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One reason it’s so hard to make predictions about the fusion age is that we’re still not sure what the best fusion device will even look like. A tokamak, the doughnut-shaped machine Commonwealth is building? A giant laser, like Livermore Lab’s? Or one of the many other shapes and concepts that other start-ups are working on?
At this point, aren't we pretty sure that laser confinement won't easily scale to continuous operations? All the fusion startups I can think of are using some form of magnetic confinement.
Mmm... I wouldn't say that it's difficult to scale. Getting fusion to happen is hard, but repeatedly is simply an engineering problem (still hard, but less so).
I just have a hard time imagining how one would convert a reactor like the NIF have (where tiny gold pellets of deuterium are loaded and blasted one at a time) into something which could power a city.
A tokamak like the JET or ITER (which can operate continuously) seems easier to adapt into a power plant.
It's being worked on. Repetitive shots aren't as ideal or obvious as a quasi-stable reactor, but a pulsed system will still have its output effectively smoothed in process of heating a thermal jacket or liquid first wall.
Statistics, high speed computing which I've assisted with previously, and other techniques are likely to get the rep rate to at least 1hz with the occasional miss.
Certainly ironic that we're making what feels like a nuclear combustion engine. Old tech, same as the new tech..
There are also a lot of manufacturing difficulties with tokamaks. The magnetic flux density is much stronger at the inside of the torrid vs outside, since all the torroidal coils must meet near the middle. So there's an issue of "barely enough magnetic force" at the outside, "too much" force on the inside, which adjusting for or adding compensation for potentially further decreases system efficiency. And that's the goal, getting to thermal breakeven.