tombo wrote:
While ITER is not falsifiable and so more like religion or a political cash cow.
(I suppose this comment really should be in a general forum.)
ITER is falsifiable. If this Alfen Eigenmode fast particle instability is excited
once the plasmas start burning and no way is found to stop it then we will have to abandon the tokamak approach as a fusion approach.
There are many situations in which ITER will be unlikely to have a follow up. At the end of the day there is a vast complexity of problems most of which are solvable which need to be tackled. ITER will put them to the test. If enough of them are solved we'll try again, if none of them are solved we may not. I guarantee you that the success or lack there of, of ITER will be carefully evaluated before deciding whether to take the next step or not. Just because you can't summarize its falsifiability in a single snappy statement doesn't mean the fusion programme will go on regardless.
Also worth mentioning the danger of artificially "falsifying" things and giving up when there's still hope. I believe the mirror programme in the U.S. was "proven" to be incapable of providing net DT power by a factor of two. And it was axed, including a beautiful massive mirror machine which was build and waiting to run but then scrapped before firing a single pulse. Its quite possible the gas dynamic trap may be possible to overcome this problem yet it is surrounded by the taboo that now plagues mirror machines.
Or they could just ask for more money to try find a way to fix it. Which sounds more likely, giving up on their life's work or asking for more money?
Tokamaks have received far, far more funding than alternative concepts. This probably made sense at one point, but now it seems more like bureaucratic inertia than good science.
When you have researchers saying things like "This has a life of its own, it almost doesn't matter if it works" you should worry whether they're talking about useful science or a jobs program for scientists.
I believe the mirror programme in the U.S. was "proven" to be incapable of providing net DT power by a factor of two.
IDK, they built a $300M mirror machine at Livermore (which I think is the one you refer to) and never got to run it because their funding was cut. That was the high water mark, iirc. This was a time when oil prices had fallen dramatically and energy research wasn't as sexy anymore.