So I’ve been following the ITER project on YouTube. They’re very close to completing construction of the buildings for the reactor. Then they have to build it.
They chose a Tokamak design – Tokamak is a Russian acronym for toroidal chamber-magnetic. Seriously.
Right now people keep saying when will fusion happen. I hate to tell them but there are a bunch of Tokamak’s and stellarators and even ignition facilities all over the world. And they’ve been fusing stuff together for some time.
The issue is none of the machines so far as reached break even, vis a vis power required to run it is less than the power it puts out.
So they run for periods up to about 10 seconds or so.
The ITER project is a bit overbuilt. But then it had to be.
This sounds ominous. I hope people know what they are doing.
It’s not ominous – think about this for a moment. It can be fueled by splitting sea water. And the Earth is something like 75% sea water. And better – fusion reactors fuse two isotopes of hydrogen – deuterium and tritium.