Comment on Is the dream of nuclear fusion dead?
keepthepace@slrpnk.net 3 months agoITER does not aim at being a power plant. Its heat is directed at cooling towers with no turbines. The first fusion power plant is supposed to be DEMO which is supposed to start producing electricity by 2050.
Fermion@feddit.nl 3 months ago
DEMO is not a singular reactor, but rather a class of reactors that are expected to be built using the technologies and lessons learned from ITER. So basically ITER’s main goal is to be a massive international R&D project to pave the the way for individual countries to be able to build their own DEMO plants afterwards. Pathfinding manufacturing technologies for this unique of a system is a big part of why ITER is so expensive. Replicating an ITER like machine should be considerably cheaper.