Between the port of New York and a New York Amazon warehouse? Don't need them.

Between a Walmart distribution centre and a Walmart store? Same.

Between FedEx sorting centres, or the sorting centre and the airport mail centre? Yup.

These aren't designed for hyper-miler long-haul freight (most of which should go by train anyway). Most truck journeys are local/regional distribution, for which 300km range is more than sufficient - especially if you control both ends and can do little top-ups during the day whilst the truck is being loaded/unloaded.

> Secondly charging at 43kW/250kW is very expensive, becuase the cost of infrastructure is expensive and needs to be paid off too. The unit price of electricity is only one factor. > > Don't get me wrong, these trucks will sell, but not on pure business and economic basis.

In reality though, almost nobody needs 250kW charging.

The average HGV will spend 9+hours charging overnight. It'll trundle from a warehouse to a supermarket (and back), possibly trickle-charging at both ends. It'll do maybe 4-5 round trips in the day, all of which could be covered by a single charge, but it'll probably get a bit of topping-up whilst material is unloaded.

There will be a handful of people doing London-Scotland trips who need a quick charge halfway, but that's not the duty-cycle most trucks work on.

It may also do some "light" journeys. For instance trailers to the Isle of Man generally get dropped off at Heysham, loaded by port tractors and forwarded by a local haulier on the island. So a Tesco tractor unit will take a loaded trailer to Heysham and either return to the warehouse unladen, or with an empty trailer - which will not tax the range too much.

Obviously they'll be a no-brainer for any sort of urban delivery where ULEZ or Congestion charging exists.

And we're assuming that diesel costs don't rise further/get taxed, or that electricity doesn't come down significantly (probably will, especially if they change how the wholesale market works, which they need to and will happen eventually).

Most trucking isn't like that though - even in Canada. Measuring by "daily journeys", local freight dominates over long-haul, and the average journey is well under 300km - railhead/port to warehouse, warehouse to supermarket.

Or distribution between a company's production sites (e.g. where I am in the UK we have a major manufacturer with six factories and one big goods-inbound logistics centre. So they have a fleet of trucks continuously ferrying components from the centre to factories, all <20km. There will be similar arrangements in some Canadian cities). Ideal application for an electric truck (particularly since you control both ends, and can have charging infra anywhere - though these trucks could do at least 5 rounds trips on a single charge).

In truth, 1400km truck journeys shouldn't exist outside of mad niche cases like Ice Road trucking. Between cities or provinces the cargo should just go on a train. Safer, better timetable reliability, lower carbon, one driver per hundred wagons, instead of one-per-trailer.

Even in the UK, companies like Amazon and Tesco (supermarket) are moving heavily to railfreight because it's just more reliable than road haulage. That's mostly for freight between southern England and Scotland, which is "upto 500km". Also, for stuff arriving at ports, so it goes straight on a train and doesn't touch a road until it's near its final destination.

> As you noted, they’ve worked decades to achieve seconds.

Minutes now. Last year, EAST ran sustained reactions over a minute, and a long-period plasma pulse over 17minutes.

> It is not reasonable to assume that this technology will catch up to be a viable energy source in the timeframe they target for the reactor install.

The thing to bear in mind is that certain things are a function of size and dimension. We've learnt that a classic torus tokomak needs to be bigger than JET - in fact we reckon it needs to be about the size of ITER. Now we could have just built a big tokomak in the 90s, but we also knew we needed to do lots of research on materials which could withstand neutron bombardment. And methods of extracting heat and waste materials. And a million other things. Even if JET had found Q=1, it was never any good as a power station. We couldn't have started cookie-cuttering JET reactors around the UK. It was very firmly a research reactor.

All of those bits and pieces could be done on smaller, cheaper reactors with second-long pulses. Rigs that are cheaper to build, tear apart, modify and upgrade (as JET has been, multiple times). You don't test a new rocket engine design for the first time by attaching it to a rocket - you put it in an isolated test cell because it probably won't work first time.

We're bringing together those decades of research into a viable reactor. It's now that we're committing to building "the whole rocket" and trying to launch it. We understand the geometries, the materials and the chemistries.

Consider: Nobody had launched a payload to space until they actually did it. Until that day, it was speculative. It was all a lot of work with no proof it would actually work. It was a lot of piddling around in test cells working out why the last engine blew itself to pieces, or working out why it caught fire on the pad. And then Sputnik happened. And it was both scientific and engineering fact.

There will be more unforeseen challenges, and it could undoubtedly have gone quicker if governments were vaguely interested in funding Fusion research properly. But it's not impossible, and at least one of the DEMO reactors is going to work. The level of engineering has risen and the technical risk has fallen. There's a diversity of designs, which improves the odds of finding the sweet spot.

> The technology has not yet reached a sustainable reaction.

Well no duh, you need the first prototype to move beyond short research shots and develop long-lived plasma. This is the sort of thinking that kills progress. This reactor is a planned successor to ITER and MAST. Scientists have spent decades poking nuclei, ITER is the one which will go net-positive, and and now "this is (one of) the one(s) which will produce power (on a part-time basis)". This is a DEMO-class reactor, with most ITER partners developing their own DEMO facility.

> If by part-time, you mean seconds then yes.

ITER is designed to achieve Q=1 (actually Q>10), with fusion periods of 400-600seconds and ultimate up to 1000s. So multiple minutes.

ITER First Plasma is planned for 2025. The work that has gone into building ITER and MAST Upgrade will inform the design decisions made for this reactor. Research done between now and 2030 will further inform the build process. It's reasonable to expect that after years of work at ITER (and other parallel projects around the world), reactors such as this will not only achieve sustainable fusion, but for many-minutes-to-hours.

> Developing a working prototype might be a better first step.

This is the working prototype. It'll be a research reactor, producing energy onto the grid on a part-time basis.

They've spent enough time with other fusion projects like JET that they reckon they can get a net-positive design running by 2040, and this will be it. They might fail, but that's the theory.

The claim is a design concept by 2024, first plasma by 2040.

So... first plasma by 2060 maybe?