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Fusion Science and Technology
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On moving fast and breaking things
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
So much of what is happening in federal nuclear policy these days seems driven by a common approach popularized in the technology sector. Silicon Valley calls it “move fast and break things,” a phrase originally associated with Facebook’s early culture under Mark Zuckerberg. The idea emerged in the early 2000s as software companies discovered that rapid iteration, frequent experimentation, and a willingness to tolerate failure could dramatically accelerate innovation. This philosophy helped drive the growth of the social media, smartphones, cloud computing, and digital platforms that now underpin modern economic and social life.
Today, that mindset is also influencing federal nuclear policy. The Trump administration views accelerated nuclear deployment as part of a broader competition with China for technological and AI leadership. In that context, it seems willing to accept greater operational risk in pursuit of strategic advantage and long-term economic and security objectives.
Clinton Craig Petty, James Craig DeBoo, Robert John La Haye, Timothy Charles Luce, Peter A. Politzer, Clement Po-Ching Wong
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 43 | Number 1 | January 2003 | Pages 1-17
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A245
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The design of a reduced size (R = 4.45 m, BT = 5.04 T) ignition tokamak (Q = ) with superconducting coils using a standard ELMing H-mode plasma appears to be feasible. This effective size (BT2/3R5/6) is smaller than current proposals for Q = 10 burning (D-T) plasma experiments. The good confinement required for ignition with this small effective size is obtained by operating along a gyroBohm scaling path starting from the existing tokamak database at high beta ( = 4.1%) so that the loss power from core transport exceeds the H-mode threshold power. Using a design that can achieve a high normalized current (Ip /aBT = 1.63) also helps to decrease the size of the machine. The design of this relatively compact ignition tokamak satisfies reasonable engineering constraints on the superconducting toroidal field coils and central solenoid, and allows for a sufficiently long burn time for the plasma current to relax to its final state.
