Re:Nuclear-fusion reactor doubles record for energy made fro...
by panick21_ on Thursday February 24, 2022 @07:31AM
(#30453911)
Exactly, capital cost of large civil engineering project and the financing of that is actually the driver of the cost.
If you can build a nuclear plant with 500MW output and reduce the amount of concrete needed by significant factor, all of a sudden your are quite competitive.
Just for comparison, this is one of the furthest along commercial GenIV projects designs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pZC_ajI8Hs
No massive cooling towers. No gigantic containment cylinder. No gigantic low-pressure steam turbine.
In a PWR the core containment vessel is incredibly expensive and can only be built a few places, but its actually not the cost driver. Even so, compare to those, modern GenIV core vessels are vastly cheaper.
Not having to weld 8 inch gigantic steel vessels is far easier. See:
Fusion solves a minor problem of fission while making the major problem worse. It's a great example of misplaced focus.
Cooling down the magnets of a fusion plant is not a quick process, btw. Hell, just getting a fusion plant built with RAFM steel up to operating temperature is a delicate process. Once irradiated, the temperature window that material can operate at is rather narrow (300 C to 550 C; below that it's too brittle and above that it creeps.)