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Re:A faster, cheaper path to fusion energy by Retric on Monday November 05, 2018 @06:22PM (#18386921)
A lot of the current complexity relates to the fact these are experiments not production systems. We want to be able to change a great deal of different things with high precision while gathering data, not simply generate power.

Production systems would likely have much higher gas contamination for example and operate at a steady state for months.

Also, ITER is actually rather small from a power production standpoint, 500MW thermal power ~= 150MW of electricity where we have plenty of fusion reactors several times that size. Luckily things get much easier when you scale fusion power.

Re:A faster, cheaper path to fusion energy by pfdietz on Monday November 05, 2018 @06:31PM (#18386959)
Not being production systems means entire subsystems are omitted. No tritium breeding blankets, no robotic maintenance systems, not extremely high efficiency tritium purification and recovery systems. Research reactors don't need the materials that could withstand the extreme neutron loading a production reactor would be exposed to. And they don't need to be reliable enough to operate with a high enough capacity factor to pay off the investment, as a production reactor would have to.

As you scale up the power of a fusion reactor, the volumetric power density goes DOWN. This is because it becomes limited by the power/area through the first wall. Square/cube law in action.

Re:A faster, cheaper path to fusion energy by Retric on Monday November 05, 2018 @06:38PM (#18386995)
> no robotic maintenance systems ... neutron load.

ITER has full remote handling as it's expected to get extremely radioactive. Scaling reactors up does not really mean increasing the neutron load on the walls as you want to keep that fairly steady per surface area.

Tritium production has ~zero impact on operation. The breeding blankets are really simple, you take lithium and enclose it in a metal of some type. Replace after a few months.

Also, a ~10x device is unlikely to be 50-50 DT as while hard to operate on pure DD fusion it's not that hard to get when you have some tritium in the mix.

Re:A faster, cheaper path to fusion energy by pfdietz on Monday November 05, 2018 @06:40PM (#18387008)
Retric: a production reactor would need robots capable of replacing the entire first wall every few years. ITER will not have anything like that.
Re:A faster, cheaper path to fusion energy by Retric on Monday November 05, 2018 @06:45PM (#18387033)
ITER remote maintenance system (IRMS) is specifically designed to do just that: http://users.isr.ist.utl.pt/~mir/pub/SOFT_RHSystemsForITER_I...

It's not designed to replace everything, but I doubt commercial designs would go that far either.

Re:A faster, cheaper path to fusion energy by DennisP on Tuesday November 06, 2018 @07:53AM (#18390510)
MIT's ARC is designed to make that easy. The reactor opens right up and you just lift out the inner wall and drop in a new one.

They've already tested joints in the REBCO tape, and found that they introduce very little electrical resistance.