Abstract
In an intermezzo we take stock, summarise the World’s efforts so far and what the further roadmap to fusion looks like. It was obvious that the big tokamaks had failed and that the tokamak was a dead-end. Fusion research should have stopped at this point, but the opposite happened, not in the least because politics intervened. Big plans were drawn up and the splendid prospect of a golden age of unlimited, clean energy was conjured up out of thin air.
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Notes
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Accessed on 11 September 2019; site last updated on 11 September 2018.
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Amendment of Decision 2007/198/Euratom establishing the European Joint Undertaking for ITER and the Development of Fusion Energy and conferring advantages upon it, Com (2018) 445.
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Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count.
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https://www.iter.org/proj/inafewlines; the previous planning foresaw first plasma by 2020 and full fusion by 2023 (Reuters, Science News, 2 May 2016).
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Global electricity generation in 2018 amounted to 26,700 TWh, of which about 2/3 came from coal (38%), gas (23%) and oil (3%) (https://www.iea.org/geco/electricity/).
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By the end of 2014, the total installed electricity generating capacity worldwide was nearly 6.142 TW (million MW) which only includes generation connected to local electricity grids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption).
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The capacity factor of a power plant ranges from 30% for wind/hydro plants to 90% for a nuclear power plant. A 1000 MW power plant with a 100% capacity factor would generate about 1000 × 24 × 365 MWh = 8.8 TWh of electric power. If the capacity factor is less than 100%, the generated power is correspondingly lower.
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The net capacity factor is the unitless ratio of actual electrical energy output over a given period of time to the maximum possible electrical energy output over that period. The maximum possible energy output of a given installation assumes its continuous operation at full nameplate capacity over the relevant period.
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The Roadmap is a living document, as they say, with updates and reviews to be performed at appropriate times. The latest version is from 2018.
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Reinders, L.J. (2021). Summary of the World’s Efforts so Far and Further Roadmap to Fusion. In: The Fairy Tale of Nuclear Fusion. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64344-7_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64344-7_9
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