS coils as a separate project and expect to marry them in a future prototype). This prototype has the same "make it up on volume" problem, it's just lossy in a different way.
Both have made important advances that demonstrate critical components that will be necessary to do the full thing, but different ones, and neither of them has demonstrated everything. If anything, CFS's piece is arguably more important, because other copper-magnet high-field tokamaks have been built before (e.g., Alcator C-Mod at MIT, essentially the predecessor to CFS's prototype), but nobody has built a full-sized HTS coil before.
I am all for fusion research, in the context of research. But CFS’s short term goals comes off as a publicity stunt which rubs me the wrong way. Like IBM’s Watson playing Jeopardy etc, where what’s achieved seems like a breakthrough for non exports.
It’s possible they could succeed long term, but I don’t think it’s particularly likely.
Sure, I think that's valid. I just don't think Tokamak Energy's announcement is less of a stunt. They've both made progress on a well-defined but ultimately not-that-big piece of a big pie. Just different pieces. If the act of making big press pronouncements around incremental progress is a stunt, they all do it.
I hardly view "build a machine to understanding burning plasmas and steady-state tokamak operation" as a publicity stunt. These are hard machines to build in the best of conditions. The design of any power plant must be informed of results from machines like SPARC.
Note that both companies are aiming to build a tokamak using high-temperature superconducting coils, which will facilitate energy gain in a small, high-field tokamak. CFS has built the coils, but no tokamak yet. Tokamak Energy has built a tokamak, but it doesn't use HTS coils yet, it uses standard/super-inefficient copper ones (they're developing the HTS coils as a separate project and expect to marry them in a future prototype). This prototype has the same "make it up on volume" problem, it's just lossy in a different way.
Both have made important advances that demonstrate critical components that will be necessary to do the full thing, but different ones, and neither of them has demonstrated everything. If anything, CFS's piece is arguably more important, because other copper-magnet high-field tokamaks have been built before (e.g., Alcator C-Mod at MIT, essentially the predecessor to CFS's prototype), but nobody has built a full-sized HTS coil before.