I'm cautiously optimistic about SPARC, but I don't believe it's going to be more than a footnote in the overall energy storage
At a fundamental level, our lowest cost energy options are really simple - wind blows and makes stuff spin, dig a black rock and throw it into fire, inject gas into fire, let sun shine on a blue brick, chop wood and burn, make water flow and spin stuff
Now compare that to - keep superconducting magnets 250 degrees below ambient temperature, inject high precision beams of deuterium and tritium into a vacuum chamber, capture escaping neutrons in blankets of pure lithium and berylium. Eventually, capture the generated heat in a primary-secondary heat exchange loop of pressurized water, generating steam and spinning a turbine. All of which requires thousands of highly specialized scientists and engineers to design and operate
I doubt it will ever be cost efficient. And we're not even talking about the cost of fuel. Tritium is mind-boggingly expensive - we need deuterium-deuterium fusion, tritium is just an experimental stepping stone
It’s a fair point. But there are industrial processes that need consistent high levels of power. So large cities will probably want fusion for industrial customers, and that power will be made available to others.
Actually if you have fusion you start to think of power hungry things to use it for that were previously infeasible. Carbon capture is one.
For tritium, I’m a little fuzzy on this but I thought maybe the system generates the tritium from duterium inside the reactor? It sounded like it only needs duterium as an input.
At a fundamental level, our lowest cost energy options are really simple - wind blows and makes stuff spin, dig a black rock and throw it into fire, inject gas into fire, let sun shine on a blue brick, chop wood and burn, make water flow and spin stuff
Now compare that to - keep superconducting magnets 250 degrees below ambient temperature, inject high precision beams of deuterium and tritium into a vacuum chamber, capture escaping neutrons in blankets of pure lithium and berylium. Eventually, capture the generated heat in a primary-secondary heat exchange loop of pressurized water, generating steam and spinning a turbine. All of which requires thousands of highly specialized scientists and engineers to design and operate
I doubt it will ever be cost efficient. And we're not even talking about the cost of fuel. Tritium is mind-boggingly expensive - we need deuterium-deuterium fusion, tritium is just an experimental stepping stone