If the reactor is intended as a heat source for an electric generator, building out the heat to electricity conversion shouldn't be necessary for a demonstration. That technology is already well understood. Show that the reactor is outputting so much power at a given temperature and a good power plant engineer can estimate the cost and performance of systems using that heat.
Details like fuel breeding and handling, maintenance of the reactor in the radiation environment, will need to be demonstrated as those are not so well known in the likely market industry. As will any electricity conversion process not already well established.
What constitutes a Demonstration Power Plant?
Re: What constitutes a Demonstration Power Plant?
The daylight is uncomfortably bright for eyes so long in the dark.
Re: What constitutes a Demonstration Power Plant?
The direct conversion to electricity has not been shown to work on a large scale AFAIK. There has been small scale demonstration devices, but scaling them up probably involves more work. But electricity generation from a heat source with a steam cycle and a generator is well known and does not necessary need much additional work.Skipjack wrote: ↑Sun Jun 27, 2021 5:51 pmIf that core demonstrates things like tritium breeding, materials, etc. Also, you will likely need shielding and other things that coal plants do not have.crowberry wrote: ↑Sun Jun 27, 2021 7:06 amThose reactors that run on DT-will get 80 % of their energy from the kinetic energy of the fusion neutrons. That energy has of course to be converted to heat, so in principle any DT-reactor could be constructed by retrofitting an existing coal power plant with the fusion core, which would save time and money by reusing the electric generators and the steam piping. General Fusion has said that they will target this and probably some of the others will also do that. So once they have their fusion core working, they are basically almost done.
Why would that be?
Re: What constitutes a Demonstration Power Plant?
Trenta has demonstrated it at >95% efficiency and at 30 times the volume of VENTI, it is (almost?) full scale.crowberry wrote: ↑Thu Aug 05, 2021 12:12 pmThe direct conversion to electricity has not been shown to work on a large scale AFAIK. There has been small scale demonstration devices, but scaling them up probably involves more work. But electricity generation from a heat source with a steam cycle and a generator is well known and does not necessary need much additional work.
Re: What constitutes a Demonstration Power Plant?
I think Helion is a special case for direct conversion since they are using the acceleration and compression magnets to extract the power, sort of dynamic breaking, sending the power back to the capacitor banks. From the capacitor banks the power can be converted to AC for delivery to the grid. Capital cost should be low for the conversion as it is power electronics, with inductors for power filtering.
Counting the days to commercial fusion. It is not that long now.