Viewing profile — sam

Well said about the “lossy crankshaft”. As for what determines Q, that’s up next, stay tuned :)

Power to magnets (at least those not contributing to heating) are assumed to be included in the house load.

Thanks - what browser?

Yeah, it’s slightly buried - the publication with all the details, including the math is linked to in footnote 3 of the explainer article, https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/29/6…

This is mistaken. In space a radiator can radiate to cold (2.7K) deep space. A thermos on earth cannot. The temperature difference between the inner and outer walls of the thermos …

In the context implied above it is the ratio of fusion energy released to laser energy on target or the laser energy crossing the vacuum vessel boundary (they are the same in this …

We are careful to always specify what kind of “breakeven” or “gain” is being referred to on all graphs and statements about the performance of specific experiments in this paper. E…

It’s the ratio of fusion energy released to heating energy crossing the vacuum vessel boundary.

Companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems are an example of those utilizing high-temperature superconductors which did not exist commercially when ITER was being designed.

Author here - some other posters have touched on the reasons. Much of the focus on high performing tokamaks shifted to ITER in recent decades, though this is now changing as fusion…

This comment thread will go down in history along with the famous HN Dropbox thread. This thing is incredible and will eventually crush the iPhone. Solves iPhone addiction while re…

We only included projected values of SPARC and ITER because they're the only ones whose physics basis has been published in the peer-reviewed literature. We would certainly like to…

Thanks. We published a number of prepublication versions over the past year on arXiv to gather feedback from the physics community before submitting to Physics of Plasmas last Dece…

Author here. The black curve represents the hot-spot ignition condition for a laser inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiment (like the NIF). This means that during the short pe…

Surprising to see so much negativity here. Limiting to a small number of headlines is a useful mechanic. I can see this going in a number of interesting directions.

If you're interested in wheels, check out The Bicycle Wheel by Jobst Brandt. If you're building wheels it's a must have.

I’m guessing you’re referring to HL-2M which indeed in testing. But that tokamak is not designed to generate electricity but rather to study long pulse durations (~5s) at reactor r…

Author of that article and plot here. SPARC is projected to have energy gain Q >=2 and potentially up to 11[1]. ITER is projected to achieve Q of >=10[2] so I would guess that SPAR…

Most of the ports are used for diagnostic equipment, things like laser interferometers to measure plasma density or other devices to measure plasma temperatures. Also some ports ar…

I’m working on this exact issue. You can view all fusion energy companies here and filter by location. https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations/ You can view each of their fu…

Yes, check out https://www.fusionenergybase.com/ which I've put together. List of organizations are here, https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations and individual projects are…