> We’re still a few years away from having them in actual power plants
I admire your optimism. I'd say half a century, if things go well, but I'm not convinced fusion will ever be economically feasible.
I admire your optimism. I'd say half a century, if things go well, but I'm not convinced fusion will ever be economically feasible.
There's this [1] famous graph comparing US research spending into Fusion, compared to 1976 predictions how long it would take with different budgets. According to that, the US funded fusion below the "not enough to ever get it done" budget. With that in mind, we have come remarkably far.
1: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ab/U.S._his...
Also, I think you have causality reversed. Fusion isn't remote because of lack of funding; rather, funding was low because there weren't stakeholders pushing for it, and that was because the stakeholders didn't see any value coming from it. For example, all the reactor designs utilities had been presented with were not things they had any interest in building, they were too large, complex, and expensive.
(I know I still owe you a detailed response on the thermo thing.)
Not on Earth. But put a good enough fusion reactor on a rocket, and you can reach neighboring stars in 3 or 4 decades instead of the 15 one would expect for fission. (Of course, nobody is even sure reactors can get that good, but it does look possible.)
I think nuclear propulsion is going to be the biggest beneficiary of higher mass-to-orbit-for-a-reasonable-price advances.
There are a huge number of propulsion technologies that are physically possible but too heavy and/or dangerous for near-Earth use.
Cheaper lift (to bootstrap) + more ongoing destinations and transit work (to drive) + outside of Earth orbit (to alleviate safety concerns) = rapid progress
The proposed fuel is even worse as AM242 has a half life of 141 years making it hard to collect in bulk.
And there is absolutely zero chance of fusion solving our current energy crisis, the odds for fission are already low enough. There is no point on speculating on that.
Early designs for ITER where for a larger device that would have actually produced electricity though not cheaply enough to be economically viable, but it got scaled way down.
HTSCs weren't usable when it was designed, and have only just become usable in the last 5 years or so but they are a fundamentally different material. You don't just drop them into a large, incredibly complex machine that depends on it's integrated magnetic containment system: you are functionally building a new device.
If you can ITER, then you don't get a refund on spent dollars. You get a loss. And then you get to start another 30 year project to maybe build a new vacuum vessel, which you have to do because you still haven't actually tested plasma stability.
"But but MIT skunkworks!"...yeah. It's still going along, and they haven't suddenly churned out a functioning reactor based on HTSCs because oh look, whatever the advantages they're a new material with different properties, manufacturing and handling behaviors all of which need to be developed, measured and inspected before you can use them effectively in a fusion device. If they look good then great: they can be used to make DEMO, the ITER-successor commercial powerplant prototype, cheaper and more powerful.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...