Not to be TOO picky, but your subject line and your question were TOTALLY different, leading to a cognative diss... oh heck, it were confusing.
What did you REALLY want to ask?
LOL, good point. I guess I'd like to ask... both!
But for the sake of the poll, I guess I'm most interested in seeing which design people think will lead to successful commercialization of fusion power.
(Although I'm just as interested in which one will break even or achieve net power first. Is that even stated correctly?)
General Atomics/Boeing have been making money out of tokamaks for years with their Starlite/ARIES/DIII-D programmes, or do you think they were doing it for the benefit of mankind or something??? Are there other examples?
Fusion power has already been commercialised! It's currently a research(/useless??) product, but it has been commercialised.
If you were to try to refine your question to 'the first watts of grid-power converted from fusion energy' then I would refer you to whoever first sold solar panels!
Ooops, I actually voted without rereading the question.
I voted in response to the headline. What a mean trick!
From all that I know the JET had break even by calculation. Just for a very short period of time. Dont ask me numbers, its been what? 20 years?. Oh, hehe I remember also, that back then as it is today, commercial fusion was 30 years away...
Skipjack wrote:
From all that I know the JET had break even by calculation. Just for a very short period of time. Dont ask me numbers, its been what? 20 years?. Oh, hehe I remember also, that back then as it is today, commercial fusion was 30 years away...
That is the claim. Though plenty of ways to debate it.
I can limit input into a capacitor to 1 watt, yet get megawatts out of it. Is this a Q=>1E6 device?? I think not.
JET's magnetic fields consume ~1GJ to energise, whereas the total energy output in its best run was about 22MJ I think. Sure, if the thing could be run continuously, the 1GJ 'investment' in energising the field would eventually be paid back, but not in the unit-seconds that tokamaks actually push neutrons out.
...and no-one's been counting all the ancillary parts, so 'net-power system output', no.
Have you ever visited Dinorwig? They do tours. It is, truly, almost unbelievable. Imagine cutting a big hole into the centre of a mountain, then building a cathedral half a mile inside it.
....
Probably a bigger cathedral than you're imagining!!
Now dig another hole out of the mountain next to it, the length of a football pitch, plus grandstands.
Now drill a hole connecting a lower and upper reservoir....a 30m diameter drill...and put a half-gigawatt motor/generator set in it.