Fusion involves much harder and far more extreme physics than any other technology you might compare it to. Technology is not just a resource problem.
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There is material science, Physics, chemistry, computer simulations, advanced GPUs and CPUs, Big Data, advanced algorithms, advanced software modelling systems
Superconductors, magnetic fields study and probably a dozen or more advanced things required to make fusion.
IMO there is no way we could make fusion in the past even if we threw money like water into researching it.
Watch as they start (or already started) using machine learning algorithms to better study fusion
Without the modern advances we have now it would be impossible to advance much on fusion
And who knows, maybe we need some other undiscovered technologies in order to achieve a major milestone (not even talking about completing the research..)
Superconductors, magnetic fields study and probably a dozen or more advanced things required to make fusion.
IMO there is no way we could make fusion in the past even if we threw money like water into researching it.
Watch as they start (or already started) using machine learning algorithms to better study fusion
Without the modern advances we have now it would be impossible to advance much on fusion
And who knows, maybe we need some other undiscovered technologies in order to achieve a major milestone (not even talking about completing the research..)
Sulfur emission reduced by 97.5% with filtration device installed at coal power plant in Kostolac, Serbia. Funding provided by Exim Bank of China and China Machinery Engineering Corporation (CMEC) provided the technology. Consumes 190,000 tons of limestone and produces 300,000 tons of gypsum as byproduct which is then sold on the market to construction companies.
Agreed on this. I am just pointing out that fusion hasn't really been seriously pursued in a way that it could be. Otherwise, we'd be much further along. Honestly, what is needed is some kind of Cold War type atmosphere to push it like back in the day. Otherwise, I think ITER and all the related research are just that, research and not actually serious attempts to create a viable energy source unlike Fission reactor research.
On the contrary, it was been seriously pursued for decades. The amount of money spent on realizing f fusion has only been limited by the pace of research and the speed of developing the necessary engineering, not the lack of resources. There’s a limit to how much extra gain you get for each dollar you spend when the fundamental limit is dictated by the state of your knowledge.
Fusion research kind of reminds me of where cancer research was in the 1960s. The more time and money that was invested, the more we realized what we didn't know what we didn't know and the areas of research simply expanded and expanded. The fluid dynamics is understood pretty well, but the plasma is so "slippery" that there is currently no way to contain it for any reasonable period of time. Every time they use more power to strengthen the containment field, they can raise the plasma temperature and containment period that much more but then it just pushes net power fusion breakeven point that much further down the road. We just don't know how much further there is to go with it. If there is a real drive to develop it, they shouldn't be talking it up decade after decade while drip feeding it with what I consider relative peanuts.
The ITER project is going to be a failure, mark my words. Even if it could sustain plasma temperatures enough to initiate sustained fusion, the containment field would collapse IMMEDIATELY. Then you will have the situation where they can produce sustained fusion at will but they will have that new threshold to break through, where the field collapses immediately, everytime, which will required an order of magnitude more powerful containment field for when there is actual sustained fusion. It's not going to happen because the power it generates won't be enough just to keep the field up. They can barely keep plasma under containment without sustained fusion. Imo, we are nowhere near fusion power. The kind of materials science we need are far beyond what we have now, it's not even worth the try. They should be spending the money on fundamental research like materials science, physics and chemistry and focus on viable technologies like MSR Thorium reactors instead.
The whole idea is to have a device which can explore burning plasmas with those kinds of characteristics you would have when doing sustained fusion.
Several years back at the D-III facility in the US they discovered a way to increase confinement time. They basically refined the calculations used to create the magnetic field for the confinement and increased the speed they rotate the plasma and they got much better performance. They had to develop new algorithms to compute the optimum magnetic field.
These kinds of improvements take a long time to develop. Massively increasing investments wouldn't necessarily mean we would have viable fusion any sooner.
Even if ITER works as planned they still are supposed to have to create a DEMO reactor and only after that would a commercial reactor be built.