Comment by vonneumannstan
4 days ago
CFS is building their demo reactor that should achieve Q>1 and are already building their first commercial plant: https://blog.cfs.energy/cfs-will-build-its-first-arc-fusion-...
Barring some kind of engineering failures and delays they seem on track to have things ready in the early 2030s.
I think this is hopelessly optimistic. From what I can tell, they have not even started building the ARC reactor. There is about zero reason to believe that all the completely unproven concepts, like the molten-salt liquid blanket (or tritium breeding in general) are gonna work without a hitch and zero delays-- thats just straight up self-delusional.
In comparison with ITER, the have the advantage of newer magnet technology (which certainly helps!), but thats the only actually proven thing, and every other aspect of ARC is basically complete vaporware.
It would be a very pleasant surprise to have them extract electrical energy from the thing in early 2030, but I'm not even holding my breath for first plasma by then. But we'll see.
Our first clue that it was bollocks was when it was called ARC reactor.
No one has demonstrated stable plasma operations for any lengths of time and they are claiming to not just get Q-plasma > 1 but Q-total > 1 by 2030? This is more optimistic than Full Self Driving by 2016
You fell for the oldest trick in the fusion book.