3 ms·

And ITER's design is already wildly outmoded now that high-temp superconductors exist (which they have for quite some time). Just a multinational pork project.

• XorNot 4y ago
  ITER exists to prove that fusion plasma stability can be sustained to extract useful energy. How it does it is irrelevant since the big news is having a sufficiently large tokamak vaccum vessel with instrumentation to study. HTSCs weren't usable when it was designed, and have only just become usable in the last 5 years or so but they are a fundamentally different material. You don't just drop them into a large, incredibly complex machine that depends on it's integrated magnetic containment system: you are functionally building a new device. If you can ITER, then you don't get a refund on spent dollars. You get a loss. And then you get to start another 30 year project to maybe build a new vacuum vessel, which you have to do because you still haven't actually tested plasma stability. "But but MIT skunkworks!"...yeah. It's still going along, and they haven't suddenly churned out a functioning reactor based on HTSCs because oh look, whatever the advantages they're a new material with different properties, manufacturing and handling behaviors all of which need to be developed, measured and inspected before you can use them effectively in a fusion device. If they look good then great: they can be used to make DEMO, the ITER-successor commercial powerplant prototype, cheaper and more powerful.