#arXiv Stellarators as a Fast Path to Fusion arxiv.org/abs/2104.04621 Seventeen years after the beginning of the fusion program, sentiments changed in 1968 when tokamaks were shown to have confinement properties far beyond those of any other fusion concept.
Nonetheless, the absence of robust stability was concerning since that had been known from early tokamak experiments. An invention is required for a tokamak to have sufficient passive stability for a power plant.
Is the stellarator the required invention that makes the least change in the fundamental concept? Stellarators are intrinsically strongly non-axisymmetric, which means careful design is required for adequate confinement; the power plant construction requires roughly five years.
All of the governments of the world have failed in this responsibility by not providing the required funding. The fusion community itself is largely responsible for neither governments nor those who study energy issues to take fusion seriously as a solution.
If the community itself does not believe a fusion power plant could be built in fifteen or twenty years with an annual investment that is small compared to a trillion dollars, then it cannot expect others to believe. If fusion cannot be developed quickly, skepticism is expected.
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