Fusion Meme Getting BTFO

No waste. No waste. You're the waste. No, you're the waste.

Your understanding of coal markets and the forces driving them are equivalent to your understanding of the total environmental cost of policies you support because people you like on Facebook said they're good.

I still have faith in the stellarator design. If only it was aneutronic...

I find the optimized stellerator quite an admirable achievement. But ultimately it just seems too fucking complicated to be economically viable. You need ridiculous degrees of quality assurance at basically every single step of the construction and manufacturing of the construction elements.
Recent advancements in super conductors make me hope we eventually don't need to blow up a fusion power plant in size quite as much as we assumed a few years ago, but still, the prospect of building a device this precise at even slightly bigger scales seems incredibly daunting.

I don't see how the stellerator will be any useful, I seriously cant see any big advantage, it only features the lack of poloidal fields, but it irregular geometry and it's small traversal area and large transverse area/toroidal radius factor doesn't seems to be particularly good to smash ions or to give more probability for fusion in the super heated gas, it will end in a waste of time and resources.

It has no random instabilities because there's no electricity induced into the plasma.
That same lack of current is also why there's no need to shut down the reactor every once in a while.
So it looks like it overcomes some of the biggest remaining weaknesses of current tokamaks.
I'm not quite sure but it also might be easier to introduce new fuel and remove waste from the plasma.
Overall, the stellerator looks like it might be a charm to keep running for extended periods. All of this is of course going to be researched thoroughly in the coming years.

But ultimately, I agree with you that I'm skeptical of this being viable in the long run.
But then the people involved with it seem to be thinking of the whole thing more as an exercise in ridiculously meticulous engineering instead of the future of energy.
Ultimately, this thing just getting built migh've helped other fusion projects. Either with engineering solutions they had to come up with or generally just by raising demand for materials related to fusion tech. Several of the supplier companies were greatly advanced in the colaborations.
And in general it's a new device to study plasma physics in over extended periods. That might also be neat, I guess.

Does that weird steampunkish design from General Fusion have any chance of viability?

if people would pull their heads out of their asses. we could have enough fission energy for centuries.

Not really, no.

yes