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World's Largest Fusion Project Is in Big Trouble, New Documents Reveal
(www.scientificamerican.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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If you look at this chart from the article the delays actually look pretty reasonable and you can see them closing in on completion. Looks like been a series of set backs in the recent past with particular components but I think a budget comparable to the Manhattan Project (as the article states) is probably pretty reasonable for a project like this. In fact I was pretty surprised it was that small.
Yeah, this really doesn't look even remotely surprising to me.
Absolutely everyone involved should already understand that they are not building something that they know how to build.
Sure, they have plans, and they can build to exactly those plans... But even then, there is no guarantee at all that they will then achieve net positive fusion energy. Because nobody has done that in a controlled reaction.
But it's also not like the rest of the world is sitting still. Other projects exist, and sometimes those projects are going to learn things that will impact the design of ITER.
For that matter, even if they have the plans, some of the pieces are things that nobody has ever built on that scale before, which means that nobody really knows how to build them until they try.
This is a really good example of a project that you can not accurately estimate.