For decades, government scientists have toiled away trying to make nuclear fusion work. Will commercial companies sprint to the finish?
They have been ‘closing in’ for 60 years.
Most highly sought-after technologies ‘take time’, and develop in an iterative fashion called ‘successive approximation’.
Heckling from the sidelines is what is known as ‘being unhelpful’.
I am not ‘heckling from the sideline’ to the ppl working on it. I am just ‘heckling from the sideline’ the media for trying to generate clicks with such headlines.
You’re completely missing the point. Yeah, this stuff takes time, and it will continue to take time. The point is, this article saying we’re “closing in on it” is clickbait garbage that’s just as useful as the one a decade ago saying we are “closing in on it”, and a decade before that.
So you’re unimpressed with what’s been going on at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory? Where they’ve induced a fusion reaction for a net energy gain? And repeated with better results?
Were we achieving net energy gain a decade ago? The decade before that?
Is net energy gain the goal? If so, does repeatable demonstration of the phenomena mean that we are closing in on it, or does it mean that we are moving further away from it?
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It would have been achieved by now if it had more than just token amounts of funding.
Just 10 more years!
I have been hearing this since the mid-80s.
Oh great, another public-private partnership puff piece. What NPR is trying to do here is convey government as “inefficient” and pave the way for more public support to take away the meager amounts of funding that Fusion get’s and give them to contractors that will then give that money to share holders, essentially stealing it from the public.
To put it another way, imagine that this “company” that claims they are close to a fusion breakthrough were lead by Elon Musk, would you believe him?
At least there are plans moving forward and practical tests being done.
To put it in a way I liked from someone else awhile ago, it’s like having the plans for a combustion engine, but not having the details on how large any of the various parts should be.
From the various articles I’ve seen, the research is definitely moving to a net positive energy direction, but there’s still plenty of research to do.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Standing in front of a set of aluminum coils that look like an advanced engine for some yet-to-be-built starship, Kirtley makes the case for his project that he’s made to venture capital firms and wealthy private investors:
That money came from investors like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who has shown an active interest in investing in nuclear fusion and fission as potential forms of clean energy for the future.
The hot plasma gasses struggle to escape their magnetic confinement, and getting the hydrogen and helium to stick requires an enormous amount of heat and compression — more so than other kinds of fusion fuels.
High-speed electronics, fiber optics and advanced, solid-state switches all make it possible to heat and compress the fusion fuel much more quickly than in the past — lessening the time it has to escape from its magnetic confines.
Like Helion, Zap’s concept isn’t new — government researchers tried to make it work in the 1950s, but ran into trouble keeping the synthetic lightning bolt from breaking apart before fusion occurred.
Helion’s last funding round raised enough money to complete both construction of its current machine and begin work on the full design of a power plant.
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