One advantage that is purely political is that sub-critical reactors will be more political acceptable.
Don't think accelerator reliability issues are much of a concern any more, the systems are pretty mature at this point. I see the many advantage in being able to produce tailored neutron energy spectrum to process as much waste as possible.
The latter is the main focus in my mind. Excess energy is just an added bonus. We need a process like this as burying the nuclear crap has become a politically untenable.
By I much prefer inherently safe reactor designs.
You are barking up the wrong tree.
Of course there is no conspiracy and I very much appreciate that Jeff Bezos invests into General Fusion.
What I find problematic is that ITER crowds out other fusion research due to its cost overuns. For instance there are now only 1 1 1/2 positions allocated to the Shiva star device (a machine GF could put to good use for plasma compression experiments). This is just enough money to prevent a mothballing of the machine, but not enough to actually get some research done.
This is not conspiracy but just how the world works. As ITER absorbs more money the overall public budget doesn't grow, and government is too inflexible to allow for private partnership (especially with, god forbid, a Canadian company).
No one, and I mean no one, expects the Polywell will escape the Ritter issues.
Except those who continue working on it. Cusp confinement has been theorized but to my knowledge never experimentally confirmed until these results came in. They may very well be overoptimistic with regards to having any chance in approaching thermalization in the center of their reactor, but given that they now have an experiment going with fairly decent confinement it seems warranted to establish to what extend Ritter's concern will haunt this design.
Plasma dynamics are very difficult to model and while Ritter's conjecture is plausible it nevertheless makes some assumptions that may not hold in the actual experiment.
You may call this hand waving, but the best way to establish this is an actual experiment. This, after all, is also the way that science works.
Too funny. So you really did not look at the paper. Arxiv is a pre-print archive. The notion that these nine authors spanning two companies, one European university, Los Alamos and the US Navy will not manage to get this published in a per-reviewed journal is rather cute.
With regards to the Polywell design you clearly either have not read this paper, or must think they made up their results.
As to General Fusion, they are hardly the only ones looking into magnetized target fusion (just the most ambitious ones) - so I fail to see how you comment even applies there.
Other interesting and scientifically sound approaches are limping along on pitiful drips of venture money e.g. General Fusion.
And while some public money goes into Polywell research, it's produced on a dime when compared to ITER.
Don't mean to knock the work that's done to advance the Tokamak design, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.
Saudi Arabia is a massive sponsor of ISIS.
The obsession of ISIS with killing Shias flows directly from the top.
My comment was directed at the AC's phrasing:
"The UN got caught [theguardian.com] hiding Hamas missiles in one of the Gaza 'schools' they operate."
As to Hamas committing war crimes and terrorism, that's a dog bites man story, what's your point?
Article states of the bat that it was a vacant UN sponsored school building. To spin this as the UN being complicit in hiding Hamas missiles displays some remarkably reading comprehension problems.
Maybe the UN should start sponsoring schools in the
US. Obviously the education system failed you.
C'mon, the fact that this plane carried people from several nations who are completely uninvolved in the Ukraine mess is key here.
It's like bystanders getting killed in droves during a shootout with police. Changes the narrative.
Look, as somebody who lives in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) I've followed this story very closely as soon as it broke. There needs to be corrections and consequences imposed by the provincial government.
This only happens when this story is kept in the forefront and MPs feel this is something their riding cares about.
It's really local politics 101. Presumably you are American and think your broken barely democratic system represents how things work anywhere in the world. Thankfully it doesn't.
"Gotcha, you snot-necked weenies!" -- Post Bros. Comics