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by devoutsalsa 1723 days ago
Probably not. ITER takes 440 megawatts of total power to generate 500 megawatts of power, at the cost of many years of development & billions of dollars. [1]

[1] http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2021/10/how-close-is-nuclea...

5 comments

ITER means International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. It's not supposed to be useful. It is a prototype.

And yes, it costs a lot, but if they succeed, it would solve so many problems, it would be worth it.

And for scale, compare this to the amount of money being spent on, I don't know, the video game industry[1].

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190509014637/https://newzoo.co...

> ITER takes 440 megawatts of total power to generate 500 megawatts of power

not 500 MW of usable power. Have a watch of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

Yeah, you're right. I forgot about the heat efficiency. Even if it generated the full 500 megawatts, it wouldn't even be close to practical.
Shouldn't we be betting for SPARC from MIT and not ITER?

https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc

No, read further down in that article. The gain is actually 0.57, certainly not > 1. And that is the plan, not anything demonstrated.
From your article it's more: "Okay, so ITER will have delivered in that full demonstration that we could have okay 500 Megawatt coming out of the 50 Megawatt we will put in."
That's 50 MW going into the plasma. But they have to draw 440MW from the grid to deliver this power to dump those 50 MW into the plasma (lasers are extremely wasteful).

Also note, the 500MW are the power of the plasma - in the best case scenario, maybe 50% of that could be converted into electrical energy, the rest will be lost as heat.

So grid-to-grid, they will be taking out 440MW of power and putting back in 250MW. Except that is useless, so they didn't even bother with a turbine the full 500MW of plasma power will have to be vented as heat in ITER itself (DEMO will take over, and aims to deliver net power generation ~20 years after ITER is successful).

No, it’s less. Please read the whole thing. The claimed gain is only 0.57.