Structural and credible plasma facing materials are the biggest hurdle to fusion reactor power demonstration. Glad to see private fusion companies paying attention to this extremely important detail. Commercial fusion can't be demonstrated if credible radiation tolerant materials aren't developed and if funding is not spent on fundamental irradiation effects. Fusion spectrum effects remain largely unknown - a major missing link in our understanding of how energetic neutrons degrade materials. Fusion is not a plasma physics topic any longer!

Seems old news. The effect of Neutron dose on reactor materials is well explored.

@MattNolanCustom

11 ай бұрын

Dealing with relatively low fluxes of circa 2MeV neutrons in Fission reactors is well explored. Huge fluxes of 14MeV neutrons from a working DT Fusion reactor is new territory.

@anthonycoyne7590

11 ай бұрын

At this time, I doubt there is sufficient data to gain empirical results to evaluate the effect of DT operations. Extrapolating data from fission studies should give a reasonable working model. Admittedly, DD data should be plentiful.

@MattNolanCustom

11 ай бұрын

@@anthonycoyne7590 DD neutrons aren't much more energetic than fission neutrons. I'm glad you agree that DT operations are currently lacking in empirical data, so not old news.

@RachelRon-ye3op

11 ай бұрын

@anthonycoyne7590 Looks like you don't know much about neutron dose effects on materials. There is always time to learn.

@anthonycoyne7590

11 ай бұрын

@@RachelRon-ye3op well, the oracle speaks, only to mock.

Theres something fundamentally wrong thinking this will ever be a commercial power supply . You cannot have a more difficult steam engine to scale up, the cool down and warm up times for the thousands of tons of superconducting magnets that will be required with every fault alone makes it ridiculous .

@xxwookey

11 ай бұрын

How long does it take to cool down the magnets? Answering my own question it took about 3 hours from injecting 20K helium to getting 20K throughout the REBCO coil in a CERN experiment. (See "Design and Testing of a Gas-helium Conduction Cooled REBCO Magnet for a 300 kvar HTS Synchronous Condenser"). And it took a couple of hours to cool the gas, but that probably mostly depends on the power of your cooling kit. Tokamak's designs do not have 'thousands of tons' of magnet. They do have tons, so it does look like the start-up procedure would take a few hours. Whether that matters depends on how often they stop. Subsequent starts could presumably take much less time because the magnets might already be pretty cold (100->20 is quicker than 280->20). We do already run expensive machines with superconducting, gas-cooled magnets in: MRIs, and that seems to work, so it's not impossible, and those are presumably mostly not HTS so it's harder. You are right that it won't be practical if it's not stable, but we've known that for a long time.

@MyKharli

11 ай бұрын

That's as far removed in scale from a commercial power plant as a match to a multi GW coal powered power station . .@@xxwookey

@xxwookey

11 ай бұрын

@@MyKharli Which 'that' are you referring-to here? ST40? I would agree that we are currently a long way from even demonstrating that a commercial power plant is even feasible. But I think it probably is possible. Whether it is economical remains doubtful, but you can't determine that without building actual experiments and it seems to me TE are doing quite a good job of that. A much better job than ITER, at least in cost-effectiveness terms.

@MyKharli

11 ай бұрын

Its beyond clear it can never be economical , its a cross subsidy for the military mostly as is most nuclear reactors and research . If that was added to the military budget people would complain but dangle some `free `energy possibilities in front of them they turn into the usual idiots @@xxwookey