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Comment by ufmace | Hacker News Reader

Awesome article. But I gotta wonder - given the sheer size and cost of the ITER reactor, it's hard to see how we'll ever be able to build a commercial version of the reactor that's competitive with anything conventional. I don't suppose anyone here has any insight on that?

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Besides the whole prototype status, ITER itself also has many problems which conflate the cost (and time) required to build. Every country involved wants to make a "significant" contribution, so you get many parts built in different countries, which may need to tool themselves to build these parts, and that need to later fit together. I even think one part had to be rejected because it didn't fit the rest.

The scale is also crazy, inside the tokamak the magnets can push against each other with forces twice that which the space shuttle's launch creates http://www.iter.org/newsline/269/1593

Once ITER is built though, and if it works, then we'll have the knowledge, and tooling required to make more of the parts to build a second (and that knowledge and tooling is spread amongst many countries). The cost will decrease a lot for the first few, and much more after.

The article also made me wonder how much of the cost is just due to the way the project is managed and split for multiple countries?

One example from the article: "A single manufacturer should build ITER’s vacuum chamber, a high-precision device that must operate with perfect symmetry. Instead, it will be constructed in nine segments, two in Korea and the rest in Europe. The design calls for certain features to be welded, but the Europeans decided to use bolts, which are cheaper."

The tokamak is the fusion community's choice of device for getting energy out of a fusion reactor, but smaller configurations may also be promising.

There's talk of exploring compact fusion configurations as a faster path to commercial viability; many private companies in North America are working on compact fusion and Lockheed's Skunkworks has expressed interest. Smaller size of these devices means research and operating costs are lower. The end product might be something more easily integrated into power grids (~100MW versus ~1GW of DEMO) and would hopefully have a competitive cost of electricity.

Path to Market for Compact Fusion Cores: http://fire.pppl.gov/FESAC_WP_Path2Mark_SWood.pdf

http://www.icosa.co/2013/02/lockheed-skunkworks-develops-com...

There's a plan to get from ITER to a commercial version. Next in line after ITER is "DEMO", which will have higher output and actually produce power (ITER will just vent off the heat). PROTO would then build further on the first two, further refining all the improvements made along the way, to provide a template for building commercially viable fusion power stations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO

I'm going to assume the cost is the novel research behind this. Trying to create fusion in the first place has been researched for decades. If this works, and they can do it at scale, a new reactor wouldn't have the same cost as all the previous research attached to it.

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