W7-X’s success has shifted some more funding into stellarators, but outside of that not much has changed in the landscape in the past 20 years. YCBO is still prohibitively expensive and fragile, but the use of high temperature superconductors with high critical currents would increase confinement time by a large amount.
You seem like you have a strong narrative you’re sticking to. Is there something you’d like to disclose?
"MTBF for Blanket/FW/PFC in any DT fusion device is estimated top be very short while MTTR is predicted to be too long -- leading to very low availability of only a few percent"
http://www.fusion.ucla.edu/abdou/abdou%20presentations/2016/...
Contrast that with Stacey's optimism about reliability.
"Based on our present understanding, D-T tokamak fusion reactors project a cost-of-electricity that is about 50% larger than the projected cost-of-electricity from advanced light-water reactors in the middle of the next century."
We all know what happened to the projected cost of fission reactors -- the projections turned out to be hopelessly optimistic, because of complexity and loss of experience. Fusion would face these problems in even worse form (indeed, ITER's cost ballooned 4x or more past the initial projections.)
The experience with fission has enabled us to calibrate the optimism bias in these projections, with damning results.
Simply being competitive with fission is no longer good enough for fusion to succeed. It has to be significantly better than fission.
Fusion is better in terms of proliferation issues, long-term radioactive waste, and fuel cost. Being in the same ball park in terms of the hard cost of electricity is probably a good enough target for now.
But fission is now a loser technology, hopelessly uncompetitive vs. the hard charging renewables. It's not even close any more.
Solar with long-term chemical energy storage should play a huge role, but I think it is too soon to say if one will push out the other or if fission will stage a resurgence. A lot depends on incentives to phase out fossil fuels. If natural gas produced electricity remains the cheapest option the development of all energy alternatives will be effected.
If you are arguing that fusion will never compete economically with natural gas, you may be right in the short-term but in that case there may not be a long-term.
