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0 pointsSomeone5y ago0 comments

The article claims this design can easily be built before ITER is completed (5 years vs 15 years)

It also says it can be built much cheaper than the total cost for ITER.

The article doesn’t say it, but I would guess that it also can be built for less money than the money needed to complete ITER.

If so, what’s not obsolete about ITER? Are there useful experiments that can be done with it that one can’t do with a more modern design?

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willis9365y ago

ITER is much more complicated than SPARC. For example, the disruption mitigation system is similar to DIII-D's but with (I believe) much higher resolution in time and space. ITER has 80 MW of plasma heating but most Q targets only require ~50 MW. It is a platform to do science. It's a huge machine that is meant to demonstrate a tokamak reactor. Corners can't be cut to get there.

Making a tiny machine quickly, skimming over the hard engineering problems is more of a moonshot approach. It's halfway to a startup with actual MIT startups selling HTS coils. Be wary of anyone selling something.

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