Comments on: Compact Fusion Reactor

By: Isegoria

Isegoria — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 13:24:17 +0000

The popular accounts point to the compact fusion reactor's compactness, with an emphasis on how small and portable such a reactor might be, when the designer's own emphasis is on how he can iterate his smaller design much more quickly — in true Skunk Works fashion.

By: Candide III

Candide III — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 08:18:50 +0000

This sounds fishy to me. Even putting aside the technical challenges of putting magnets inside the plasma volume, such ‘magnetic mirror’ configurations were investigated quite thoroughly early in the history of fusion research, in the 50s and 60s, and found to have a number of undesirable properties which motivated the change to toroidal configurations. Anyway, the capital costs of practicable fusion power plants are so high (much higher than for fission power plants) that they will likely be prohibitive.

By: Scipio Americanus

Scipio Americanus — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 21:33:06 +0000

This set of announcements is very premature. When you boil it down they’re announcing a fairly minor advance in terms of the overall effect on our ability to actually produce usable fusion power. As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are a number of problems that come with smaller reactors and in-reactor magnets that have caused enormous headaches in the past – and they don’t propose any way to deal with those headaches. There’s also the issue that a smaller reactor will be less efficient at breeding tritium for its continued operation.

The size claims themselves are also a little misleading. They’ve shrunk the core itself, but all the associated secondary equipment hasn’t changed size, and it amounts to hundred of tons at a minimum.