Technology

Ah I was wondering this and my cursory search result was that :

• Their design (ARC) is sound for its physics.
• their design would produce more energy if nothing goes wrong with the hardware.
• The hardware is designed but not built yet.

Basically it's really promising because on paper it should really work as expected. But at the same time without building it, there will be obstacles along the way. The materials could last too little time for it to be commercially viable.

So they seem to be at the very last theoretical step of fusion energy but there is still a huge challenge in actually building the thing and most importantly, it to be viable commercially.

Yeah this feels more like a long-shot gamble by a hungry start up that the beginning of a new transformative tech.

No, that had nothing to do with fusion or fission. The Resonance Cascade was a quantum event created when Gordon inserted a Xen crystal sample into a Anti-Mass Spectrometer.

They're waiting for you Gordon... In the test chamber

@CapuccinoCoretto @Delta_V cant wait to have another being attatch to my head

(I feel the need to point out that it's been 30 years since people started saying this...)

Oh man though this one is cool - I have a dear dear friend working on this project, and it's absolutely wild. Nothing they're doing is new, exactly but modern magnet designs have enabled SPARC to simultaneously hit a bunch of metrics that were previously entirely reliant on purpose-built machines.

Excerpt from them when I asked them about this yesterday:

While no existing tokamak has reached the same parameters that SPARC will simultaneously, there is empirical evidence in part for all of the major parameters it seeks to reach. the purple dot is ARC, the power plant design, and the red X is ITER, the gigantic international tokamak being built which doesn't take advantage of newer and more powerful magnets (which is what allowed SPARC/ARC to have much smaller volume)

so like yeah, we've built a ton of reactors that could do all this individually and then CFS have managed a system that has combined those results into a single machine and that has been the big goal for years (beyond stopping the plasma from fizzling out). There's still challenges to solve, but this system has cleared all the previous hurdles (barring some of the noncritical ones). It's so damn cool. It's not fusion happening now, the headline is sensationalist, but it's the biggest step forward we've had probably since research into plasma fusion started.

This is like asking “why do R&D to invent solar panels when gas has always been 25¢/gallon?”

Technological progress isn’t free.

Because this is how research works and if we manage to get fusion power generation working well, we’ll have practically limitless clean energy available.