> But this is beyond ridiculous, so many years of R&D for 8 minutes of sustained acticivty activity? That sound like a joke
...You know the duration of the plasma pulse being 8 minutes doesn't mean they do it once and then the whole project is over and they need to start dismantling it, right? After a pulse, the plasma is discharged, you have a few minutes of rampdown and cooling, and then you can do it again. IIRC in the first experimental phase they expect to do ~30,000 pulses.
That’s like saying “spending $30,000 for a license plate holder sounds like a joke”. This machine is being built for the information needed to make real reactors. Empirically derived scaling laws, confinement physics, and divertor physics all greatly benefit from having their regimes pushed past where they have been. It’s a science machine.
