Comment by pfdietz
4 days ago
I do enjoy how mindless some of the fusion advocacy is.
Why do you think a result like this would make anyone less skeptical of fusion? Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion. This is just another vastly overhyped "breakthrough", which we seem to have every week.
I've followed fusion for probably longer than you've been alive, and there are fundamental showstoppers for the common approaches, particularly tokamaks and stellarators. Fusion may have a chance with unconventional approaches, like Helion's, but the consensus approach looks like an exercise in groupthink that won't lead anywhere.
>Why do you think a result like this would make anyone less skeptical of fusion?
Just 9 days ago: >>Ability to run a device for this long is not the obstacle to success for nuclear fusion.pfdietz
3 days ago
1970-01-01
3 days ago
What an odd take. Do you also consider the list of flight endurance records to be immaterial to aircraft evolution?
Focus on relatively unimportant subtasks has a name. It's called "bikeshedding".
This achievement is relatively unimportant. It's not the major issue that would block a DT fusion reactor. As such, achieving it doesn't move the needle much on the plausibility of DT fusion in tokamaks.
This is not the definition of bikeshedding.
3 replies →
Agreed with all of this. And, there’s an implicit criticism of science journalism here. Any article that suggests useful fusion reactors are X years away should address the massive unsolved engineering problems that have to be surmounted. But no news source is going to spend five or six extra paragraphs explaining neutron metal activation or hydrogen embrittlement.