stshank.bsky.social
Head of Content at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup developing zero-carbon power plants to help fight climate change. Former science and technology journalist at CNET. Bird nerd and member of the Eunice Winkless fan club.
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Years of research, development, engineering, and now manufacturing and assembly work. We've proven out our technology through tests (e.g. TFMC and CSMC prototypes, now production magnets). Plus lots of detailed planning & execution.
Here are recent photos of our magnet factory and tokamak facility.
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I was planning a November vacation road trip to Utah last year until I looked at EV charging options.
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Just love those black phoebes. Maybe in part because they perch so obligingly.
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I struggle with lots of improbabilities in James Bond movies, but for some reason the invisible car was just unacceptable to me. I couldn't just roll my eyes a bit, sit back and say "hey, it's just a movie, go with it." Not sure why that was the moment my brain dug in its heels, so to speak.
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Glad to be of service! Some better photos of the WindBorne balloon here: bsky.app/profile/stsh...
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Indeed, we at @cfs.energy haven't completed our first tokamak yet, but we expect to reach Q>1 in 2027, which will be a much more notable achievement in fusion energy than sustaining a plasma for a long time. Not to dismiss WEST's achievement, but fusion needs confinement + density + temperature.
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I will say that I receive zero bots or scammers on Gmail Chat, I imagine because it's not worth the bother for the scammers.
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I have one nephew who still uses it to chat with me. He's been the only one, for more than a decade.
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No worries, I get it — I was just offering up a little data point I thought you might find interesting. Science FTW. cfs.energy/technology/p...
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Not *everyone* in the US. See for example what we're up to at @cfs.energy:
blog.cfs.energy/cfs-will-bui...
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At @cfs.energy we're building a fusion demonstration tokamak (SPARC) and plan our first power plant (ARC) to put watts on the grid in the early 2030s. That's not tomorrow, but nor are massive grid buildout, new nuclear power, long-duration storage at scale, etc. blog.cfs.energy/cfs-will-bui...
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Related: the @cfs.energy Slack thread about this development is really robust. Forget enumerating the states of matter — just defining what a state of matter actually is turns out to be pretty gnarly.
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I'm very confused. This looks more like a generative AI hallucination than an actual bird!
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QR codes for the app:
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Everybody skips past that anyway to get to the actual article.
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Nice roundup. Let us know if you ever want to talk to us over here on Team Tokamak at @cfs.energy. Also note this news today — our partnership with Type One Energy. blog.cfs.energy/cfs-flexes-m...
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Not to downplay the seriousness of China's fusion effort, but there's a difference between sustaining a plasma for a long duration and sustaining a plasma that's *hot enough to fuse* for a long duration. Here's a post by @cfs.energy CEO Bob Mumgaard on this point: www.linkedin.com/posts/mumgaa...
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That's what I thought, too, but check the iNaturalist ID from somebody who probably knows a *lot* more about slime molds than I do (which is not a lot).
Also this podcast started out really well but then I fell asleep last night so I don't know how it ends. www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...
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It's quite a tome, but I just finished reading it and I enjoyed it. Picked up a few corporate history nuggets. Toward the end it had a lot of company docs I'd already read but a couple I hadn't seen.
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BTW the best performance of this piece, to my ears anyway, is from Wendy Carlos on the Moog synthesizer from Switched-on Bach. She uses several effects to show the different voices, plus it really gallops along. But it's not on streaming services. I uploaded my CD version and listen to it a lot.