Reply To: Physics Nobel to Big Bangers

[nemmart]

Breakable wrote: http://fora.tv/2010/06/16/Ed_Moses_Clean_Fusion_Power_This_Decade

This was a nice talk. Thanks for posting it.

There are a couple of question that I wish had been asked…

I had seen a talk on the web a few years about about ITER — here’s the link: http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_03/Lectures/Colloquium/050428Smith/index.htm

In the talk, Chris Smith discusses the very difficult engineering challenges:
1) Designing the lithium blankets and the processing to replace the tritium burned
2) The heavy neutron bombardment weakens the containment structure

He said the engineering challenges would take years to solve and test and would require
a dedicated IFMIF facility.

Clearly the same problems would exist for NIF. I wish someone had asked Mr. Moses
if these engineering challenges had been solved and shown to work? and if not, how can
he be so confident about timeframes and costs, etc.