NASA Found Another Way Into Nuclear Fusion (2020)
popularmechanics.com
popularmechanics.com
1. For magnetic confinement -- Affordable, extremely high powered magnets called ReBCO magnets have hit the market in recent years.
2. Increases in computing power have made doing the modeling for a new design into a task that can be done in a cloud cluster, instead of requiring a dedicated supercomputer
3. VC's have funded a number of companies to actually start building prototypes.
I'm not qualified to say if it's "for real" this time, but there's definitely new excitement in area.
I expect to be using fusion power in my house by 2032. Find me in 2032 and tell me if I'm wrong.
1 https://www.discovermagazine.com/technology/why-nuclear-fusi...
But ITER was never even promised to be ready to fire up before 2050, and there has never been any intention expressed to generate power with it, commercial or otherwise. The promise was that after ITER work is done, they might be ready to spend $100B-300B on a commercial plant to be completed around 2100.
No commercial power will ever be generated by Tokamak. Its sole reason for still being pursued is as a jobs program for hot-neutron physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for occasional weapons work, although the large dollar amounts involved are a convenient channel to funnel public money to select private pockets.
Of course, by 2100 we will have overwhelmingly better choices available than this massive boondoggle. Even fission is more viable. Even orbital solar is more viable. More likely, terrestrial solar and wind will have long since crushed all competition except, maybe, geothermal.
In the meantime, every cent spent on Tokamak is stolen from work on actually viable ways to counter global climate disruption. Has been for decades.
There is one small boon from Tokamak work. Besides the hot-neutron scam, they are training up a generation of plasma physicists, which will have important, thus far unknown benefits if we don't blow all the opportunities.
While inertial confinement fusion facilities like NIF are also used for weapons work, the physics of magnetic confinement fusion plasmas are quite different from the physics needed for bombs. There's no chain reaction, and the 'hot neutron physics' is actually a very small part of the overall system. The neutrons essentially go in a straight line until they hit the wall; they don't interact with the plasma itself.
Most people in magnetic confinement fusion are studying magnetized plasma waves, instabilities, turbulence, and other collective behavior that are in a very different regime from bomb physics.
Let's see if this turns out to be snake oil, or something comes out of it.
I read quite extensively about cold fusion, and in the end there were too many bad actors to actually have a demystified clue of what's happening
Muon-catalyzed fusion is a totally unrelated phenomenon which has merely been referred to as cold fusion by some pop science articles.