This is how R&D projects work. It’s extremely difficult to estimate timelines. Someone might have said the same thing of, for instance, image recognition - we kept getting “one step closer” for years and years. You could look at Fei-Fei Li making ImageNet in 2006 and go, “she didn’t really solve anything - they keep saying we’re one step closer to image recognition but this is just some new dataset.” Of course that actually was a very significant step, it was crucial groundwork for AlexNet.
There is absolutely no way to know whether getting to 100M in a spherical tokamak is really significant. Maybe this design is a dead end that will never see actual use. Maybe you will have a tiny one in your tea kettle by 2050.
What’s clear, though is that the pace of fusion research is really much faster than it was. That should be exciting to everyone except oil barons.
This is how R&D projects work. It’s extremely difficult to estimate timelines. Someone might have said the same thing of, for instance, image recognition - we kept getting “one step closer” for years and years. You could look at Fei-Fei Li making ImageNet in 2006 and go, “she didn’t really solve anything - they keep saying we’re one step closer to image recognition but this is just some new dataset.” Of course that actually was a very significant step, it was crucial groundwork for AlexNet.
There is absolutely no way to know whether getting to 100M in a spherical tokamak is really significant. Maybe this design is a dead end that will never see actual use. Maybe you will have a tiny one in your tea kettle by 2050.
What’s clear, though is that the pace of fusion research is really much faster than it was. That should be exciting to everyone except oil barons.