Tokamak Energy makes breakthrough in efficient powering of nuclear fusion

All I could glean from the article was that they halved their own previous energy costs for cooling the superconducting magnets.<p>Which is pretty cool if you need some really powerful superconducting magnets and you have to keep them going for long periods of time.<p>They&#x27;d probably be great for levitating frogs.<p>I don&#x27;t know if these magnets would be useful for MRIs. Like the fMRIs that you need to keep going for a while or something. I hope so; more people having sex in fMRI machines can only be a good thing. Just because the mental image is so amusing.<p>I didn&#x27;t see any hint that this was particularly significant for commercial fusion. Instead of generating X amount of power and consuming Y for magnets plus Z for other stuff, where Y+Z &gt;&gt; X, now you&#x27;re using Y&#x2F;2 for magnets, and Y&#x2F;2+Z &gt;&gt; X. Yay?

The Tokamak hype machine is in overdrive. But no commercially viable power will ever be generated with a Tokamak. Such a reactor would be much more expensive to operate than a fission plant, and fission plants get less competitive every year.<p>We may hope that the plasma physicists employed on these projects are learning things that will later be applicable to actually-practical fusion. It seems like a Good Thing to be keeping plasma physicists employed, but I hope the crash when reality catches up to the projects does not leave them suddenly unemployed, as has often happened to (particularly) aeronautical and electrical engineers over the past 60 years.

&gt; Once commercialized, fusion energy will be clean, low-cost, secure, abundant, and safe.<p>Safe?

Thanks in advance HN for explaining what&#x27;s really going on here.