MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

This has been by far the most informative source on Fusion I've seen and gives a clear picture on how to evaluate claims like this. MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig ▶ this video

My layman's understanding is that recently available (~last 5 years) industrial scale processes to produce rebco tape[1] is the specific advance in superconductor tech that's specifically enabling higher tesla magnetic field strengths from significantly smaller and lighter and easier to manage magnets, so you can get a system that's "powerful enough" to run net posititve at a size that's small enough to be built by a few universities rather than a few dozen nations (i.e. ITER), so the complexity of the engineering project drops from "unimaginable" to "just very high". 1 - link 2 - really great talk from a few years ago about this from MIT's Plasma Science Fusion Centre: ▶ this video (really, if you like this stuff, give the talk a watch. It's great.)

As there seems to be quite a lot of confusion in this thread about what this is, here's an excellent video giving an overview of the state of the art in fusion energy research that is understandable by a lay audience: ▶ this video (somebody posted that video on another recent HN fusion thread)

This talk by Zach Hartwig from IAP 2017 "MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy" is fantastic. Hartwig is an assistant professor in the Nuclear Science & Engineering department at MIT. He presents a straightforward overview of the basic science involved as well as the most promising technologies today. ▶ this video

Your comment makes it sound like you don't understand the physics of it at all. What does Uranium have to do with this? What does "performance of uranium" means? What do you think will happen when you bombard it with "radiation"? What kind of "radiation"? Uranium is most commonly used in fission devices, not fusion ones. Fusing Uranium would absorb energy, not liberate energy, this is why we split it. link For heating, you'd be better off using a heat pump. Or I guess you could take some radioactive material and shield it. Or even a breeder reactor, but that's fission. I do not want to come across as disrespectful, but what you're saying sounds like alchemy, or the kind of "science" they show in superhero movies. I could understand using a layer of metal to produce x-rays, and concentrate these to heat a sample (a bit similar to H-bombs, BTW), but I am not a nuclear physicist either. Real physicists have thought about this much more than we did, and if there was a simple pathway to practical fusion, we'd know about it by now. I think you underestimate the complexity of all this (kind of a "Dunning-Kruger" effect), go watch the "MIT's pathway to fusion[1]" videos for an introduction to the problem and modern approaches :) [1]: ▶ this video

Small tokamaks are what I think are potentially viable, a la Commonwealth Fusion Systems. Here's a good talk that I think addresses the physics vs engineering approaches to fusion. ▶ this video

As a very much non-nuclear engineer, I found this video [1] explaining different fuels, size, magnetic field strength, and the orders of magnitude physics and engineering that goes into current fusion efforts. Curious where Helion would put themselves on the nτE vs ion temperature plot he uses to evaluate how feasible a technology is. [1] ▶ this video [2] link

There's some discussion about this in this[1] presentation which also mentions the SPARC reactor. My main takeaway is basically yes, high-temp superconductors got "mainstream" very quickly. I'd recommend watching the whole thing, I found it quite interesting. [1]: ▶ this video

There's a good talk here about why ITER is so large: ▶ this video The idea is essentially that to get the parameters needed to make net energy with tokamaks, you need either very strong magnets or a large device. At the time of ITER's design, they used the strongest magnets they could find and then made the thing big enough to get the energy gain they wanted. The speaker of this talk argues that it's size that stalled progress in tokamaks, since they'd become so big that building them became a massive, multinational project.

There are a number of interesting companies looking at fusion. High Temperature Superconductors change what you can do for Tokomaks. In the US Commonwealth Fusion Systems are exploring these paths: link In the UK Tokomak energy are exploring ideas as well: link This video explains why high temperature super conductors can enhance fusion's prospects: ▶ this video

I think this talk ( ▶ this video ) makes a pretty good case for why a project of the scale of SPARC makes sense from an engineering standpoint.

Agreed — the problem is that, from an energy perspective, it "doesn't break even". Zach Hartwig of MIT has an excellent video [0] of how to evaluate announcements of nuclear fusion advances. The big problem is breaking even. There are other problem, too: plasma containment, etc. [0] ▶ this video