3 ms·
And safety. Fusion has the enormous advantage that you can just switch it off, without the core continuing to generate heat and causing a meltdown if the coolin
by tlb 7y ago
And safety. Fusion has the enormous advantage that you can just switch it off, without the core continuing to generate heat and causing a meltdown if the cooling system fails.
0.5 MW capacity costs around $1M with solar, so if 0.5 MW of fusion power takes up a cubic meter that doesn't seem like a deal breaker.
- pfdietz 7y agoThe argument involves the comparison with fission. The low power density means it's going to be more expensive than fission, and fission already fails economically. The difference between fission and solar is that solar lacks many systems (like, turbines and generators) that fission and fusion would need. More fundamentally, solar is distributed (even on a large solar farm), so there's a lack of coupling between elements that makes everything easy to assemble and very fault tolerant. In fission and fusion plants, the intricate dependencies mean everything has to be highly reliable. Safety (for fission) and the extreme difficulty of repair of activated structures (for fusion) also drive this very expensive reliability.
- bassman9000 7y agoThe argument involves the comparison with fission. With the current LWR/HWR fission reactors, where core is solid.
- nine_k 7y ago> switch it off, without the core continuing to generate heat and causing a meltdown A number of fission designs have this property, too. Most operational fission reactors are from 1960s to 1980s, and indeed are capable of a meltdown.
- pfdietz 7y agoAnd if one were allowed to design a fission core with a power density as low as a fusion core, it could also be made highly resistant to meltdown, because it would have so much more thermal inertia. One might ask why fission reactors are not designed that way.