The Focus Fusion Society Forums Focus Fusion Cafe Nuclear Fusion in China Reply To: Energy output calculations?

#10751
delt0r
Participant

In ITERs defense, they kinda of need to build it first. The cost overruns to date have been from politics not the science delaying the construction so long (almost a decade). In fact that is perhaps the biggest problem with ITER, too many cooks in the kitchen, and some of these cooks are not scientists.

I know traditional fusion is a dirty word here, but if we are going to be talking about practical output you are going to have to acknowledge that these machines are getting the closest to breakeven than anything else (Lawsons criteria etc). When the tomakak was reviled by the Russians, it was 100x better than anything else, so good that the rest of the world did not believe them. It wasn’t until western scientists went and took their own measurements before they believed them. In the last 40 years confinement has improved as much as computer power has over the same time period.

Or perhaps by results you mean profit or some other metric (a working power station)? Be careful here, you may just give a metric that Focus Fusion does very poorly at, even worse than ITER and there kin.