<story><title>Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X</title><url>https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4550215/11_18</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>With fusion devices having trouble to confine the plasma for long times, I wonder if a massively-parallel fusion plant woud be feasible.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s assume that plasma destabilisation does not damage the device, and is a mundane event.&lt;p&gt;Build 10 or even 20 fusion devices (economy of scale!) feeding the common heat buffer, e.g. a large reservoir of a molten salt or metal. Feed conventional turbines off the heat of the heat tank. The tank evens out the input power jumps.&lt;p&gt;Now we can restart the fusion in every fusion device every so often, provided that restarting it is made a mundane operation, too. It, of course, takes a lot of electricity to pump into the magnets. Conveniently, we have a mighty power plant right here. Dumping the magnetic&amp;#x2F;electric energy from the magnets requires a huge sink. Luckily, we already have such a sink co-located.&lt;p&gt;Building the plant takes a massive investment. Luckily, the architecture allows to build it piecemeal, feeding the next added unit with the power of the already built units.&lt;p&gt;BTW the waste heat could be directly reused in some kind of chemical processing, like smelting, or maybe even synthesis of carbohydrate fuels from ambient carbon dioxide and water.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Retric</author><text>Ok, several issues with this.  First restarting these devices takes a lot of electricity, which drastically reduces your net efficiency. So, you still really want to solve this problem.&lt;p&gt;Second, fusion devices scale very well so one device at 10x the scale is vastly better than 10 different devices at x size.  Third, storing and pumping heat involves losses, where there is a huge range of great options for storing electricity.  Fourth, it takes massive turbines to turn heat into energy, so you need to scale several things on both sides of your merged heat system in your modular design.&lt;p&gt;Finally, X independent fusion devices don&amp;#x27;t have single points of failures shared between them.  Your combined design would.</text></comment>
<story><title>Successful second round of fusion experiments with Wendelstein 7-X</title><url>https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4550215/11_18</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nine_k</author><text>With fusion devices having trouble to confine the plasma for long times, I wonder if a massively-parallel fusion plant woud be feasible.&lt;p&gt;Let&amp;#x27;s assume that plasma destabilisation does not damage the device, and is a mundane event.&lt;p&gt;Build 10 or even 20 fusion devices (economy of scale!) feeding the common heat buffer, e.g. a large reservoir of a molten salt or metal. Feed conventional turbines off the heat of the heat tank. The tank evens out the input power jumps.&lt;p&gt;Now we can restart the fusion in every fusion device every so often, provided that restarting it is made a mundane operation, too. It, of course, takes a lot of electricity to pump into the magnets. Conveniently, we have a mighty power plant right here. Dumping the magnetic&amp;#x2F;electric energy from the magnets requires a huge sink. Luckily, we already have such a sink co-located.&lt;p&gt;Building the plant takes a massive investment. Luckily, the architecture allows to build it piecemeal, feeding the next added unit with the power of the already built units.&lt;p&gt;BTW the waste heat could be directly reused in some kind of chemical processing, like smelting, or maybe even synthesis of carbohydrate fuels from ambient carbon dioxide and water.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>bicubic</author><text>This doesn’t solve the fact that a single fusion pulse (all existing reactors are pulsed) currently consumes more energy than it produces.</text></comment>