Theory 109/New facility/Energy
Fusion Needs a Pilot
The claim
Whether fusion plasmas can sustain net power cannot be settled by scaling existing devices, because the coupled physics only appears at reactor scale.
01Mechanism
Confinement, heating and exhaust interact nonlinearly; small devices test them separately.
02Prediction
Extrapolations should diverge across designs until a pilot operates.
03Refutation
Consistent extrapolations would remove the need.