>>13112090The elephant in the room that no one in the fusion community wants to talk about is that the entire approach being taken to getting fusion to work is ass backwards.
Smaller devices develop problems, we come up with ad hoc solutions to the problems that we sometimes don't fully understand, and when we finally run into an impassable roadblock, we just build a bigger, more expensive, more complicated device and start the process over. Every generation of fusion experiments increases the cost of development by an order of magnitude while the delivered performance appears more and more to be asymptoting. I know schools that have started taking pools on which performance expectations ITER is going to lower each year at DPP.
The truth is that if ITER does end up significantly underperforming when it goes online, the fusion community is in deep fucking shit.
