The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023) • Hacker News Board

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#91

Post by willis936 » Sun, May 05, 2024, 4:43 PM UTC

XorNot wrote: post #89

willis936 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They never mentioned REBCO or HTS. It was obvious bullshit from the beginning. It was more likely a cover for a black project, like the SR-72.

Right but that's the point: the parent post is talking about those things as though they've obviously and clearly obsoleted the ITER design. Except that can't be true, because no reactor based on those technologies exists now , or is likely to complete construction in the near future. So ITER is the correct bet: take boring technologies and build a functional fusion device with them that gets Q > 1. Because there's a…

>Everyone working with REBCO has always talked about "rapid breakthroughs" in about 5 years, and then 5 years later the story is always the same: it's considerably harder to build with these things then you'd think, they're still working through the engineering etc.

Please cite the earliest REBCO-based fusion reactor promise date that has lapsed. I don't think reality agrees with your perception.

Importantly you can draw a straight line from REBCO-based fund raising and the amount of REBCO needed to be purchased for them. If "the engineering wasn't there" then that amount of money could not have purchased that amount of tape.

Also, how could ITER be the right bet when it costs so much and takes so long to build that it could never scale to anything more than a multi-generational science experiment (e.g. not a power source)?

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#92

Post by XorNot » Mon, May 06, 2024, 2:53 AM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #91

XorNot wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but that's the point: the parent post is talking about those things as though they've obviously and clearly obsoleted the ITER design. Except that can't be true, because no reactor based on those technologies exists now , or is likely to complete construction in the near future. So ITER is the correct bet: take boring technologies and build a functional fusion device with them that gets Q > 1. Because there's a…

>Everyone working with REBCO has always talked about "rapid breakthroughs" in about 5 years, and then 5 years later the story is always the same: it's considerably harder to build with these things then you'd think, they're still working through the engineering etc. Please cite the earliest REBCO-based fusion reactor promise date that has lapsed. I don't think reality agrees with your perception. Importantly you can…

ITER is a considerably more complex research device, designed and developed to generate and study burning plasma. It is also the first device of it's kind intended to do this. It is an entirely uncontroversial issue that the first version of literally anything is comparatively expensive compared to the costs of subsequent ones.

This is a problem the US Navy is intimately familiar with when it comes to shipbuilding as it is currently experiencing with it's next generation aircraft carrier design.

It is incredible though to see people saying that the ITER design is "obsolete" when the actual proposed replacement technologies have ongoing papers trying to move towards practical deployment as recently literally this year.

EDIT: It is worth nothing that I could be wrong in the end if the SPARC project succeeds[1], but there's a pretty heavy asterisk on that since ITER is amongst other things, a research project - the plasma physics modelling, supporting fusion research, even manufacturing and magnet winding research and other miscellaneous construction processes are all public knowledge which is shared amongst participating nations. It's been the only game in town for decades, and no one was wrong to try and build a fusion reactor 3 decades ago when it was as desperately needed then as it is even more so now.

[1] https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc

Re: The Mirror Fusion Test Facility (2023)

#93

Post by nullc » Mon, May 06, 2024, 8:00 AM UTC

actionfromafar wrote: post #33

jethkl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The engineering hall statue! Thank you for posting your comment. I thought it was an abstract sculpture trying look "engineery". But it's a realistic representation of a cultural wound, and it is a warning. https://engineering.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Kids...

“No deed of honor is commemorated here”

Four thousand years from now, P-Cygnian explorers arrive to find a desolate Earth-- the evidence of mankind is spread far and wide but no humans remain.

Archeologists are convinced that this planet was home to yet another civilization that killed itself fighting for access to energy ... or at least they were convinced, until they found The Artifact.

Every known civilization inevitably discovers the same design for fusion power or dies before it makes it that far: apparently it's the only one that works.

And there it is on earth, in statue form, at the bottom of an excavation pit recognizable to any student of physics.

What happened here?