[Red Badger]

Ping!..............

[dfwgator]

Late last century, the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, UK, churned out 22 megajoules of energy in what was, at the time, a record in fusion power.

Is that more than 1.21 Gigawatts?

[BBQToadRibs2]

Curious to know how much energy was used in getting to that output. More than the output I assume.

[Wonder Warthog]

My money is still on AUREON....

https://aureon.ca/

Formerly SAFIRE.

[sonova]

What elements are created after the fusion of Hydrogen, Duterium, or Tritium?

Will this be a new nuke waste stream?

I don’t know. Physics classes were a few decades ago.

[Hot Tabasco]

Who the heck designs a thing like that and where did they get the plans?

[katana]

I was going to ask whether that represented a net positive figure for power consumed versus output. But the answer was about halfway into the article. Maybe, they hope, sometime after 2035.

It's understandable that this represents significant progress in mega-scale engineering, but imagine the tantrum the Luddites and Ignorati will have when Thermonuclear power becomes feasible. No reason to stop, much less pay them the attention they crave (personally, I'd like to see them tied to their precious and useless windmills). But it should be quite a show.

[Getready]

Writer mentions the sun’s “blueprints”....when the gases in the sun started “fusing”, wouldn’t that have blown up the whole system, blueprints and all? Or if insufficient to blow it all up....would the mass run away ,compression wise, and become a black hole? Any astrophysicists out there?

[VTenigma]

We should have commercial fusion reactors up and running within 30 years.

[IndispensableDestiny]

When starting college in 1978, I got to tour the facilities at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). It was a huge DoE funded activity. They were retiring two tokamaks, the PDX and PLT. The new Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) was under construction. We got to walk around the thing. Very cool.

The most impressive part of the visit was the flywheel room. The flywheels were spun up over time and would later power the reactor during experiment.

PPPL bid for the ITER project. They lost out to the Europeans. Mostly, because PPPL did not get strong support from DoE. DoE is putting its eggs in the National Ignition Facility in Livermore. It uses lasers.

[SuperLuminal]

Another budget funding cycle...
Another amazing possible breakthrough...

The game continues...
Future retirements are at stake...
Rolling, rolling, rolling...
Keep those dollars rolling...

Worked for me...