Re: whats the plan at Cadarache ?

ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) to be built at
Caderache, is indeed another research project and the hope is that this
will indeed be the first Tokamak fusion reactor to reach, and exceed
breakeven Q=1, therefore showing that controlled fusion is a viable
energy source.

So it wont actually be a "reactor" as such, as there will be no
mechanism to convert heat, into electricity via steam turbines. It job
is to help show that the scaling up of reactor size (it will be 2 times
the size of the current largest, JET) means a scaling up of plasma
confinement time, and therefore more power will be output. Furthermore
they hope to get to a regime where the plasma will heat itself and
therefore it is possible to switch off all external heating, therefore
reaching an effective Q=infinity. All this depends on the validity of
certain scaling relations used in tokamak construction.

The extreme cost is down to the fact that some of the worlds biggest
magenets need to be produced.

I hope the "ion drivers" talked about are not in relation to ICF.....i
cant for the life of me see how a viable power plant can be made with
such a concept.

Hope this is useful

Will

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