Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by people building more reactors. That's a heck of an assumption), it's not at all a given that it'll ever make a profit. That's a lot of time to build a lot of very cheap renewables.
And there's also opportunity costs. I see a lot of hopes put on fusion and don't really understand this chasing of the perfect solution. Even best case, it's not happening in decades, and it'll take decades more to build fusion as anything more than one off multi-decade-long research projects. That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.
So opportunity costs would also make for an interesting thing to calculate. Given that fusion will likely not make a major difference climate/pollution-wise for half a century, what else could we build in that time, and how much and what effect would that have?
That's not really how it works. ITER has a budget measured in billions over multiple years, the global energy industry is trillions every year. The amount needed to do the research is such a small proportion that if there is even a tiny possibility that it could long-term provide a significant proportion of world energy, it's well worth doing the research. The scientific knowledge gain is just icing on the cake.
> That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.
We can do two things at once.
The bigger, principal problem of ITER is the used magnet technology (niobium–tin, niobium–titanium). This was safe and conservative choice in 1990s, but as consequence the tokamak has to be big and therefor expensive to build.
Commonwealth Fusion Systems is currently building a tokamak based on the same physics as ITER, but with modern magnet technology using rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) high-temperature superconductors. Their ARC tokamak should be smaller and cheaper than ITER.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARC_fusion_reactor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_Fusion_Systems
Of all the fusion energy startups Commonwealth Fusion Systems is nearest to demonstrating a realistic fusion power plant.
For example, HVDC. Interconnect and buy power from somebody with more sun. Or just overbuild solar by a lot. It's cheap, so chances are having too much of it still works out economically.
Now of course that's a research reactor full of experiments and instrumentation that wouldn't be part of a normal power plant, but given current experience that I think we can expect we won't suddenly knock down the cost to $100M. It's going to be somewhere in the billions. And we have expectations of that DEMO is going to make 750MWe.
We can then plug those estimates into the calculator and basically figure out how cheap and how powerful a fusion reactor has to be for it to make economical sense.
The size and also the complicated governance have made ITER very slow to build, which also increases expense. The JET tokamak is about the size of the reactor CFS is building, and JET was built in a year for the reactor itself, plus three years before that for the building they put it in.
Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw
One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vacuum vessel cooled by a layer of molten lead and a layer of FLiBe (a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2)).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe
The lithium component of FLiBe is used for breeding of the radioactive isotope tritium, which will be extracted from the salt and used for making the deuterium-tritium fuel of the tokamak.
The big takeaway is that better magnets reduce reactor size by the 4th power, and energy output and cost by the cubed power. Finding a material for the magnets which doubles their strength would reduce the size of the reactor by 94% and the cost by 88%.
A possible conclusion one could make is that with regular advancements in magnets it’s very possible that the first operational commercial fusion reactors will be relatively low-cost compared to current and planned fusion reactors, and even though they may begin construction after the next generation of super-sized fusion reactors - they might be finished and operational before their “predecessors” with inferior magnets have completed being built.
will AI help us get through blockers like this?
I'm out of the prediction business but my guess is: absolutely, but iff we don't collapse in some way first.
Wild to be alive as the centuries-long horse race of industrialization between doom, or the stars, approaches its finish line.
This is why I love the idea of Helion so much.
Who knows if it will ever work, but skipping the thermal transport and doing direct current generation from EMF in the reactor seems like it has tremendous potential for simplifying (and eventually downsizing)
Really gives a perspective on the range of temperatures handled.
That said, one big missing thing (other than the economic stuff, mentioned by others) which would add a lot to this simulation would be more about 'where does Q come from?'. Obviously this could be too complicated for a little sim, but perhaps a few simple things could be added like showing how increasing the volume/surface ratio for tokomaks/sphereomaks can help, or how getting rid of certain types of instabilities can improve say mirror or pinch designs. This might help people to understand why certain design decisions (like building ITER so big) were made.
"The limitations of 20+ year-old Nb3Sn superconductor magnet technology forces ITER to be so large it is taking the entire world to build a single device"
On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."
Fusion is that faster horse - promising a cheaper to operate firebox which when attached to a stream engine attached to an alternator can produce electricity.
This approach to generating electricity has been superseded by new technologies - first by gas turbines which removed the steam engine and then by wind turbines which removed heat from the process and now by solar PV which has removed all the mechanics.
I just can’t see any circumstances under which steam engines are “coming back” and becoming competitive for electricity no matter how cheap the firebox fuel is.
You can slow down those particles against an electric field and harvest the energy as electricity directly. No steam turbine. No Carnot limit.
We are not in a place where we expect fusion power to be incrementally achieved by the current systems. We need major breakthroughs that are both impossible to predict and may not even exist outside of stars or thermonuclear devices.
The idea that we'll get massive improvements in Qsci, while maintaining the same basic structure as existing fusion systems, is in the end a bit silly. What would we estimate our confidence to be that when someone invents the Fromboculator, that the Fromboculator will even have a heating system or "vacuum vessel" or a plasma system.
In the end, this looks like it's a steam engine simulator more than anything else, but with some fancy words thrown in.
And can in many cases be much higher than the heat energy (e.g. theta pinch).
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/29/6/062103/2847827/Pro...
It’s open access and you can download the PDF directly from there.
If I enable advanced mode, the "exiting" in Heating Power (exiting) gets overlapped with corresponding numbers
Display menu doesn't allow switching to Energy mode
[1] https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE
(fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually, lol)
Wasn't it perpetually 20 to 50 years away? I'm not an expert on the space. But new computational methods and magnets seem to be genuine steps forward.
That's awesome. Maybe we can fly it around the moon and take selfies with it!
Might as well roll all the high cost pseudo-science into one big instagram package...
p.s. Of course this is in contrast to using the giant fusion reaction that we have running, literally over our heads...
