Comment by anonymous plasma physicist on When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them · 2023-07-15T05:13:03.120Z · LW · GW

"Ehrlich" is German for "honest".

Nominative determinism strikes again?

Comment by anonymous plasma physicist on Forecasting Fusion Power · 2022-06-18T11:00:33.605Z · LW · GW

As someone who works in this field, let me add some thoughts:

• Marvel is a joke. I put it at less than 10% that they would even beat the NIF record by 2035.
• ITER is planned to turn on by 2025, but by now that is late 2025 ("turn on" means "create a plasma that is no more interesting than that in a fluorescent lamp"). From inside channels I know they plan to announce further delays later this year. Even if everything goes according to the present schedule, actual deuterium-tritium operation is planned to start in 2035. They will ramp thing up carefully, there will be no q=10 success on the first try.
• Even now, the design of crucial parts of the ITER heating system is not finished.
• The design of CFETR is not finished, it is not intended to be a commercial power plant (more of a post-ITER experiment), and the Chinese institute of plasma physics plans to build an intermediate tokamak, called BEST (I kid you not), before they start building CFETR.
• Don't confuse Tokamak Energy with the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy, the location of the Joint European Torus. Tokamak Energy merely rents some office space there (possibly in a deliberate ploy to leech credibility?). The successes of JET are not Tokamak Energy's.