MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy

Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by orbital-decay on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @07:06PM (#28464169)

Expensive because it's a custom built physics lab, not a commercial power plant. Slow because it's an international project. Not just that, but it also requires lots of infrastructure to be built and entire industries to develop in multiple countries, before it can be useful. ITER is massive, but it's also just a tip of the iceberg.

>It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the major radius by a few meters would have such a huge impact on cost/timelines.

It would, easily. Past a certain size, production costs rise exponentially and require one-off tech.

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by onlyrealcuzzo on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @07:17PM (#28464246)

Is it massive because it's 6 meters? Like - a 6 meter diamond would be "massive" - but a 6 meter boat isn't that impressive.

Or is it massive like the tokamak is a 6 meter engine to a 100 km collider? Like there's a ton of other stuff being built in a massive structure?

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by dodobirdlord on Thursday September 09, 2021 @12:48AM (#28466325)

A 6 meter superconducting magnetic containment vessel is massive, as such things go. But ITER is also an entire facility built around the containment vessel.

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by lambdatronics on Thursday September 09, 2021 @11:19PM (#28477438)

The magnets are so large they had to build a factory on-site to put them together. If you can make the magnets small enough to transport from a centralized factory, that's a huge win.

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Re:MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion... by lumost on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @09:39PM (#28465238)

If production costs rise exponentially with reactor size then the exponential power gain with size isn’t very impressive.

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