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https://archive.is/WW6ji

Their fusion and fission work is very impressive,” the Microsoft Corp. co-founder said of China’s nuclear innovation efforts. The country is investing more in fusion “than the rest of the world put together, times two

  • Skiluros@sh.itjust.works
    English
    71·
    1 day ago

    Breakthrough Energy Ventures — a climate investment firm Gates founded — has bankrolled several nuclear startups, including fusion pioneer Commonwealth Fusion Systems

    What exactly has CFS pioneered? I am genuinely curious.

    Their wikipedia page states that they have yet to demonstrate net power generation (via fusion reactor) with the current target date set for 2027.

    Their SPARC concept seems to be based on the ARC concept which is described as having the following key benefit:

    The key technical innovation is to use high-temperature superconducting magnets in place of ITER’s low-temperature superconducting magnets. The proposed device would be about half the diameter of the ITER reactor and cheaper to build.

    The sentence cites an article titled “Advances in magnet technology could bring cheaper, modular fusion reactors from sci-fi to sci-reality in less than a decade” from August 2015. Less than a decade indeed.

    Gate goes on to say the following:

    A growing number of big tech companies from Microsoft to Alphabet Inc.’s Google have inked power purchase agreements with nuclear startups [e.g. CFS] to secure future electricity supply. But Gates says there is still a long way off for those startups to deliver electricity at scale.

    “Nuclear as a whole won’t be a gigantic contributor to data center electricity until 2035, and that’s assuming everything goes well,” he said.

    I honestly don’t understand what the article is trying to say (both explicitly and implicitly). Gates believes that we need to invest more into fusion and fission to compete with china [and change our attitudes to nuclear power]?

    I say all of this as someone who is generally supportive of nuclear power (I live in Ukraine, if not for our nuclear power plants, things would be far far worse with our electricity situation).