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Comment by ladams | Hacker News Reader

Stellarators in particular suffer from very long development cycles. It takes years and years of research to develop the algorithms used to optimize the coil geometries, and then the production of the coils and assembly of the vacuum vessel within the coils is much more challenging than for a tokamak. The coils are hard to produce because they have highly irregular shapes, and tight tolerances. Assembling the vacuum vessel is hard because the coils cover much more of the "toroidal-ish" surface area than in a tokamak.

The is a lot of interesting work going on in stellarator design optimization now, but it will likely be many years before that research is realized in another actual reactor.

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For a few billion USD you could build a real power plant of this type. Sounds expensive, but consider how much money nuclear fission did cost initially, and how much money we burn on other stuff, then it's not unthinkable to have somebody rich chip in and make it happen. (Germany just gave $10bn subsidies for a domestic Intel factory.)

They managed to handle what a fission reactor outputs every second in this experiment.

I don't think that points to a commercial reactor whenever someone spends a few billions.

That's how research works. The first fission experiments couldn't power half a small country either.

When you listen to the guys from this original article then you'd know that for 10-20bn USD you could likely build a real power plant with this tech within 5 years. It's obviously not without risk, which is why nobody is doing it. But the technical feasibility is there.

They also point out that once the first-of-a-kind installation exists, subsequent models will be way cheaper and way better since you'd have learned a lot and streamlined the process.

But we choose to use public money for fossil subsidies instead, cause jobs, or something.

The US has spent (inflation adjusted) $34 billion on fusion as of the end of 2021. Assuming no real change it would be $35 billion as of the end of 2023.

http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2021/ph241/margraf1/

Fusion has been "a decade away" since before the turn of the millennium.

To say we should just throw $10-20 billion at a power plant and hope something comes out is not a good idea.

We should wait until one of the many multi billion dollar research plants is able to get even 10% of a reasonable to target energy output before even thinking about that.

Otherwise we would likely just sign the death of fusion in the public eye. Could you imagine the backlash if a $40 billion dollar project couldn't even produce power after two decades? (Going off how public works costs and timelines have been going is the reason for higher values)

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