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I'm a big fan of fusion research, but I strongly believe that fusion energy can NOT help with the climate crisis-- it's too late for it. Because IMO ANY path t
by myrmidon 5y ago
I'm a big fan of fusion research, but I strongly believe that fusion energy can NOT help with the climate crisis-- it's too late for it.
Because IMO ANY path towards commercial fusion (that is not a total moonshot) needs to go through:
1) small demonstrator (JET, Wendelstein 7-x)
2) scaled up research reactor (ITER-like)
3) demo plant capable of electrical energy generation (ITER successor)
4) Mass construction of a somewhat standardized design (kinda like EPR or APR-1400 construction)
IMO, considering somewhat comparable steps in nuclear fission reactor design it is SUPER unrealistic to expect steps 2, 3 and 4 to take less than 10 years each (and even that is EXTREMELY optimistic already).
Throwing more ressources at the problem might help, but not that much; IMO only step 4 is really amenable to parallelization...
- TaylorAlexander 5y agoYou would be right if not for one thing. ITER and its planned successor DEMO take forever to build because they are huge. The whole point of SPARC and its planned successor ARC is that they use new high temperature superconducting magnets with a significantly higher field strength than ITER. This means they can build a machine with the same Q gain as ITER in 1/10th the size. Because of this they can go through steps 2 and 3 much faster. And they have already done step 1 in an existing reactor at MIT. They claim they can do step 2 in 3 or 4 years because the machine is so small. They recently proved their magnets work in a demonstration last September or thereabouts. They have the strongest large bore magnets ever created, and this directly leads to a much smaller machine. That is why I say they are promising. Really, check out the links!