Tokamak Energy sets a temperature record among commercial fusion companies
tokamakenergy.co.uk
tokamakenergy.co.uk
There are IAEA reports for fusion calling for materials that survive >100 displacements-per-atom (DPA) and > 1000deg C[1]. Additionally you might also need highly controllable super-conducting magnets as well as advanced sensing of the instabilities of the fusion plasma to ensure they are well confined (a chief requirement for fusion). There are other problems, but these are typical issues with tokamak-based fusion devices. Chiefly most tokamaks around the world do not operate in "continuous mode", ie they operate on "shot mode" or short duration experiments to attempt to ignite the plasma to fusion conditions. Achieving high-duty cycle operation with a ignited plasma is its own hurdle.
Making hot plasmas is interesting, but if your technology requires the above, you are looking at around 4-5 once-per-decade material science results.
Every national lab in the US is saying we are out of time, we need existing energy solutions to avoid the worst of climate change.
Source: I am a nuclear engineer. [1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S136970210...
We certainly need to decarbonize as fast as we can without waiting for fusion, but if we're lucky then fusion might make things easier down the road.
The problem is that even 1 DPA is significant for structural materials, and is basically a nightmare for electrically or mechanically sensitive ones. For example light-water fission reactors achieve about 50 DPA to their reactor pressure vessels over their 40-50 year lifetime. Its hard to imagine that anything called a super-conductor could maintain Cooper-pairs after getting the average atom displaced from its original position.
Additionally CFS ran at 20 Kelvin... which again is hard to imagine happening at scales other than CERN-like efforts (ie one-of-a-kind installs):
"In September 2021 Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) created a test magnet with ReBCO wires in which flowed a current of 40,000 amperes, with a magnetic field of 20 tesla at 20 K." [1]
Edit: Also magnets have 1/R^3 field die-away, in direct competition with 1/R^2 particle dispersion die-away.... meaning your magnets control better as you make cavities smaller, however it also means the magnets get much more DPA :(.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_barium_copper_oxide
Materials are an ongoing problem, and it's not just dpa. Abdou at UCLA pretty convincingly argues that increasing dpa of wall materials isn't even the most pressing problem; reliability of the wall/blanket is.
http://www.fusion.ucla.edu/abdou/abdou%20presentations/2018/...
I should add that fusion neutrons add a problem beyond that experienced in fission reactors: the neutrons are sufficiently energetic that production of helium by (n,alpha) reactions in materials is a serious issue. The helium migrates to small very high pressure bubbles that break materials from the inside.
"Results show: anticipated MTBF is hours/days (required is years), and MTTR is 3-4 months (required is days), and availability is very low < 5%"
I don't have a problem with talking about MTBF and replacing blankets etc but we are talking about research, not a reactor.
Also of note look at the MTBF of magnets and cryogenics in this system! (1.14years and 0.57 years)
What does seem like a real problem for them is the one you've brought up before: the limited supply of beryllium.
How? The lithium/beryllium "blanket" (i.e. thousand tons of molten metal in a maze of pipes) is inside the coils?
If you look at the ARC design, the blanket tank interposes between the coils and the plasma. There's also another neutron shield there (made of titanium dihydride) to further reduce the neutron dose on the magnets. Fun fact: the temperature of the salt in the blanket tank is > the decomposition temperature of TiH2, so in a serious accident large amounts of hydrogen gas could be produced.
There's a reason the ARC reactor is 20 meters tall and weighs as much as several WW2 US destroyers.
In your typical fusion reactor design, the blanket is not just inside the coils, it's inside the vacuum vessel (shielding the vacuum vessel from radiation damage and direct plasma heating too). This means any leak from the blanket is a leak into the fusion chamber itself, a criticality 1 issue for which redundancy is not possible.
Any thoughts on the real focus of the lab?
[1] https://wci.llnl.gov/facilities/nif
Edit: However it is good to note that in comparison with other fusion methods, laser based methods relax materials constraints I listed above simply by spreading the energy/particle fluxes over larger surface areas.
If you built a giant fusion reactor based on NIF you could reduce DPA and temperature requirements, but it would fundamentally be a "shot" based reactor.
There is a statue of it in front of UW-Madison's Engineering Hall. It's a water display that, funnily, has not worked in many years.
The problems above are not just a plasma instability problem, which has impeded progress. The interior walls of the fusion reactors are just pretty extreme environments, and the extremity is made worse by the fact that if you control plasma flow with magnetic fields, you trade the ability to control magnetic fields with dose -to-the-magnets-.
Achieving high magnetic fields also require high currents -> super conductors -> low temperatures (0.1-20 Kelvin).
When Q>1 times come, we will then have to assume Qtotal < 1 until explicitly mentioned. As there are losses along the way and heat must be converted to electricity.
Use 20MW of energy to add 10MW into plasma, get 20MW of fusion, convert 30MW of heat into 10MW of electricity and they have reached their stated goal without actually achieving anything useful. And that’s assuming steady state operation rather than a fraction of a second pulse that briefly reaches their goals.
It’s exactly the same thing as a startup selling dollars for pennies and saying yea we’re going to make it up in volume.
Tokamak scaling is very well established. The output scales with the square of plasma volume, and the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Stronger magnetic fields also make the plasma more stable. JET already demonstrated a five-second plasma, which they only had to shut down because they have copper coils that would melt if operated longer than that.
Because of all this, many independent fusion researchers think SPARC will succeed in getting 10X gain in 2025. After that, the larger ARC should easily reach commercial levels.
Of all the commercial fusion companies, CFS is the most conservative one. Tokamak Energy is a close second, with a very similar approach. The other fusion startups are attempting approaches that have more physics risk, though many of them would have fewer engineering and economic difficulties if the physics does work out.
First you need fuel, global Tritium supplies are tiny and DD fusion is much harder.
Next stability is an open question, no Tokamak has ever operated near maximum capacity for even 1 hour.
Add to that serious material science questions, etc etc and even Q>100 alone just doesn’t actually mean much.
Now let’s just assume all of that is solved, you still need to actually ensure your design is economically viable. Simply producing energy from fusion alone isn’t enough which means you need to cheaply solve not only all the above but do so cheaply.
He3 barely exists on Earth. However, pure deuterium fusion is easier than He3 fusion, and its waste is half He3, half tritium.
Even if it could be recovered, all the 3He on the entire moon might power the world for maybe 100 years.
That strengthens the point I was trying to get at, which was that there's no reason to go to the moon for He3 when, if we can get net power from He3, we can just make it in a D-D reactor and gain energy in the process.
For D-3He fusion to be useful, we have to hope that it will be economically viable to synthesize 3He, in the meantime. Arguably, we ought to be making and stockpiling tritium now so there will be enough 3He when we need it; but that might be too optimistic.
They actually have a fairly practical-looking design though. ARC will use FLiBe for tritium breeding and coolant. That will surround an inner reactor wall that's 3D-printed and replaced annually. MIT already demonstrated joints in the superconducting tape, allowing the reactor to be opened up to replace the core.
Economic viability is an open question for all tokamaks. Some of the other designs would have a better chance of achieving low costs if things work out, but there's a much bigger question mark on the plasma physics.
But D-T reactors would mainly breed tritium from lithium. The CFS reactor, for example, will immerse the reactor in a pool of FLiBe salt, which also functions as coolant. Each beryllium atom hit with a neutron emits two neutrons, and when neutrons hit lithium atoms they breed tritium. General Fusion does something similar with lead in place of beryllium.
It’s really not clear which would end up cheaper in the long run.
As to containment, the lack of high pressure steam makes much thinner walls completely viable. You still need shielding around the vessel, but not a completely redundant system capable of containing highly energetic steam explosions.
In terms of risks, sabotage at a nuclear reactor can be vastly more expensive than just the cost of equipment. Modern reactors are reasonably safe, but not if people where actually trying to break them. Especially when you consider what someone could do with access to the fuel. It’s not weapons grade, but dirty bombs are horrific.
The building housing an ARC will be very large. The reactor itself is 20 meters tall, and the entire top half of it has to be lifted off and moved aside when changing out the vacuum vessel. All that lifting and moving will have to be done remotely because of radiation from the activated vacuum vessel, which then will need yet another shielded area where it can be broken down for disposal and the debris from that cleaned up or at least contained.
Safety system don’t just need to handle normal operations. The energy in a fusion reactors magnetic fields is very well known, a fission reactor steam explosion or potentially hydrogen explosions can bet vastly more violent.
Using Fukushima as a baseline. ~1,000 kg of hydrogen * 142 MJ/kg is a lot of energy and that was vented outside the primary containment vessel before detonating.
Granted this is not an inherent requirement for fission, but good luck convincing regulators it’s unnecessary.
IOW, we're never going to break even. You and I are paying now, and would in any case never get any of the revenue, if in fact any could be had.
But we are supporting the careers and research of plasma fluid dynamics physicists and their students, and a few of them might do other, actually useful, and anyway wholly unpredictable things, later. With a good measure of luck, none of those things will build up to any world-spanning catastrophes the way the steam engine did.
p-B or D-He3 fusion, if achieved, would have application in the outer solar system even if not competitive here.
Lower risks should mean fewer NIMBY issues, which means wider adoption. Nuclear advocates miss that if fission played a larger role in energy generation it would also see more major incidents. Which then risks a backlash etc.
I think both Tokamak and CFS have roughly the same strategy of using bigger magnetic fields. Given the scalings here https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsta.2017.043... + JET working well it's a lot less risk than whatever most others are doing. Make a JET sized tokamak but have 5x the magnetic field strength gives a 625x gain in power, ideally.
SPARK is undoubtedly a more efficient design but it’s not a solution for any of the major outstanding problems.
Note that both companies are aiming to build a tokamak using high-temperature superconducting coils, which will facilitate energy gain in a small, high-field tokamak. CFS has built the coils, but no tokamak yet. Tokamak Energy has built a tokamak, but it doesn't use HTS coils yet, it uses standard/super-inefficient copper ones (they're developing the HTS coils as a separate project and expect to marry them in a future prototype). This prototype has the same "make it up on volume" problem, it's just lossy in a different way.
Both have made important advances that demonstrate critical components that will be necessary to do the full thing, but different ones, and neither of them has demonstrated everything. If anything, CFS's piece is arguably more important, because other copper-magnet high-field tokamaks have been built before (e.g., Alcator C-Mod at MIT, essentially the predecessor to CFS's prototype), but nobody has built a full-sized HTS coil before.
It’s possible they could succeed long term, but I don’t think it’s particularly likely.
If you wanted a legacy, you could hardly do better than being the Zefram Cochrane of energy. You don't even have to stop being an asshole!
[1] The Scheherazade for a current example of interest, but there are thousands more examples.
This is the weirdest thing to me. How do billionaires think a big boat is cooler than building nuclear fusion? If I was a billionaire, I'd build space ships and underground tunnels and nuclear micro reactors
Chicks dig the long ball.
"Gamma ray tanning beds: illegal in 220 countries!"
Being first to fusion would mean your name would be above even Einstein in history.
Integrating the curves is maybe $100 billion. And below a certain level of funding nothing can really be done (you can't build any reactor on $10 and a box of surplus paperclips the IRS donated from pity). The fact we actual got anywhere using the handful of "it's a start" research reactors like JET, which dates to 1984, that could get built is a testament to the scientists and engineers, not a indictment of the field.
Basically, if as much was spent on it as we spent on blowing up poor countries for no real reason (at least $2,000 billion, just for Afghanistan), we'd likely be onto the second or third generation. Or we'd have concluded decades ago that it really can't be done to a five-sigma certainty.
The cynic in me says there's a renewed push for it recently because China has 3 research reactors, the next one (CFETR) is designed to outperform ITER (which China is contributing to) and support research for DEMO (which is to say, it is or is very close to being designed for experimental power generation), and the US feels in danger of being beaten to it.
$500 worth of steroids may let me bench press 200lbs, but it doesn’t follow that with $50,000 I could lift my house.
Booking out a hotel for hundreds of aides, attachés and visitors is very difficult outside the largest cities. Securing it can be impossible. Particularly on short notice. A yacht solves those problems.
(I’d still pick the reactor.)
> Physicists trapped in indentured servitude aboard Elon Musk's converted droneship research station "Just Fucking Get It Done" as it sails the post-apocalytic seas.
> Just when they thought it couldn't get any worse, they dock at Peter Thiel's island bio-research facility and they have to take matters into their own nitrile-gloved hands before it's too late...
He also has a startup, LTA (Lighter Than Air), aiming to build blimps for humanitarian purposes.[2] According to this article he also wants to the blimp to be "luxuriously appointed" so it can be used as an air yacht.[3] LTA is based at Moffett Airfield in Mountain View, and I know I've seen blimps take off and land there every once in a while. When I see one I always wonder if it's Sergey's blimp.
[1] https://www.thedailybeast.com/google-co-founder-sergey-brin-...
[2] https://www.ltaresearch.com/
[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/google-sergey-brin-airship-c...
Fun fact, this was part of the setup for Tenet.
You'd think a billionaire would have gotten one of those by now. Like China with the Liaoning... though, even the Liaoning isn't nuclear.
Actually, that's pretty amazing. The Americans have several nuclear carriers. The Soviets/Russians had/have several. And the French have one: the Charles de Gaulle. That's it. Nobody else has any. Not even China. Not even Britain (which does have nuclear submarines).
That's pretty amazing.
It really puts into perspective how powerful the United States is.
Granted, there's an argument that these are becoming floating targets, what with ASBMs, and as hypersonics come online. But still. They're pretty impressive things.
And even the Russians seem less capable than expected.
Which leaves basically just the US. Still.
Complacency would be a huge mistake -- and China is projected to start working on nuclear carriers pretty soon -- but, nevertheless, maybe reports of America's dethronement are premature.
Though that was long ago, I'm unaware of changes regarding that.
So no cruising to your bunker in NZ on your supernukular toy when the SHTF :-)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_marine_propulsion#Ci...
https://www.boatinternational.com/yachts/editorial-features/...
If not for visions of space-faring billionaires, I could easily foresee sea-based billionaires with a small armada of support vessels to provide for them:
Old tankers could potentially be repurposed as massive hydroponic farms, or even fish farms. Why trust the local's mercury-and-parasite ridden fauna, when you can instead pull some fresh Tilapia 2 (genome will be slightly modified to prevent breeding with 'natties', probably will have different-colored skin) out of The Pond's hold?
A cruise ship would probably be the best host vessel for your employees, since it already has a lot of the features you'd need (sleeping, eating, refit some of the entertainment spaces into workspaces), and a smart move would have been to buy one during the Covid crash the operators had early on. Force your employees to register as residents in your port town of choice for optimal tax shelter status, and minimal legislative oversight.
Nuclear submarines could be used as top-secret skunkworks, since they could dive down in order to guarantee some amount of isolation from corporate spies. Once you have your roster for a project, you'd dive down a mile or so, and give the teams metrics to see who earns the most sunlight during the bimonthly surfacings. Lines up nicely with 2 week sprints, right?
But here's something I can't figure out: What would the flagship be? How many people would it need to support? Would it be one of the biggest of the armada (like the capital vessel), or would it be an incredibly-well-appointed cruiser?
Even the biggest yachts can't host even close to these numbers of people. E.g. the gigantic Azzam superyacht, at a cost of $600M, and 180m in length, can host only 36 guests according to news reports.
I doubt when Buff Jezos goes to visit Gill Bates on his super yacht he shows up only with a couple suitcases.
Then I discovered that the $700 million superyacht Scheherazade can accommodate "40 guests in 22 cabins". I suppose you could fill the hallways with bunk beds as well for your "hundreds of aids, attaches, and visitors".
I don't think accommodating 40 guests is difficult "outside of the largest cities".
“ It's worth acknowledging that while owners will ultimately spend a huge amount for the privilege of having their very own superyacht, they're able to recoup some of these costs by chartering them out. Connor estimates that around 12 weeks of charter represents the annual operating cost of most yachts, which means owners can break even if they hire their boats out for the same length of time they use them during the year.”
[1] https://www.cnn.com/travel/amp/hidden-costs-of-owning-a-supe...
I guess you get some back if you sell it, and you probably never actually laid out for it as such rather than though some mad financial chicanery because simply paying for stuff is decidedly plebian.
Your buddy sets up a special company just to build it and stiffs all his employees and suppliers. Then the quid pro quo gets you another 30% or so back.
Renting it out for another 12mo/year earns the remainder back in a decade or two.
You can also 'donate' the use of your yacht to have a big party (also known as a charity ball) from time to time if you feel you are paying too much tax. Make sure the 'charity' is one owned by one of your buddies and is primarily used for lobbying or undermining competitors.
I gotta ask, have you ever filed taxes? Cause that’s not how any of this works.
1) You don’t buy something for $100+ million out-of-pocket. It’s easy to borrow money when you have money. The purchase would be financed at very close to market interest rates, and the repayments factored into the running costs.
2) The vessel would then be run as a business and chartered out for conventions, luxury cruises etc. Any profits would go to the owner.
3) The owner would then use the vessel as needed, maybe even paying like any other customer (albeit out of the profits generated by the boat itself, I’d imagine.)
4) Any remaining profits could be used to pay off capital, but probably aren’t. Instead, they’d be used to fund new ventures.
[1] https://www.superyachtfan.com/yacht/moonlight-ii/
[2] https://www.fraseryachts.com/en/yacht-for-charter/moonlight-...
that's a big "if"
I'm surprised no authority has raided one just after an investment banker party cruise, looked for the forgotten baggies and seized the vessel for "drug smuggling".
If you're a state level actor, you've got state level security concerns. I doubt, for instance, the American or Russian consulate gets rented out for parties where they turn over the whole kit to some other organization.
Yes, there is "your" staff on-site to protect much of the yacht / facility, but that doesn't stop a determined actor who's got a week of somewhat unsupervised access from infesting the whole ship with bugs bombs and poisons.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/oct/24/superyachts-...
In particular they backed "Commonwealth Fusion Systems".
Unfortunately it is not as active as it once was, but their old videos are very interesting.
[1] https://www.popsci.com/article/science/ask-anything-whats-ho...
(I’m not a physicist so I’m willing to be corrected, but this doesn’t jibe with my low level compulsory physics courses from uni :) )
For most normal systems, entropy increases with an addition of energy, and they have a positive coldness. Confusingly, the lower the entropy change, the less cold or hotter we would regard it: if you bring two systems into contact, they share energy to maximize their total entropy, so something which has low coldness = low entropy change will donate a lot of energy to something with a higher coldness = higher entropy change, the smaller negative will be balanced out by a larger positive.
You can extrapolate this to an infinite temperature, this would be an object with β = 0 or zero coldness, it can take or lose energy without changing its entropy at all. An example is an assembly of electron spins in a magnetic field, when 50% of them are aligned with and 50% are aligned against the magnetic field: this is the most entropic that the spin system could possibly be, so there is no way to increase it and to first order changes in energy do not decrease it. It has zero coldness or infinite temperature.
Add a little bit of energy and it is in the state where it actively wants to lose energy, putting more energy into the system requires aligning more of the spins along the magnetic field. This is a negative coldness, which is also regarded as a negative temperature by this T =1/(k β) formula.
Perhaps the correct measure is not temperature, but inverse temperature (i.e. 1/T)?
As you reach a state where almost all particles are in their maximum energy states (this is assuming there is one) you will slowly approach negative zero (which again you can never quite attain).
Statistical mechanics can be confusing at first.
In particular even with a quantum non-interacting gas with particle-in-a-box modes, the Hamiltonian is not bounded from above and there is no reason to expect a negative temperature, no?
There exist systems, like spin systems, where energy is bounded from above and so entropy decreases as you add energy, which is the definition of negative temperature... But I find it dubious that every system is such, unless I am missing something nonintuitive about say relativistic effects or so
> This is only possible if the number of high energy states is limited. For a system of ordinary (quantum or classical) particles such as atoms or dust, the number of high energy states is unlimited (particle momenta can in principle be increased indefinitely). Some systems, however [...], have a maximum amount of energy that they can hold, and as they approach that maximum energy their entropy actually begins to decrease.
In my (limited) understanding, it's somewhat like the phenomenon that a communication channel bit error rate over 0.5 actually results in less information loss (imagine a BER of 1: that's just a NOT gate).
If your energy states are limited, adding energy actual brings you closer to an ordered state (that of everything being in the highest state).
But, this is not a situation you get by simply heating something up with a blowtorch, no matter how hot it is.
(sorry, can't provide anything beyond that level)
I mean that's the general upper limit on stuff in the universe: it eventually collapses into a black hole.
v ~= Sqrt( k_B * T / m) ~= constant * Sqrt(T)
(There is another constant in the formula that depends on what definition of mean you use, but it's safe to ignore it for this discussion.)
So if T is big enough, the result of this formula is faster than light.
But this formula is useful only for a not relativistic gas. Once the temperature is so big that relativistic effects are important, you must use another formula. (The other formula is more difficult to calculate, but when the temperature is low the result is almost identical to the formula I wrote.)
Temperature has no theoretical upper limit, but if it's high enough weird things can happen as described in a sibling comment. More details in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_units#Planck_temperatur...
"We are proud to have achieved this breakthrough which puts us one step closer to providing the world with a new, secure and carbon-free energy source."
Seems like every fusion energy announcement, always one step closer but never quite arrived.
This is how R&D projects work. It’s extremely difficult to estimate timelines. Someone might have said the same thing of, for instance, image recognition - we kept getting “one step closer” for years and years. You could look at Fei-Fei Li making ImageNet in 2006 and go, “she didn’t really solve anything - they keep saying we’re one step closer to image recognition but this is just some new dataset.” Of course that actually was a very significant step, it was crucial groundwork for AlexNet.
There is absolutely no way to know whether getting to 100M in a spherical tokamak is really significant. Maybe this design is a dead end that will never see actual use. Maybe you will have a tiny one in your tea kettle by 2050.
What’s clear, though is that the pace of fusion research is really much faster than it was. That should be exciting to everyone except oil barons.
Sometimes money wants to deny the future that is coming.
- ICE factories can't just be switched to be EV factories, so having an existing ICE factory is a burden not a benefit.
- They don't have capacity to build batteries
- Even if they did, they don't have the raw materials
- Even if they did, they don't have the raw materials processing capacity
- Even if they did start securing the capacity now i.e. Building Lithium mines, battery factories, EV car factories etc. By the time they come online... GM will have run out of money, because no one will be buying their cars anymore, but they'll still be paying for ICE factories/workforce/etc.
Xpeng and Neo are kind of Tesla clones, but they have home ground advantage in that they are Chinese based which is where the majority of the EV market is right now, it's also where all the battery supply is. You haven't heard of them, because they haven't entered the US market yet.
GM don’t have a strategy, it’s clear they are just hoping for a miracle. Hence: Penny stock.
The market agrees with me (look at the growth rate of EV sales globally). The stock market disagrees with me… but it’s clearly irrational… again look at the growth rate of EVs.
Which is probably true.
I've heard from friends of some of the typical shenanigans played among state actors involving oil and gas, and that would be the least underhanded thing going on.
I am saying that the timeframe between a breakthrough in fusion, and it having a measurable effect on energy usage is so large that "money" will not reflect it with immediate and large moves in the market.
‘Breakthroughs’ like fusion typically does are useless. Something viable is not.
When something viable happens, you’ll see markets move, because market pricing is based on expectations of future performance, not current performance.
My non-expert understanding is that Futures are a specific financial instrument with set expiry dates, and are about locking in prices for these commodities at a certain date. The vast majority of these would be expiring in under low digit years. I am arguing that the ramp up time for fusion to go from "feasible design" to "having a significant impact on the the amount of oil/gas consumed" is much longer than most futures expiry dates, and would therefore have little impact.
That said, I guess people can (and do) buy futures with expiry dates for more than 10 years out, presumably they just have to find a counter party. Is this a significant amount invested? Bringing me back around to my original (and honestly asked) question: How many years out do oil/gas futures project?
For me, I'd take 'viable' to mean something like a demonstration plant actually working somewhere, a team with the ability (somewhat proven) to reproduce it at scale, and after that exists the math pencils out it's profitable even on a risk adjusted basis.
At which point, it's a real thing that will happen, and prices will start to adjust based on the likely adoption curve (with various speculative values of the curve of course too).
Which yes, may or may not change future values for delivery depending on the timeline.
But it doesn't really matter, for now that's just an aspirational goal, not an imminent reality.
Sorry, Could not resist
Though you could argue that was 1992[1] and KDE has has Plasma sewn up for a long time too.
Chinese one reached 120m, this one just 100m (+20%)
https://www.livescience.com/chinas-1-trillion-artificial-sun...
It marginally reduces the size of a fission plant, a non-problem.
It presents klingon level engineering problems.
The feedstock and its subsequent volatility are civilization grade problems.
In the designs I've seen thrown around, you end up generating tritium and helium inside the lithium reactor cover/blanket.
I'm not saying we shouldn't pursue it for research purposes, but the desire to research is politically/emotionally driven and not based on the discovery of any recent phenomena.
Governments should only fund things. They should not actually run them.