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Comment by wcarss

My layman's understanding is that recently available (~last 5 years) industrial scale processes to produce rebco tape[1] is the specific advance in superconductor tech that's specifically enabling higher tesla magnetic field strengths from significantly smaller and lighter and easier to manage magnets, so you can get a system that's "powerful enough" to run net posititve at a size that's small enough to be built by a few universities rather than a few dozen nations (i.e. ITER), so the complexity of the engineering project drops from "unimaginable" to "just very high".

1 - https://www.fusionenergybase.com/concept/rebco-high-temperat...

2 - really great talk from a few years ago about this from MIT's Plasma Science Fusion Centre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk (really, if you like this stuff, give the talk a watch. It's great.)

parent wcarss 6 years ago

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