ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly

Re:ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly by maccam94 on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @05:17AM (#23984835)

Cambridge Fusion Systems[1] is a private company spun out of MIT that is building a proof-of-concept reactor based on these new magnets within the next 5 years.

Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte (2016) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

Timeline (in case you want to skip over some parts):

  00:01:00 - introducing Dennis Whyte, MIT department head for nuclear science
  00:04:24 - presentation starts
  00:06:00 - identifies breakthrough with REBCO magnets
  00:07:25 - explains deuterium-tritium fusion
  00:12:30 - basic metrics for reactor performance
  00:17:15 - energy output of other previous fusion experiments
  00:19:00 - examines ITER and the problems of its approach
  00:22:00 - problems solved by high energy magnetic fields
  00:28:15 - full scale reactor concept, teardown of REBCO magnets
  00:37:00 - design limits and margins
  00:39:00 - fixes plasma instabilities found in weaker magnetic chambers
  00:40:00 - maintainability, lifespan, component replacement
  00:45:00 - solution to neutron damage and energy capture
  00:50:30 - cost and profitability
  00:54:00 - full graph of field strength vs reactor scale (and thus funding requirements)
  01:01:50 - Q&A
  01:30:00 - question about the biggest risks

He gave another talk in 2019 with more numbers and even more confidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM

1: https://cfs.energy/technology

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Re:ITER: World's largest nuclear fusion project begins assembly by pfdietz on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @07:10AM (#23985406)

And then you go to the arxiv paper for ARC and learn: the power density is 40x worse than a PWR primary reactor vessel, and their projected cost is $29/W(e) (vs. < $1/W(e) for PV). Also, the vacuum vessel likely wouldn't survive a disruption (although maybe they've fixed that in the years since).

Compact high field tokamaks have better power density that ITER or DEMO would, but they still are very inferior to fission reactors. And fission reactors are far out of the running economically.

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