Big doughnuts

Pleased to read today that tokamaks - fusion power units in the shape of a torus or doughnut - seem to be coming of age, with an international project called ITER planning to generate maybe 3,000MW from one (or maybe two) by 2040, quite a respectable sized power station.

The catch is that by then the ITER project (see reference 1) will have been in the pipeline for around half a century and will have clocked up $40bn costs. No idea how the $40bn does on the buck-per-megawatt front, but at least it is generating serious amounts of electricity, so a big leap forward from the effort at Didcot.

The new news is that some bright young things at MIT think that they can do much better. See reference 2.

So maybe our children are going to have the power needed to drive their toasters in the mornings after all.

But what happened to a rather different sort of fusion called IFR which Monbiot thought was the business back in 2011? See reference 3. Hopefully Cameron and his crew are on the case, as I don't suppose that Corbie is.

PS: interested to see from wikipedia that most of the biggest power stations in the world are hydro, with the Three Gorges well in front. Nuclear well up there too, so we have not all followed the bizarre German example.

Reference 1: https://www.iter.org/. As well as power they also offer a nattily animated version of the illustration above on their machine tab.

Reference 2: http://www.kurzweilai.net/mit-designs-small-modular-efficient-fusion-power-plant/.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=monbiot+station.