US Dept of Energy injects more particles of cash into tokamak fusion reactors The US Department of Energy is handing out more fusion power funding, this time doling out $47 million to 38 projects that are exploring the feasibility of tokamak reactors. Tokamaks use powerful magnetic fields to force plasma into either a torus or a more spherical shape, depending on the type of design used. The ultimate …
tbf I know how it is, what with being a sort of accomplished Mistress of the Stealth Typo myself. Not enough coffee and over-reliance on real-time spell-check has produced a lot of quite bizarre results over the years. Particularly on media with insufficiently accommodating editing...
"Don't forget to email corrections@theregister.com if you spot anything wrong."
I tried that a few months ago and the article wasn't corrected. This one was funny, that is all.
It looks to me like you're using speech recognition to write? I can't see how that's a keyboard typing error.
Using the wrong homophone appears to be a common error among people who touch-type in English. (I don't have any rigorous research to cite offhand, but anecdotal confirmation is easy to find.) When your typing speed is fast enough, your conscious process is running word-by-word rather than letter-by-letter, so it's not hard for the cerebrum to trigger the cerebellum to whack out the wrong approximate match.
1. What was the error - we jump on correction emails within minutes if someone's working. We strive really hard to fix issues ASAP.
2. We're not using speech recognition. If you see typos or brain blips like that, it's because we've got something else on our minds, such as technical accuracy -- I'd rather a story is a fair representation of reality with typos than perfectly written but total BS.
C.
The dead end is the design, not the concept. Tokamaks have been the primary focus of fusion research for so long because the Soviets claimed some success with them in the 60s. As it turns out, the claimed performance doesn't scale even remotely, which became obvious within just a few years, but the initial performance gains caused everyone to concentrate on tokamaks, to the exclusion of everything else, far longer than was warranted. We've subsequently had 50 years of research on tokamaks with very little to show for it, with other promising technologies getting short shrift, or being ignored entirely.
Stellerators. Tokamaks are good research tools because they are easy to design with 1960s technology.
But they are a bit crap for power station use, for example they can't produce power continually.
The problem is that because they are simple to make work that are what most large projects settle on because you can't take a risk on a multi $Bn project.
So ITER is like what happens if, in the 1930s, you create an international project to invent the transatlantic aircraft for the next 50 years - and you agree to build a giant airship because that's what everyone agrees is a trusted design.
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