After ITER: What China and others are doing in fusion. Interview with MIT’s Dennis Whyte
By Dan Drollette Jr | November 12, 2024
Though it may look like the interior of the ship from the movie Alien, this image actually shows a researcher inside one of the alternatives to ITER’s type of plasma fusion experiment. This particular machine, named the Large Helical Device, is one of a class of designs known as a stellarator. Image courtesy of National Institute for Fusion Science, Japan.
After ITER: What China and others are doing in fusion. Interview with MIT’s Dennis Whyte
By Dan Drollette Jr | November 12, 2024
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Keywords: China, ITER, Nuclear Fusion Energy, Russia, commercial fusion, plasma, tokamak
Topics: Climate Change, Nuclear Energy
Dan Drollette Jr
Dan Drollette Jr is the executive editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. He is a science writer/editor and foreign correspondent... Read More
Whyte’s claims about materials availability illustrates a peculiar facet of fusion promoters’ claims: Every statement they make asserting some advantage of fusion energy is the exact opposite of the truth, and those false claims are easily exposed. Concerning materials, Whyte states “fusion has the advantage of not needing any particularly critical elements to operate; fusion is not really sensitive to the scarcity of rare earth metals.” Notably, CFS-MIT’s much-ballyhooed SPARC magnet coils are made of REBCO, standing for “rare-earth barium coper oxide.” Rare earths include such materials as yttrium, lanthanum, neodymium and samarium, which come mainly from China. There is only one rare-earth… Read more »
The hubris of fusion promoters is unparalleled. Whyte claims that fusion power reactors and AI are “the two most disruptive technologies of this century.” But can any fusion device generate any electric energy whatsoever?? Every fusion facility consumes megawatts to hundreds of megawatts of electricity, or megajoules for pulsed systems. But in 75 years of R&D, no device has ever produced a token amount of fusion-derived electricity (say 2 kilowatts) while simultaneously gorging on megawatts or megajoules. It’s unlikely that anyone can make even that modest a demonstration before 2040. There’s no compelling reason to believe that any fusion device will ever… Read more »
As a coda to the above comment, one notes that the data warehouses that host AI computers actually have something in common with conceivable fusion power reactors: Both consume enormous amounts of electricity and coolant water.
What Daniel Jassby says makes complete sense and one wonders if all the start up investors have any idea if the real problems with building a fusion reactor. He mentions the cost of tritium, but this is not enough since the quantities available are very limited. It seems that about 20Kg is available from the CANDU reactors. These produce about 1.5 Kg a year but with about 1 Kg lost through decay to He-3, net production is very limited.