New Wave of Fusion and Robot Innovation at MIT

An anonymous reader writes "Popular Mechanics has been getting some great access inside the labs at MIT all week, and they've gotten some interesting looks at developing technologies. Robot-assisted rehab with gaming-style controllers comes out of the biomechanics lab, blind and crash-proof UAV testing with F/X cameras is being done at the aerospace controls lab, and work on electric scooters with super-cheap assembly is proceeding at the Media Lab. Perhaps most exciting is a fight for funding while the holy grail of clean fusion power in reach at the plasma center. The article on fusion predicts, "We'd see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century."

Re:Fusion power, always 20 years into the future

[QuantumG]

and what have YOU done about it huh?

Prediction:

[QuantumG]

Tokamaks will never be cheap, nor efficient.

Inertial gravitational containment [wikipedia.org] is the holy grail.

Inertial electrostatic containment [google.com] is the next best thing.

20 years...

[1zenerdiode]

Yes! Clean, reliable fusion power is only twenty years away...remarkably, this has been the case for over 40 years.

Re:Fusion power, always 20 years into the future

[thedarknite]

I don't know about anyone else, but I asked some nuclear physicists very nicely and they assured me that they would build me one...

... to power the mecha that I asked some robotics and mechatronics guys to build me.

Re:20 years...

[jd]

Froma researcher's point of view, it's more profitable to have further research. Actually getting things into production would eliminate the chance of pushing the research costs up. Investors would look at it as further research tidying up the details and cleaning up loose ends. It is in their interests never to have a final conclusion. The best answer is to give them a significantly larger budget and a restricted timeline. Give the researchers ten times the budget, lock them in a research facility in North Dakota. Tie the air conditioning and heating to a timer. Each year, reduce the power. Either they build a reactor in the designated time, or suffer the climate. The ultimate in extreme reality shows, where getting kicked off is not a good idea.

Re:"anomalous transport" phenomena

[Chris Mattern]

I thought that was "anomalous materials".