Power stations.

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theeclownbroze
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Re: Power stations.

Post by theeclownbroze » Mon, 21. Jun 21, 00:55

Molten Salt. It is going to be used in the ARC first commercial scale fusion reactor, I believe the prototype smaller SPARC spherical tokomak will also use Flibe Molten Salts.

The interesting thing about Fusion is now we have REBCO superconducting tape, ironically the "wait calculation" that we apply to interstellar travel - wherein we can't be sure when is the best time to launch an interstellar voyage because maybe 100 years later we produce faster propulsion technology and travel even faster than the voyage we started 100 years prior applies to fusion technology.

E.g. The ITER program now might be superseded by an actually functional commercially viable fusion plant and the ARC reactor might be able to produce usable energy before ITER is even finished, at 1 tenth the size and cost, all thanks to new superconducting material science.

BaronVerde
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Re: Power stations.

Post by BaronVerde » Mon, 21. Jun 21, 10:31

Looks promising. Hopefully not just one more of those fusion concept drawings that pop up and disappear again:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03 ... ng-magnets

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mr.WHO
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Re: Power stations.

Post by mr.WHO » Mon, 21. Jun 21, 14:56

For people complaining that fusion is always 30 years in future:
30 years ago we were able to trigger the controllable fusion for just below second.
Now it's between 30-60 seconds and the next milestone is for 10 minutes.

With "longer" controllable fusion we'll be able to actually learn much more, improve and optimize much more, so it's guantee that we'll move on from experimental reactors to industrial/commercial designs.

I think every of top 5 nation has plan for commercial "technology demonstrator" by 2030.

Fusion is going out of laboratory and into the business "soon".

Next-gen Nuclear reactors are also good secondary option and stop-gap solution till Fusion will become wide spread.

BaronVerde
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Re: Power stations.

Post by BaronVerde » Tue, 22. Jun 21, 12:00

https://www.euro-fusion.org/news/2020/n ... rce-sparc/

tl,dr: They say SPARC aims for a ratio of 2 for energy input/output, ITER for 10. In principle, for these machines (Tokamaks) bigger is better because of the efforts necessary to confine a plasma and the load forces on the whole contraption. Yet, if the SPARC demonstration of high temperature superconductors works as envisioned (and the physics are 'sound' so far), that '... would make devices more compact and cheaper ....'.

We'll see soon(tm) what either experiment can achieve :-)

But anyway both of them are just technology demonstrators, prototypes. None is meant to be a real productive power plant, we aren't that far yet.

And, to add a personal opinion of mine, I am not sure if that last millennium idea of humonguous power plants to serve a large region is really the way to go, given all the losses from transport and transformation, and the astronomic cost it has. It may be that by the time fusion power is finally there, it has become obsolete because of decentralized power generation with renewables that come almost for free.

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