I feel like we need a SpaceX for Fusion, someone willing to fund and build a whole bunch of SPARC reactor prototypes of various sizes quickly, with the understanding they may or may not work.
The Nature Papers on ARC show it's almost sure to work. So it's rather disappointing it'll take 5 years to build SPARC, and then another 10 for ARC. Seems to me the primary problems are manufacturing and scaling components like REBCO. Someone like Musk would look at this and go "ok, first thing, let's build our own REBCO factory, and even mine the materials if necessary ourselves to get cost efficiency". They're still approaching this as "big science" project, where they don't want to fail, and they're gonna subsist on grants and as much off the shelf providers as they can.
Given the climate crisis, the government should be doing the same as they did with the CRS for space, award DOE contracts of $X billion for a working reactor, dole it out to people doing SPARC or Thorium Molten Salt (LIFTR) designs.
The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow, we need to build and fail a lot more rather than sink $22 billion into multi-decade projects like ITER.
The Nature Papers on ARC show it's almost sure to work. So it's rather disappointing it'll take 5 years to build SPARC, and then another 10 for ARC. Seems to me the primary problems are manufacturing and scaling components like REBCO. Someone like Musk would look at this and go "ok, first thing, let's build our own REBCO factory, and even mine the materials if necessary ourselves to get cost efficiency". They're still approaching this as "big science" project, where they don't want to fail, and they're gonna subsist on grants and as much off the shelf providers as they can.
Given the climate crisis, the government should be doing the same as they did with the CRS for space, award DOE contracts of $X billion for a working reactor, dole it out to people doing SPARC or Thorium Molten Salt (LIFTR) designs.
The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow, we need to build and fail a lot more rather than sink $22 billion into multi-decade projects like ITER.