International Colloquia #26: Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling

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Recommends vjaswal · 2021-10 · on “The Truth About Nuclear Fusion Q Factors”

I've seen various youtube videos from their employees and CEO. From what I remember, Dennis Whyte (head of the fusion lab at MIT and CFS cofounder) says you need about Q>5 at least, to make fusion economically viable. So that must mean Qplasma > 5. SPARC is working towards that by 2025. And so far, the company, CFS, has been achieving their milestones for the performance of their magnets. The HTS magnets and coils is the main ingredient that the startup is optimizing for. Sometime in the last year, they implied that their Qplasma was much better than they minimally hoped for. I think they achieved Qplasma > 10, but Dennis was keeping the details proprietary. From all the talks I remember, th

Recommends leonidasrup · 2026-04 · on “Fusion Power Plant Simulator”

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 [this video] 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)). [LINK] 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 d

Cites compumike · 2022-09 · on “Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100M°C for 30 seconds”

"Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling" [this video] talks about the steady-state heat transfer out of a proposed tokamak design. Around 1:09:23 they show "1.5 GW" deposited as "0.3 GW from radiative photons -> surface heating" plus "1.2 GW from 14.1 MeV neutrons -> volumetric heating". Designing the first wall and the volumetric blanket are, indeed, engineering challenges.

Cites leonidasrup · 2026-05 · on “Company says nuclear fusion could power the grid – and soon”

There many technical changes which will have to be overcome for fusion to: 1. Produce long term stable plasma. SPARC should demonstrate this. Commonwealth Fusion Systems are confident that with the magnet properties of SPARC and the conservative parameters of the SPARC plasma they can demonstrate this. 2. Produce the prototype of a fusion power plant, the ARC reactor. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has to scale up the SPARC reactor. They have to not only design, but also build and test, reactor vessel which would allow useful heat recovery and tritium breeding. Tritium is hydrogen, very small molecule that has tendency do leak through smallest cracks. It can also cause hydrogen embrittlement. 3