There isn't a political union, only a trade union. All the laws are in the interest of improving trade.

You said what the difference is yourself. Leave, rejoin, leave rejoin, leave rejoin causes chaos and churn. Leave, rejoin can be a populace being tricked by right wing elements into making a dumb decision, and it's very unlikely that a country that's done that is going to re-leave after discovering how badly it turned out for them. Do you really think the UK would be likely to leave again any time in the next 50 years if they rejoined now, having discovered just how wrong the tories were, and just how right the left were? If they were made to join schengen, and the euro to re-join then they lose their border checkpoints, and ability to produce currency, and leaving becomes much harder, adding yet more reasons why it's unlikely that they'd re-leave.

It doesn't make any sense to say "no, we're not going to trade with the 5th biggest economy in the world, that's right next door to us, because this one time, they made a dumb mistake."

Holy shit... I just noticed...

"€, 'blah' £, $!"

Did slashdot finally fix the stupid text encoding bug?

Meh, taking petty revenge doesn't make sense from a diplomatic stand point. The fact is that both the UK, and the EU have a lot to gain by trading with each other, and sharing regulations. Refusing to do that is cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Dealing with countries like Orban's Hungary is easily doable by taking a much more nuanced approach than "once you leave you're done".

For example, the UK would hopefully learn its lesson about leaving because before they left, they had a privileged position, with vetos, and the ability to opt out of implementing certain regulation, and not being part of schengen, and opting out of the €uro, and ... By leaving and rejoining (if it ever happens) they will (presumably) lose all of those benefits. If they were to do it again, and prove themselves to be abusing the mechanism, I'm sure the penalties would become much more harsh, and people would become much more reticent to let them back in.

Long story short - most diplomacy works best by taking a nuanced, and in general, forgiving approach, not by blunty applying rules like "if you leave you never get back in".

Of course... I might be biased in all these. I'm a Scot who voted to stay in (like most Scots by a wide margin). I of course very much want it to be possible for us to rejoin.

No idea why you'd want to say "you've got to stay out for 2 decades", but certainly "you've got to actually participate in the union if you want back in" is entirely reasonable, and I say that as a Brit.

Uhhhh... I'm sorry, what? No it hasn't. Generally, the more socialist areas of Europe have had far lower poverty rates than the more capitalist areas, and America. Unchecked capitalism has been an absolute disaster for poverty.

I quickly looked up the average net worth "in the west", I guess Europe increased the average?

A step? A single step? You donâ(TM)t think it was already a few steps too far when we decided that one individual was worth the same as 3,000 normal people? So much that they could spend $200,000 a day and not get any poorer? Now he apparently is as valuable to us as 3,000,000 ordinary people, and can spend a fifth of a billion dollars a day without losing any value. How is that only one step too far? I get that people around slashdot donâ(TM)t like that commy shit, but how on earth do they think this outcome of capitalism is in any way justified?

Major radius: 3.3m. Size of house. Hmm... you live in New York don't you?

What on earth makes you think that warming up and cooling down will take weeks?

That's true of low temperature superconducting magnets, but really not so much with high temperature ones. It's also true of ones designed for science, where you want to go as slowly as possible to make sure that your instruments don't go out of whack even very slightly by cooling different things at different rates. In commercial applications though, systems with superconducting magnets, usually cool down and warm up in a few days.

How long do you think fission power plants are offline for during a year? It can take actual weeks or even months to refuel them. I'm not seeing why you think needing to do maintenance periodically (just like every other type of plant) is a show stopper for ecenomic viability.

What on earth do you mean "has no real effect on the original physics problems that were found in the 1990s"? It makes things physically smaller precisely *because* it has a real effect on the original physics problems found long before the 90s, It's been known for a *long* time that if you can increase your magnetic field strength, then your fusion power goes up with the 4th power. By doubling the magnetic field strength, they increase fusion power by 16 fold. That's the reason they're able to reduce the size of the reactor.

Well, good thing we're not risking much investment in it. Last year globally about $400bn was invested in deploying wind energy. Around $500bn was invested in solar deployments. CFS has so far attracted about $3bn. Taking a small punt on a company that has a technology that's very immature, but improving rapidly seems entirely reasonable to me.

Yeh, they've already built the magnets. High temperature superconductors absolutely do exist - there's a whole category of them called REBCO (rare earth berillium copper oxides).

Yes they do. The high temperature superconducting magnets that commonwealth fusion systems have solve the problem.

The primary problem with the embrittlement is that you need to somehow get the damaged sections of reactor out from between magnets that wrap entirely around them, but you also need to not go anywhere near those damaged bits of reactor, because they're radioactive. Taking it apart with robots between the magnets and the reassembling the reactor has always seemed like a non starter that would take years.

CFS though have a solution... Specifically, the REBCO tapes that they use can be soldered together with non superconducting materials, and maintain their ability to generate extremely high field strengths. ARC is designed with soldered jumpers in a couple of locations around the magnets, allowing them to take the magnets apart easily. That allows them to remove the entire core of the reactor out, and remove it in one operation using a large gantry crane positioned over the reactor.. Yes, they get a chunk of radioactive waste to deal with, but the reactor gets to keep operating with a new core.

As for as the ecenomics go... well... I'm sure the very first ever fusion plant won't be ecenomical. However, it'll immediately start making the second one ecenomical, because it'll start producing the tritium that they previously had to buy. There's already a significant number of improvements that can be made documented in the literature. I'm sure the second one will be more ecenomically viable, and the third more so and so on and so forth.

Plus, pretty sure it's *not* littered with corpses. I think JET is the only reactor that was ever built so far with the goal of being energy positive (and even then, only in terms of fusion energy, not electrical, since it had no generation equipment). It got to a factor 0.72 in its final runs when they went balls to the wall since they didn't need to avoid damaging the machine. That's still a little way off, but it's also nearly 50 years old at this point. It uses copper (not even superconducting, let alone high temperature superconducting) magnets. It's substantially smaller than ARC, and it rarely ran using tritium due to the handling constraints.

Every other tokamak I can think of has been built with the explicit knowledge that it wasn't going to be able to reach break even, but would progress research. The amount of energy tokamaks produce has been going up faster than moore's law has been adding transistors to chips, or at least it had until around the year 2000, when we ran out of new magnet technology to squeeze everything in tighter. Thankfully, as you said, we've now got new magnet technology in CFS's HTS magnets that can roughly double the field strength.

Hopefully when SPARC breaks even some time in the next few years, we'll be able to more concretely tell the naysayers to shut up.