Please, wake me up...

As that fusion specialist W.C. Fields said, "Never give a sucker an even break"...

The problem is that if somebody can dream up a magnetic configuration that is stable, even a stellarator can work. The first article's claim was that this had been done - it needed artificial intelligence (or at least a very complicated mathematical simulation in three dimensions) to describe the magnetic field.

The second article doesn't go this far, but claims that occasional episodes of instablity can be coped with.

As you say, it all sounds like bullshit designed to rip money off gullible investors, but this isn't any kind of proof that there isn't a scheme which can work. My father invented a scheme which allowed you to run a continuous paper-pulp digestor counter-current.

The guy who had invented the continuous digestor

had spent ten years trying to get it to run counter-current, was impressed, but not enough to get Kaymr to pay royalties, though they built lots of copies. I met him in Tasmania when I was about six when he was visiting the first of his continuous digestors to be sold in the southern hemisphere - it was the sixth off the production line.

Inventions are innovations that aren't obvious to those skilled in the art, and sometimes you have to wait a bit until they show up.

<snipped sensible comment>

It has been running for quite a long while with plentiful fusion power always just another 50 years in the future...(for 70 years and counting)

Nuclear electricity too cheap to meter was promised in '54 but never delivered. To be fair to IEEE they do sometimes publish that too:

Sergey Kubushyn snipped-for-privacy@Koi8.net wrote: |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"It is not Daily Mail or some tabloid (or it is?), but IEEE magazine. The| |ENGINEERING society." | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------|

Since when was the IEEE ever an engineering society?

|-------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] | | | |[. . .] At least I will be able to | |cancel my membership -- I don't know why I'm still a member... | | | |[. . .]" | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I do not know why you ever joined the IEEE. The IEEE had attempted to get me to join it, so I have written a response challenging it. I have never received a response to that response. (S.

fuer Kontaktdaten!)

That would mean I deceived myself :) Probably got fooled by the "Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers" name and the bunch of standards like, e.g. IEEE 802.xx, IEEE 754 and many more...

Won't renew my membership anymore.

Sergey Kubushyn snipped-for-privacy@Koi8.net wrote: |--------------------------------------------------| |"[. . .] :) Probably got fooled by the "Institute | |of Electrical and Electronics Engineers" name" | |--------------------------------------------------|

I doubt that "The Daily Mail" is daily. (Most newspapers there do not produce more than 6 issues a week.)

Some of West Germany used to be further east than East Germany. Some of South Korea is further north than North Korea. Is the Pacific Ocean pacific?

Still, maybe I should change my name by deed poll to Mister Trillionaire just in case :)

|--------------------------------------------------| |"and the bunch of standards | |like, e.g. IEEE 802.xx, IEEE 754 and many more..."| |--------------------------------------------------|

Various "IEEE" standards' technical achievements rely entirely on engineers who are not the IEE"E". (S.

fuer Kontaktdaten!)

The best way to understand the IEEE is to follow the money - look at their annual reports. The IEEE is a _publisher_ at core. Their market is technical - for the Engineers alluded to in the name.

I've worked on IEEE standards for decades.

Joe

To a greater or lesser extent that is true for most of the learned societies and related professional institutions.

Free access arXiv preprints has somewhat changed things though.

Now even the once mighty MNRAS journal is available free online (previously like Nature it was subscribe $$$ or pay per view $$).

Obviously you could read it in any university library that had a decent periodicals section (but the library would have bought that copy).

Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@Nonad.co.UK> wrote: |-------------------------------------------------------------------------| |"Obviously you could read it in any university library that had a decent | |periodicals section (but the library would have bought that copy)." | |-------------------------------------------------------------------------|

I think that many years ago the IEEE changed our online subscription policy such that we became restricted to 5 years back in time. (I work in a field founded in the 1920's, but not in an IEEE journal.)

As for libraries' hardcopies, many thereof became mislaid.

"J Korean Med Sci. 2023 Oct 23;38(41):e333

1598-6357·pISSN 1011-8934

[. . .]

Causes for Retraction in the Biomedical Literature: A Systematic Review of Studies of Retraction Notices

Soo Young Hwang ,1 Dong Keon Yon ,2 Seung Won Lee ,3 Min Seo Kim ,4 Jong Yeob Kim ,1 Lee Smith ,5 Ai Koyanagi ,6,7 Marco Solmi ,8,9,10,11,12 Andre F Carvalho ,13 Eunyoung Kim ,14,15 Jae Il Shin ,16,17,18 and John P A Ioannidis 19

1Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea 2 Center for Digital Health, Medical Science Research Institute, Kyung Hee University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea 3Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Suwon, Korea 4 Samsung Advanced Institute for Health Sciences & Technology (SAIHST), Sungkyunkwan University, Samsung Medical Center, Seoul, Korea 5Centre for Health Performance and Wellbeing, Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, Cambridge, UK 6Research and Development Unit, Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu, CIBERSAM, Barcelona, Spain 7ICREA, Barcelona, Spain 8Department of Psychiatry, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada 9Department of Mental Health, The Ottawa Hospital, Ottawa, ON, Canada 10 Ottawa Hospital Research Institute (OHRI), Clinical Epidemiology Program, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada 11School of Epidemiology and Public Health, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada 12Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany 13 IMPACT - The Institute for Mental and Physical Health and Clinical Translation, School of Medicine, Barwon Health, Deakin University, Geelong, VIC, Australia 14 Department of Health, Social and Clinical Pharmacy, College of Pharmacy, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea 15The Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Industry Management, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Korea 16Department of Pediatrics, Yonsei University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea 17 The Center for Medical Education Training and Professional Development, Yonsei Donggok Medical Education Institute, Seoul, Korea 18 Severance Underwood Meta-Research Center, Institute of Convergence Science, Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea 19 Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford (METRICS) and Departments of Medicine, Epidemiology and Population Health, Biomedical Data Science, and Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA [. . .] [. . .] For example, in Retraction Watch, 40% of retractions are by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.72 [. . .] [. . .] [. . .]

1. Brainard J. Rethinking retractions. Science 2018;362(6413):390-3." alleges a scientific article.

(S.

fuer Kontaktdaten!)

Before cheap copiers, students used to cuts pages are of journals and take them home.

The libraries did replace the missing pages, at least for the more important journals, but it was a known problem.

On my web-site there's a link to a 1959 IEE (thus English, not American) paper.

I bought the right to display it on my web-site from the IEE when I bought a .pdf copy of the paper. That isn't the copy I display - The IEE orginal wasn't all that good and JM - who posts here - sent me a better one.

The reason I bought it is that none of the academic libraries I could get at had decent copies. The IEE journal involved is pretty obscure, and the libraries hadn't bothered to clear up after the student depredations.

There is worse. A librarian I knew told me that sometimes people would cut prayers out of prayer books. John

This is no joke, it's going to happen.

China has significantly accelerated its compact fusion reactor development, shifting its focus from laboratory experiments to an industrial-scale race aimed at generating the world's first fusion-derived electricity by 2030. Under its 2026–2030 national plan, Beijing designated nuclear fusion as a key strategic "future industry," providing massive state backing alongside an influx of private capital.

1. The Flagship Compact Device: BEST China’s primary vehicle for near-term compact fusion power is the Burning Plasma Experimental Superconducting Tokamak (BEST), located in Hefei.The Goal: Unlike purely experimental facilities, BEST is explicitly designed as a compact device to demonstrate net energy gain and deliver the first fusion power to the grid around 2030.Timeline: The facility is scheduled for engineering completion by the end of 2027.Recent Milestones: In mid-2026, technicians successfully cleared full-load testing for two domestically developed superconducting magnets crucial to BEST. This included a massive 582-ton Toroidal Field (TF) superconducting magnet and a high-temperature superconducting central solenoid coil.

1. High-Temperature Superconductors (HTS) & Materials The transition to compact fusion requires shrinking the physical footprint of reactors while maintaining intense magnetic fields. China has made rapid progress in this sector:Supermagnets: The central solenoid coil developed for BEST achieved internationally leading performance using high-temperature superconductors (HTS), which allow for much stronger magnetic confinement in a smaller space.Extreme Materials: Chinese researchers successfully integrated a newly formulated super-steel (dubbed CHSN01) into its reactor pipeline. This material can withstand intense 20-Tesla magnetic fields and massive structural stresses while operating under extreme fusion temperatures.

2. Commercialization & the Startup Boom Historically dominated by massive, state-run installations like the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), China's fusion ecosystem changed rapidly between 2025 and 2026:Private Venture Surge: A wave of commercial startups has emerged to build agile, smaller-scale, and faster-iterating compact fusion devices.Capital Inflow: In the first half of 2026 alone, dozens of domestic fusion startups completed funding rounds totaling more than 7 billion yuan (~ billion USD), transitioning fusion from purely academic physics into an active "patient capital" playground.Long-Term Roadmap: The government’s official trajectory plans for a compact pilot experimental reactor by 2035, a full demonstration reactor by 2045, and commercially viable, scaled production shortly thereafter.

1. Record-Breaking Foundation Research This compact technology is heavily supported by milestones achieved on China's larger existing tokamaks:HL-3 Tokamak: Located in Chengdu, this reactor achieved a "dual 100-million-degrees" milestone, reaching ion temperatures of 117 million °C and electron temperatures of 160 million °C.EAST Tokamak: In addition to setting continuous steady-state long-pulse plasma records (running for upwards of 20 minutes), EAST is acting as the baseline testing ground to clear plasma ignition capabilities by 2027.

The consolidated strategy—uniting state infrastructure with agile private startups—positions China in direct, neck-and-neck competition with Western private compact fusion efforts.

China is overcoming the long-standing physical and engineering limits of Tokamak reactors through a series of highly specific materials science breakthroughs, AI-driven plasma control, and supply-chain scale.Rather than just building larger machines, Chinese researchers are focusing on solving the fundamental operational "trade-offs" that have stalled Tokamak progress globally for decades.

1. Breaking the "Greenwald Limit" (Sustaining Ultra-Dense Plasma)Historically, every Tokamak on Earth faced a strict physical ceiling known as the Greenwald Limit. If scientists tried to pack the hydrogen fuel plasma too densely, the plasma would become unstable, break apart, and violently collapse against the reactor walls.The Solution: Researchers utilizing the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) discovered that this instability is actually triggered by how the plasma boundaries interact with the inner wall of the device.The Breakthrough: By using precise microwave heating (ECRH) and active gas-seeding to control plasma-wall interactions from the exact moment of ignition, they successfully accessed a highly sought-after "density-free regime". They stabilized plasma at 1.3 to 1.65 times past the Greenwald limit, proving that future compact reactors can drastically multiply their fusion power output (which scales with the square of the plasma density).

1. Solving the Divertor Heat Flux Trade-off (The DTP Regime)When a Tokamak runs in "high-confinement mode" (the state required to generate efficient energy), the plasma naturally produces violent bursts of heat called Edge-Localized Modes (ELMs). These bursts act like mini-lightning bolts, hammering and destroying the divertor—the exhaust component that removes excess heat. Safely cooling the divertor usually meant cooling the plasma edge, which ruined the fusion efficiency.The Solution: Chinese scientists developed a new operating framework called the DTP (Detached divertor and Turbulence-dominated Pedestal) regime.The Breakthrough: By injecting light impurity gases in real-time to create a "cushion," they achieved partial divertor detachment. This simultaneously cooled and protected the reactor walls, eliminated the destructive ELM bursts entirely, and kept the core plasma operating at high fusion efficiency—solving a central engineering paradox of Tokamaks.

2. Deploying "Zero-Shot" AI for Real-Time Plasma Magnetic Control Because Tokamak plasma behaves like a highly erratic, turbulent fluid, human-engineered algorithms struggle to adjust magnetic fields quickly enough to prevent plasma from touching the reactor walls and cooling down instantly.The Solution: Scientists at the Southwestern Institute of Physics, working alongside Zhejiang University, developed a deep-learning AI model trained entirely on historical experimental data from the Huanliu-3 (HL-3) reactor.The Breakthrough: They integrated this AI agent directly into the HL-3's real-world magnetic control systems. Leveraging Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks and self-attention mechanisms, the AI accurately predicts and manipulates plasma current and shape. It demonstrated a "zero-shot" generalization capability, maintaining precise plasma stability even under completely novel, unfamiliar operating conditions.

1. Overcoming Extensively Demanding Magnet Manufacturing To constrain plasma burning at temperatures exceeding 100 million °C, a Tokamak requires immensely powerful superconducting magnets. These magnets must sit just meters away from the extreme heat while being cryogenically cooled to -269°C (near absolute zero) to maintain superconductivity.The Solution: China leverages its dominant industrial supply chain to build massive, highly specialized components domestically.The Breakthrough: This culminated in the manufacturing of the 582-ton superconducting Toroidal Field magnet for the upcoming BEST reactor. Chinese engineers overcame the structural limitations of magnet stress by inventing ultra-low-resistance joints (for flawless power transfer), advanced radiation shielding, and millisecond-level quench-detection sensors to prevent the magnets from overheating and destroying themselves.