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September 30, 2020 12:10 am

Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is 'Very Likely To Work,' Studies Suggest

JoshuaZ writes: Recent research into the Sparc fusion reactor design make it seem likely to work. Unlike some other fusion reactor designs, Sparc uses high-temperature superconductors which are capable of much stronger magnetic fields in a more closely-confined location. Sparc will be much smaller than large-scale international project ITER, which after multiple delays is now not scheduled to even start fusion reactions by 2035 at the earliest. The Sparc researchers hope that their reactor design will be completed soon enough to have an impact on climate change. The new research on Sparc consists of seven different papers, all of which have favorable estimates for the likelihood of the project succeeding. Some physicists, including Cary Forest, at the University of Wisconsin, were more skeptical. Forest told the New York Times that Sparc's estimates for when their reactor would be ready were probably off by at least a factor of two. "Reading these papers gives me the sense that they're going to have the controlled thermonuclear fusion plasma that we all dream about," said Cary Forest, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who is not involved in the project. "But if I were to estimate where they're going to be, I'd give them a factor of two that I give to all my grad students when they say how long something is going to take."

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