I'm having trouble understanding what's actually been accomplished here. The article provides a good overview of Tokamak vs Stellarator, but seems to jump back and forth between proclaiming this as an innovative breakthrough and saying it's just a framework to test ideas.
> In terms of its ability to confine particles, Muse is two orders of magnitude better than any stellarator previously built
Is it? It doesn't seem as if they have reached first plasma or have plans to do so anytime soon. Using electromagnets to not only confine but also to control the the plasma is a big selling point of the stellarator design, and they don't seem to address this.
This seems really cool, and I love the idea of lower-cost fusion. (Or even just functional fusion.) There are about a dozen companies making real progress in fusion, but I can't quite figure out what this team has actually accomplished.
Seems like the premise is that building these small experimental stellarators is a major cost in doing fusion research and therefore if we can bring the cost of these down from billions to less than a million, more teams can do more research faster, even if this specific design never generates any economic power. I have no idea if this premise is true or not -- I'm just a layman who read the article.
> In terms of its ability to confine particles, Muse is two orders of magnitude better than any stellarator previously built
Is it? It doesn't seem as if they have reached first plasma or have plans to do so anytime soon. Using electromagnets to not only confine but also to control the the plasma is a big selling point of the stellarator design, and they don't seem to address this.
This seems really cool, and I love the idea of lower-cost fusion. (Or even just functional fusion.) There are about a dozen companies making real progress in fusion, but I can't quite figure out what this team has actually accomplished.
What am I missing?