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by d-gearloose 1569 days ago
The good thing about fusion is that a lot of problems stem from the size of the surface area as compared to the volume.

The bigger the reaction vessel gets, the favorably this ratio is.

This experiment just shows that the predictions about ITER seem to be in a realistic region.

2 comments

You have that backwards.

The bad thing about fusion is that the power has to radiate through the surface of the reactor. That means that when you are at the engineering limit of what that wall can withstand, your volumetric power density decreases as you make the reactor larger.

This is unlike a fission reactor, where heat is transferred through the surfaces of large numbers of thin fuel pins, and where the surface area increases in proportion to the volume of the core.

Bigger being better is not a plus.