Which is to say, it is full of statements about ITER I've heard for decades at this point - namely, the illusive "industry will totally overtake ITER".
It's been said before, and it hasn't happened: someone announces a thing, declares scale up in 5 years, 5 years passes and they don't have anything - but at the time all the people super-keen to have "totally called it" and prove how smart they are take a pre-emptive victory lap celebrating the success of the private industry over government science, or ITER or something...just slightly misremembering that it hasn't happened yet. Then it doesn't happen.
This article is citing the US NIF as a potential competitor to ITER: it's not. In any possible way. Or to put it another way - the NIF took about 30 years to get to ignition. They are nowhere near Q > 1 (it's also basically not the goal of the facility - the facility is a nuclear weapons research lab first and foremost).
I will confidently make a prediction here: in 5 years Helion will be dead. Commonwealth Fusion Systems still won't have anything. Tokamak Energy won't have anything. The link in this article about private investment is to another article which is already 7 years old. The website[1] of Tokamak energy talks about fusion "in the 2030s."[1] General fusion are saying break-even by 2026.[2] Tri-Alpha-Energy are saying early 2030s[3] for "Da Vinci" (which I'm just going to assume is their power producing prototype since it's hard to tell from the website). Commonwealth Fusion Systems say they're building SPARC right now as a net energy machine, but as of 2024 they are still building it[4]. You know, the next thing will just be "net energy" as a quick to-do point.
Now...do I wish any of these company's ill-fortune? Not at all. I hope they succeed wildly and it turns out everything works great. We'll be several billion in research dollars ahead if someone cuts off ITER at the pass with a viable, cheaper reactor...but they haven't done it yet. You don't get to take a victory lap about their success when there aren't net energy fusion reactors out there. Because saying you can do it, and actually doing it are quite different - otherwise we'd have succeeded at fusion in the early 1970s when we were writing all the initial grant proposals, not spending the next decades learning about plasma stability, loss mechanisms and scaling rules. After all, people were very confident about Polywell fusion being the next big thing till...whoops, once you have the right model of what's happening it's pretty clear you can't get it to work.[5]
I'd like to add that inertial confinement fusion is unlikely to be practical as an energy source, because even though it is closer to Q ≥ 1 than any magnetic confinement project has got, it is 'bursty' and requires lasers to recharge, unlike the plasma in magnetic confinement which is expected to continuously fuse and produce energy.
It's not really here nor there though - the reality is it's an underdeveloped technology. It is technically very interesting that it works, but the big engineering roadmap is just "okay, how do you even build a power plant out of this?"
You can certainly imagine that you simply drop pellets into the chamber continuously, and use a heat absorption medium (because you don't have magnets to keep cool) to smooth out the power curve. But all of that is the sort of development work which ITER is designed to prove out for Tokamaks - i.e. everything up to "we have the boiling water now". You'd have to build the ITER-for-Inertial-Confinement reactor project to make progress on it (and a huge chunk of your problem would just be "how the heck do we not spend all our power in the lasers?").
Fortunately we're likely to keep plugging away at it anyway, because the primary goal of NIF is to simulate nuclear fusion reactions in hydrogen bombs without detonating hydrogen bombs - and thus the secondary research can happen anyway. But it's definitely not in the category of "clearly the superior approach" - and more importantly, it wasn't "quick" to do - they've been plugging away at the problem decades.
I don't quite understand what is the purpose of ITER. What is it trying to achieve?
Just demonstrating Q>1 won't be useful.
If it's improvements in plasma modeling and material science, won't it be possible do achieve that in smaller scale experiments?
Like it's very hard for me to believe that the only way to improve knowledge of plasma and stuff is to spend $20+B on ITER.
Especially as ITER goals were set in 1980s. Computing capabilities are now many orders of magnitude better and are going to grow further in 2030s. Isn't there a possibility that by 2040 they'd just be able to do high-precision simulation of ITER?
And if you have a choice to spend $20+B on building the thing or $20+B to simulate it, the later is probably much more preferable as then you can simulate millions of alternative designs without actually building them.
Ignition, the part the hasn’t been done before, requires a large reactor. We don’t know how to generate self-powering reaction or run for long periods. ITER scale is only way to do that.
Plasma is hard to simulate because it is chaotic and includes fluid mechanics and self-generated magnetic fields. There have been effects that have been discovered that weren’t predicted by theory. Simulation can’t be done at finest enough level. We also don’t know the parameters for ignition.
I agree completely. I’m also quite sure about Helion never delivering anything, like you said. It seems they are spending more on social media influencers to get funding than actually doing R&D.
Which is to say, it is full of statements about ITER I've heard for decades at this point - namely, the illusive "industry will totally overtake ITER".
It's been said before, and it hasn't happened: someone announces a thing, declares scale up in 5 years, 5 years passes and they don't have anything - but at the time all the people super-keen to have "totally called it" and prove how smart they are take a pre-emptive victory lap celebrating the success of the private industry over government science, or ITER or something...just slightly misremembering that it hasn't happened yet. Then it doesn't happen.
This article is citing the US NIF as a potential competitor to ITER: it's not. In any possible way. Or to put it another way - the NIF took about 30 years to get to ignition. They are nowhere near Q > 1 (it's also basically not the goal of the facility - the facility is a nuclear weapons research lab first and foremost).
I will confidently make a prediction here: in 5 years Helion will be dead. Commonwealth Fusion Systems still won't have anything. Tokamak Energy won't have anything. The link in this article about private investment is to another article which is already 7 years old. The website[1] of Tokamak energy talks about fusion "in the 2030s."[1] General fusion are saying break-even by 2026.[2] Tri-Alpha-Energy are saying early 2030s[3] for "Da Vinci" (which I'm just going to assume is their power producing prototype since it's hard to tell from the website). Commonwealth Fusion Systems say they're building SPARC right now as a net energy machine, but as of 2024 they are still building it[4]. You know, the next thing will just be "net energy" as a quick to-do point.
Now...do I wish any of these company's ill-fortune? Not at all. I hope they succeed wildly and it turns out everything works great. We'll be several billion in research dollars ahead if someone cuts off ITER at the pass with a viable, cheaper reactor...but they haven't done it yet. You don't get to take a victory lap about their success when there aren't net energy fusion reactors out there. Because saying you can do it, and actually doing it are quite different - otherwise we'd have succeeded at fusion in the early 1970s when we were writing all the initial grant proposals, not spending the next decades learning about plasma stability, loss mechanisms and scaling rules. After all, people were very confident about Polywell fusion being the next big thing till...whoops, once you have the right model of what's happening it's pretty clear you can't get it to work.[5]
[1] https://tokamakenergy.com/about-us-fusion-energy-high-temper...
[2] https://generalfusion.com/
[3] https://tae.com/fusion-power/
[4] https://cfs.energy/technology#sparc-fusion-energy-demonstrat...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell