3 ms·
I'm not super knowledgeable, but my understanding is that ITER was designed around the best superconductors known at the time, which meant making the whole thin
by elihu 3y ago
I'm not super knowledgeable, but my understanding is that ITER was designed around the best superconductors known at the time, which meant making the whole thing really big.
A benefit of stronger magnets is that you can make it a lot smaller, and presumably cheaper -- which is what MIT has been working on with SPARC.
I don't know if it's practical to upgrade the magnets on ITER, but I'd expect it to be really expensive -- especially if they've already manufactured/installed the old magnets.
- pfdietz 3y agoIt would be completely impractical, since ITER is not designed to withstand the much larger JxB forces (which scale as B^2). In the high Tc high field designs, the mass of the metal supports for the magnets dominates the reactor mass.
- Certhas 3y agoThank you, that's the kind of point I was looking for. Why does JxB scale quadratically? Because a stronger field can contain (linearly) more current?
- pfdietz 3y agoIf you double the current J, you double the magnetic field B. But the JxB force is now quadrupled, because you doubled both J and B.