• threelonmusketeers
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    4 hours ago

    One reason it’s so hard to make predictions about the fusion age is that we’re still not sure what the best fusion device will even look like. A tokamak, the doughnut-shaped machine Commonwealth is building? A giant laser, like Livermore Lab’s? Or one of the many other shapes and concepts that other start-ups are working on?

    At this point, aren’t we pretty sure that laser confinement won’t easily scale to continuous operations? All the fusion startups I can think of are using some form of magnetic confinement.

    • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
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      3 hours ago

      Mmm… I wouldn’t say that it’s difficult to scale. Getting fusion to happen is hard, but repeatedly is simply an engineering problem (still hard, but less so).