MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig

This talk by Zach Hartwig from IAP 2017 "MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy" is fantastic. Hartwig is an assistant professor in the Nuclear Science & Engineering department at MIT. He presents a straightforward overview of the basic science involved as well as the most promising technologies today. [VIDEO]

As there seems to be quite a lot of confusion in this thread about what this is, here's an excellent video giving an overview of the state of the art in fusion energy research that is understandable by a lay audience: [VIDEO] (somebody posted that video on another recent HN fusion thread)

My layman's understanding is that recently available (~last 5 years) industrial scale processes to produce rebco tape[1] is the specific advance in superconductor tech that's specifically enabling higher tesla magnetic field strengths from significantly smaller and lighter and easier to manage magnets, so you can get a system that's "powerful enough" to run net posititve at a size that's small enough to be built by a few universities rather than a few dozen nations (i.e. ITER), so the complexity of the engineering project drops from "unimaginable" to "just very high". 1 - [LINK] 2 - really great talk from a few years ago about this from MIT's Plasma Science Fusion Centre: [VIDEO] (really, if you like this stuff, give the talk a watch. It's great.)

This has been by far the most informative source on Fusion I've seen and gives a clear picture on how to evaluate claims like this. MIT's Pathway to Fusion Energy (IAP 2017) - Zach Hartwig [VIDEO]

Mmmh, some of the claims in that article are debunked in this neat video from MIT (though over 1h long): [VIDEO]

I saw this a while back and thought it was a good summary: [VIDEO] I forget the current best efficiency, but it's getting close.

Simple: people in the know realize that this technique still needs a bunch of development. This is a good talk about the various variables you need to demonstrate in fusion: [VIDEO]

> Scale is everything for fusion (plasma). No. Q is everything in fusion. Scale is one way to improve Q in a Tokamak. The problem with improving Q by increasing scale is that it makes the reactors uneconomical. A reactor the size of ITER cannot ever be economically viable, even was capable of producing massive amounts of electricity. Luckily, scaling up is not the only way to increase Q. The better way is to use more powerful magnetic fields. Put more eloquently than I can: [VIDEO]