Oh it’s fine. we’ll just put it over in the poor part of town… not like this shit will be regulated, after all.
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Put a positive spin on it! Housing project for the poor and/or homeless. Lots of smallish houses on a little plot of land, each with a dry casket in the basement to heat the house. Tax deductable for the developers/investors. Win-win-win!
(Yeah, I wish I was joking. Give it a little time and one of our techbro geniuses will pitch something like this. And there’s a good chance it will go ahead, with bespoke legislation if needs be.)
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MIT-Linked Company Says It Will Build ‘World’s First Grid-Scale’ Nuclear Fusion Power Plant
400 MW, expected to come online “sometime in the early 2030s”.
In other words, Ten! Ten years! Ten years, man! TEN! from now. Right.
They haven’t even finished building their smaller, proof of concept machine yet.
And now they’re already starting to build the real thing.
And while the article correctly points out that the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory reached nuclear fusion “ignition”, i.e. a reaction that puts out more energy than is put in to trigger it, it fails to mention that NIF is a laser-based inertial confinement fusion (ICF) research device.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is building a Tokamak, i.e. using magnetic confinement fusion (MCF). To the best of my knowledge Tokamaks still haven’t reached breakeven, let alone producing surplus energy. By the way, the first Tokamak was built in 1954. This is seriously tricky. Every time one problem is solved another one rears its ugly head. At one point this should work, the proposition as such is solid. But even then this will be lab grade proof of concept that will have to be scaled up considerably.
So I’m a bit sceptical here, both about the claims and the approach.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for fusion research.
But what Commonwealth Fusion Systems is doing here has a strong whiff of pump and dump about it. Or maybe it’s more like “catch the wave” in order to get more money. Nuclear power for bit barns is all the rage right now, including fusion. They still need to do a lot of R&D to even reach proof of concept. Right now they have ~$2 BN. That’s not enough to build a “conventional” fission power plant with an output like this.
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My understanding of the NIF test was that it was more about testing a weapons style fusion reaction. IIRC their energy balance was off by a number of digits, plural.
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Yeah, there is that, too. Something, something, dual use…
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