Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[delt0r]

In ITER defense, 99.9% of the delays and problems are political not scientific. Its stuff like where it gets built, and who gets the magnet contract, and why should they get all the magnet contracts what about my country magnet maker..etc. The original time line is about a decade behind right now and there was much less money made available, at least in part because the US pulled out (or mostly pulled out). I mean you need to get 20 countries to agree on something each time a big decision is needed, what would you expect?

From a science perspective it think either some serious upgrade to JET (begin done) or ITER is the next logical step. Sure everyone want a slice of the pie, but the fact is that nothing else is really close. Nothing else has data that is even close and well at the end of the day… Show me the data. Sometimes i think the “not working with ITER” folk forget that when the Russian reveled the design it was 100x better than anything else at the time, so good that the west assumed they were lying. It wasn’t until a team from the west took their own measurements before they where believed. Right now they still are the best design on the table (stellarators are nice too but cost more to build).

I know that ITER is a dirty word here… but lets try and work with data, and not feelings. They are not steeling your funding. If the money is taken away from ITER it will not go into other fusion work. Most likely it will go into the banking sector and not science at all.