Skralyx on The Daily Kos says the physicists are on schedule.
Physicists? Not vote counting managers?
No, physicists. Specifically, the fusion energy folks, the ones who’ve been telling us fusion energy was 20 years away for all of my lifetime.
It’s hard to overstate how much the world would be changed by success in net energy generation by nuclear fusion. A mini-Sun, on Earth, on demand. But every time you hear about nuclear fusion, it seems the timeline for it just got extended again. It’s always 20 or 30 years away, isn’t it?
Well, here’s a refreshing change, to say the very least: The Journal of Plasma Physics has just released a special issue stating, via 7 papers, involving 12 different research teams, that due to recent advances in theory, design, and materials, the first working demonstration of net energy production by nuclear fusion, with no need to add external heat once it gets going, has been moved up by a decade. It’s now projected for 2025.
Whether this turns out to be a panacea for our dirty energy pains is another question, though. How long does a fusion power plant stay in future? How often does it have to go down for maintenance? How much does it cost to build one or more of these such that they supply a substantial portion of the power grid?
What are the risks of catastrophic failure?
Still, this is an exciting time in fusion research – and maybe for future generations.
