Call me with the second and third commercial reactors are completed. That's when we'll have an idea of the real world viability, including how to scale and deal with production concerns.
No, I'm saying don't sit around talking about how this will be ready for commercial deployment in less than ten years until after it has been demonstrated to actually work in a production environment.
The first commercial production system will be an alpha build. The second and thirds are betas. It's only after those are completed that there's enough information to make commercial plans.
As of now, this system the GP is talking about hasn't even been built yet and won't be operational until at least 2025. And even when it is built, it is just a lab experiment designed to run in 10 second bursts. There are numerous more steps after this design phase before we get to commercial application.
Ten years is a pipe-dream for commercial application.
I'm excited to see progress in this field. But we are doing it a huge disservice by spreading misinformation about it. There are still a lot of problems to be solved before these are ready for prime time. And these problems will require a lot more funding to solve. If people sit around and talk about how this will be ready to go in 10 years, then who is going to want to fund it into year 11?
Scientific funding is directed largely by politicians. And there are many, many political opponents to science in our current Congress. Giving them ammo in the form of empty promises doesn't do advocates for fusion energy any good.
The honest answer is, we still don't know if tokamak will ever make for a viable commercial power plant. Best can be said is that it has been demonstrated to produce net positive energy for short periods of time, and that there is confidence that improvements can be made. That's it. The viability of commercial application has yet to be demonstrated and may never happen.
