Comment by pfdietz
5 hours ago
Yes. They argue Helion screwed up computing the rate of energy flow from fast ions to cool electrons. I have not seen a good rejoinder from Helion, which is a very bad sign.
Given this, and given the apparent failure of Zap's scheme to scale, I don't think fusion has any significant chance of succeeding now.
> I don't think fusion has any significant chance of succeeding now.
if by "now" you mean schedules proposed by all those fusion startups, then you should've known better the moment they became "viral" in a very fake way (same for quantum computers)
for a more serious timeline, ITER is coming online early 30s, add a decade to get to more-than-even tokamak and another decade for something "commercial"
and by then it will be just in time to support operations on the Moon, I guess
> if by "now" you mean schedules proposed by all those fusion startups
No, I mean the impossible economics of their schemes. For example, the ARC reactor is about 40x the volume and mass of a fission reactor of the same thermal power output. It cannot possibly be competitive as a source of heat with a fission reactor. And fission is not competitive with renewables. So fusion is doubly cursed economically.