ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

>For the contractors-on-roofs, the slip & falls add up even though they'll never get an HBO mini-series.

Are solar roofs significantly more dangerous to work on than a normal roof for some reason? Roofs are going up whether they have panels or not.

Or like three pre-launch startups

You're right that something like a super collider could produce its own major opportunities for graft and corruption, but because it's a single project with a single construction to production timeline and a much more specific budget proposal, it doesn't quite compare to the endlessly fluid, highly organic and always adaptive nature of many long running billionaire foundations.

So no, I didn't quite prove the idea of its PR value false. Conspiracy nuts will always find a reason to consider anything made by some people or groups as suspect or outright nefarious, no matter how straightforward it is. but foundations oriented towards education, medical research and healthcare for the developing world are easily much more prone to that kind of narrative manipulation than a fixed, specific and extremely complex scientific device that will be used for a more limited range of possible things over a certain period of time.

The same applies to the differences in opportunities for graft and corruption between the two: Dishonest contractors and consultants could find ways to milk a privately funded super collider project during its construction and even during administration, but the scope of their opportunities would be fairly limited beyond a certain point, especially if the (presumably not stupid) billionaire funding it is keeping an eye on details.

Imagine on the other hand how many opportunities something like the Gates Foundation could offer for bad financial administration down the decades after its creator and main benefactor dies of old age or etc. Most of the collider's budget as covered by a billionaire in my scenario above will be a single sunk cost spent during a very limited period of time. The endowment of a giant foundation with flexible goals can on the other hand be managed (or mismanaged) ambiguously for decades.

The two things are not the same either administratively or philosophically.

I have such mixed feelings about ITER. I hope we learn the things we want to from it, and that what we learn is good news. But ITER is very far from being a demonstration of a practical power plant -- it's a science experiment first and foremost. (Well, it has really been an experiment in international government cooperation...)

I'm concerned that fusion research could have an 'AI winter' if there are any problems with ITER. (Similar to what has happened to inertial fusion in the failure of NIF to achieve ignition.) On the bright side, I think Commonwealth's SPARC experiment has a chance of beating ITER to hit 'scientific' break-even (Q>1) -- although ITER should top out around Q=10-20, where SPARC is aiming for Q~4. (Q~20 is needed for a power plant.)

The issue of 'disruptions' (rapid unscheduled disassembly of the plasma) has not been solved. ITER's construction was premised on the idea that we need it to be solved, so therefore it will get solved. The situation is very similar to that of self-driving cars -- avoiding 90% of disruptions seems pretty doable, but a percent or so happen without warning.(https://fusion4freedom.com/pdfs/Disruption-Risk-poster-Wurde...)

I hope that people don't get the wrong idea about fusion from ITER. Fusion reactors don't scale down well, but they also don't have to be quite as large, slow, and expensive as ITER. Tokamaks only use about 10% of the available magnetic field pressure, which means about 100x less power density than is theoretically possible, for a given magnetic field strength. Also, ITER is limited by its superconductors to about 5T. REBCO superconductors could potentially triple that, which would increase power density 81 times. So, there is a ton of headroom to improve performance -- dealing with the outflux of power becomes the major issue, actually.

Ultimately, fusion is a long way from market still. It's hard to innovate rapidly with devices that cost billions and have life-cycles of decades. Private enterprises are pushing down on those numbers, though -- that's where I'm pinning my hopes. Given that renewables are approaching grid parity, it looks like the goalposts will start receding before fusion even achieves net power production.

You gotta start somewhere! The plasma discharges will eventually last several minutes, but they will 'exercise' the machine very carefully/gradually over the course of a few years to be sure that nothing breaks.