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by ibarrac 3247 days ago
In the video the researcher claims that they can build a significantly smaller/cheaper tokamak with HTS (high temperature superconductor) materials technology that has only became available in the last 5 years. Even if ITER is built not using HTS, can HTS be later retrofitted into it and therefore improve its performance down the line?
1 comments
topspin 3247 days ago
These are certainly the painfully obvious questions aren't they? Hartwig claimed that HTS can make existing designs either smaller or more powerful, so what about ITER?

And yet it isn't addressed, and it -- somehow -- doesn't occur to anyone in this MIT audience to ask. Even if one wished to argue that ITER is committed to a design and shouldn't be altered at this point it would still useful and compelling to at least compute how much better the ITER reactor might be... but nothing like that happens here.

I imagine that any person endeavouring to earn a place in fusion power research (at least at the university or government level) needs to be careful about questioning ITER design. At the moment ITER is the home of many of the worlds leading fusion power minds and all of the best funded ones, so you'd better have your ducks in a row. The fact that the question isn't directly addressed is probably an indication of just how certain the HTS proponents are about their proposal.

One of the best parts of the talk were the photographs of the unknown alloys ("tokamakium") being deposited on the surfaces of a tokamak plasma chamber. Interesting things.

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candiodari 3245 days ago
ITER has done heroic design efforts over the past few years. But you'd be disappointed how small the resulting changes were, but they were heroic efforts. Things like feedback systems for plasma containment. So to your question, the answer is no. ITER cannot be retrofitted to use HTS materials. Effectively they cannot change the materials they use, nor can they change the shape of the superconductors. If you can't do that, there's no real point to switching to HTS supply.

The problem with ITER is that it's being half-ass funded. It's only enough funding to build it over 50 years or so. We could spend 3-4x the amount one year and have it built in 2 years instead and we wouldn't be asking these sorts of questions. We would know (that it doesn't work - I'm not a believer. However, I do agree that a massive amount of plasma physics will be learned with it after it fails to Q>1).

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