4 ms·
It should be noted that all non-tokamak approaches to nuclear fusion offer cheaper costs than ITER. Tokamaks like ITER are an outlier when it comes to projected
by ZenoArrow 9y ago
It should be noted that all non-tokamak approaches to nuclear fusion offer cheaper costs than ITER. Tokamaks like ITER are an outlier when it comes to projected/actual costs. I'm going to avoid listing my personal favourite fusion project yet again on HN, but what I will say is ITER is not the only game in town, and there's lots of promising research being done into non-tokamak designs.
- DennisP 9y agoI agree, but will mention that MIT's plan is a tokamak. But it's ten times smaller, because they use new, commercially-available high temperature superconducting tapes that weren't around when ITER was designed. This lets them use a much stronger magnetic field. (MIT doesn't have funding for it but the private company Tokamak Energy is doing something similar.) MIT's design is also easy to take apart, has a 3-d printed reactor core that gets replaced once a year, and surrounds that with FLiBe, the same molten salt used in some fission designs, for cooling and tritium breeding.
- XorNot 9y agoIt's also all a design, and you'd be a fool to believe any upfront cost-projections are going to be hit. ITER was not as expensive as it is back when it was designed either, but building things which have never been built before is full of risk. In a sane world, we'd be funding both and probably more, seeing as how fusion power is basically one of the single most important technologies we could perfect in the modern age.
- DennisP 9y agoTrue, but we have built working tokamaks like JET, which is about the same size as MIT's design, so it's not like the numbers come out of thin air either.