Why would it not be economic?
After the first reactor, do we expect building a replica, without all the R&D costs would be significantly more expensive than a standard nuclear reactor?
To me, 10x the energy sounds really good.
After the first reactor, do we expect building a replica, without all the R&D costs would be significantly more expensive than a standard nuclear reactor?
To me, 10x the energy sounds really good.
https://www.iter.org/sci/MakingitWork
"The neutrons will be absorbed by the surrounding walls of the tokamak, where their kinetic energy will be transferred to the walls as heat. In ITER, this heat will be captured by cooling water circulating in the vessel walls and eventually dispersed through cooling towers. In the type of fusion power plant envisaged for the second half of this century, the heat will be used to produce steam and—by way of turbines and alternators—electricity."
A "real" reactor will need to have tritium breeding blankets to regenerate the tritium. Otherwise, the cost of tritium alone, if made in fission reactors, for a 1 GW(e) DT fusion reactor would be $15B/year.
For this reason, a Fusion Nuclear Science Facility has long been proposed as something that will be needed before DEMO is built. This could be a small, Q < 1 DT fusion device, as the goal would not be plasma physics related. It itself will need to breed its own tritium to operate long enough, so there's a circular dependency in the development.
Unfortunately the budget for ITER comes out of the US science budget instead of the State Department. Most US fusion funding only goes to ITER at this point.