A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate.
Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by people building more reactors. That's a heck of an assumption), it's not at all a given that it'll ever make a profit. That's a lot of time to build a lot of very cheap renewables.
And there's also opportunity costs. I see a lot of hopes put on fusion and don't really understand this chasing of the perfect solution. Even best case, it's not happening in decades, and it'll take decades more to build fusion as anything more than one off multi-decade-long research projects. That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.
So opportunity costs would also make for an interesting thing to calculate. Given that fusion will likely not make a major difference climate/pollution-wise for half a century, what else could we build in that time, and how much and what effect would that have?
For those interested not only in simplified energy balance of a fusion power plant as shown in Fusion Power Plant Simulator, but in more realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak I recommend the following lecture by Dr. Dennis Whyte from MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center.
One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vacuum vessel cooled by a layer of molten lead and a layer of FLiBe (a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2)).
The lithium component of FLiBe is used for breeding of the radioactive isotope tritium, which will be extracted from the salt and used for making the deuterium-tritium fuel of the tokamak.
On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."
> I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating
The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.
Eh, a core-containment failure (in any magnetically-contained system) would involve superheated hydrogen getting friendly with oxygen. That, in turn, would give neutron-impregnated barrier materials a free ride on propellant. It's not strictly a melt down. But it's in the same practical category of failure.
Something I've been asking my AIs to do when modelling with them is to ask for the algebra for the model so I may recreate it by hand. Including such a PDF with these links would be helpful because it succintly presents the logic in a denser form than an explainer article.
Those who like playing with this sort of thing might like to play with this superconductor-coil-as-a-battery exploration where electricity just goes round as storage![1]
A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate.
Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by people building more reactors. That's a heck of an assumption), it's not at all a given that it'll ever make a profit. That's a lot of time to build a lot of very cheap renewables.
And there's also opportunity costs. I see a lot of hopes put on fusion and don't really understand this chasing of the perfect solution. Even best case, it's not happening in decades, and it'll take decades more to build fusion as anything more than one off multi-decade-long research projects. That's a lot of time for the world to get worse while waiting for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.
So opportunity costs would also make for an interesting thing to calculate. Given that fusion will likely not make a major difference climate/pollution-wise for half a century, what else could we build in that time, and how much and what effect would that have?
For those interested not only in simplified energy balance of a fusion power plant as shown in Fusion Power Plant Simulator, but in more realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak I recommend the following lecture by Dr. Dennis Whyte from MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center.
Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw
One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vacuum vessel cooled by a layer of molten lead and a layer of FLiBe (a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2)).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe
The lithium component of FLiBe is used for breeding of the radioactive isotope tritium, which will be extracted from the salt and used for making the deuterium-tritium fuel of the tokamak.
No melt down? This game sucks.
On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."
> I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating
The cost/benefit for doing this seems pretty similar between fusion as gas power. We don't usually do this with gas, so I guess it's probably not viable for fusion.
Fusion power plants can't "melt down". The amount of plasma inside the vacuum chamber is just around a gram.
> Fusion power plants can't "melt down"
Eh, a core-containment failure (in any magnetically-contained system) would involve superheated hydrogen getting friendly with oxygen. That, in turn, would give neutron-impregnated barrier materials a free ride on propellant. It's not strictly a melt down. But it's in the same practical category of failure.
For whatever reason the game doesn't load until I switch to the dark mode
If I enable advanced mode, the "exiting" in Heating Power (exiting) gets overlapped with corresponding numbers
Display menu doesn't allow switching to Energy mode
Thanks - what browser?
I think the first thing I thought when every man opened this project was: how to make this thing explode.
Something I've been asking my AIs to do when modelling with them is to ask for the algebra for the model so I may recreate it by hand. Including such a PDF with these links would be helpful because it succintly presents the logic in a denser form than an explainer article.
Yeah, it’s slightly buried - the publication with all the details, including the math is linked to in footnote 3 of the explainer article,
https://pubs.aip.org/aip/pop/article/29/6/062103/2847827/Pro...
It’s open access and you can download the PDF directly from there.
This would sell on Steam with a light Godot reskin
Those who like playing with this sort of thing might like to play with this superconductor-coil-as-a-battery exploration where electricity just goes round as storage![1]
[1] https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloo...
fantastic PBS Space Time on what the last steps are going to be to finally make fusion possible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE
(fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually, lol)
> fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually
Wasn't it perpetually 20 to 50 years away? I'm not an expert on the space. But new computational methods and magnets seem to be genuine steps forward.
the PBS Space Time episode suggests to me the housing walls might be the biggest problem
it consumes itself or makes molecules that are destructive to the walls or insanely toxic so can never risk leaks
whatever solution they come up with I suspect it will require a lot of constant maintenance on the first generation
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