Commercially Feasible Fusion Reactor

[etudiant]

From a power industry perspective, none of the current fusion designs make much sense.
They all involve enormous capital costs, because the devices are enormous to offset our lack of skill in managing plasmas.
Big complex devices are not practical, we can't even run a nuclear fission plant at acceptably low enough failure rates.
So the hope is that mainstream efforts such as ITER will get superseded by some more creative approach.
There is plenty of time, remember that ITER only anticipates structural completion by 2025 and tritium based power generation tests by 2035.
Assuming ITER has shown feasibility, a prototype power generator is to be built around 2050. So other approaches have at least 30 years to show their stuff.

 

[mfb]

Big complex devices are not practical, we can't even run a nuclear fission plant at acceptably low enough failure rates.

We do run fission power plants at acceptable failure rates. Apart from a ridiculous design and a huge operator error, there was just one accident with a problematic release of radioactive material - after one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded. With zero expected deaths from the accident itself (compare this to 20,000 from the tsunami). Anyway, fusion power plants cannot explode, so this point is irrelevant for them.

So other approaches have at least 30 years to show their stuff.

And they had decades already. So far tokamaks and stellarators look the most promising.

 

[girts]

well I would say it like this, both Chernobyl and Fukushima were entirely human errors not mechanical ones, they were just errors on different levels, chernobyl was a unsafe design built because it was easy and fast to build and cheap while very powerful at the same time and served multiple goals simultaneously, also the operators that carried out the experiment went berzerk due to multiple complicated reasons such as incompetence, stress under supervisors and authorities etc etc.

as for Fukushima, I think the planners made some cost cuts that can be labeled as criminal in the long term, they could have put the emergency diesels more uphill away from coasts on higher ground, few hundred meters of electrical cables don't cost that much , a melted down nuke plant and cleanup costs like 1000 times the price of double safety standards and yet corporations still make everything as cheap as they can so that it fits the bill.the only real mechanical fault to my mind was Three Mile Island, where equipment malfunction and wrong readings made the operators unaware and blind to the real and troublesome state of affairs.

just my two cents.

 

[LURCH]

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/aa7f41/meta

Reactor walls meaning some outer containment of neutrons and other particles emitted from the reactor core?
Could those walls be constructed in a way that produces useful isotopes when they are worn out so have to be recycled.

I recall reading a long time ago about the possibility of using liquid lithium as the wall of the reaction chamber. The lithium would continually flow, so any contaminants are carried away, damage to the chamber wall is nearly impossible , and the lithium bombarded by neutrons would produce tritium. Found a link to a more recent article, working on how to post it here.