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0 pointswillis9364y ago0 comments

High field magnets do enable potentially economically viable designs. There are still engineering challenges that require effort. Materials will be in high neutron flux and high thermal gradients for years.

Throwing money at problems warms up the industries around them. No one will get good at making HTS tapes unless they can pay to keep the lights on. Also, the plasma physics research is far from complete. Study of burning plasmas (coming with ITER) and different configurations of optimized stellarators (coming never?) are important places to shine the flashlight on.

We aren't on the home stretch, but that isn't a reason to stop, slow down, or even not speed up.

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adamsmith1434y ago· 2 in thread

>We aren't on the home stretch, but that isn't a reason to stop, slow down, or even not speed up.

Agreed, I'm very pro fusion but at this point you have companies like Commonwealth Fusion that have raised multibillion dollar amounts on their own so maybe that's a more viable path than DOE/NSF Grants to Universities?

willis936OP4y ago

It is quite exciting to see CFS' series B funding. I worry about commercializing too soon because companies need to turn a profit. The publicly funded fusion scientists and engineers are quite good at what they do and could efficiently spend money on research and new machines until the blueprint for a reactor is ready. The benefit of public programs is that they don't need to make quarterly profits and some problems are bigger than a year.

CFS has a path to be profitable even if they don't make a blueprint for reactors. Research needs high field magnets and they're positioning themselves to be the supplier of them.

adamsmith1434y ago

> I worry about commercializing too soon because companies need to turn a profit

Is this really the case though when Tech Startups routinely go public without ever turning a profit and with no clear vision on how they eventually will?

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