Comment by moogly
7 years ago
> The (thermal power)/(reactor volume) for ITER is about 0.05 MW/m^3.
https://www.f4e.europa.eu/understandingfusion/iterdevice.asp...
500/800 = 0.625 (plasma volume, not reactor volume)
In an interview with the Omega Tau podcast a while back, it was mentioned by ITER personnel that the DEMO plant that would be the successor to ITER was probably going to be designed as a 2000 MW reactor. Since the plasma is in shape of a torus, that volume increases pretty quickly with the size of the confinement vessel.
Also, per unit mass of fuel, magnetic confinement fusion is still posited to be thousands of times more efficient than fission power.
Using plasma volume is clearly not appropriate, since the point of the comparison is to compare cost of the equipment, by comparing the volume and size of the equipment between the two approaches (and ignoring that fusion equipment is much more complex and sophisticated than that in a fission reactor.)
The fuel comparison is silly, since fuel is not a major cost driver for either approach. The misconception that fuel costs matter is one of the errors that leads people to think fusion is desirable.