"The design could produce a reactor that would provide electricity to about 100,000 people, they say."
It would be a huge step forward if this can be built, but there still would be a long way to go. To scale that to "electricity for everyone in the USA", you would need to build about 3,000 of these (or build much bigger ones). And that's for _current_ electricity use, not if everybody starts driving an electric car.
A fusion reactor able to produce net electricity at all would be a massive breakthrough. I don't think the size matters much at all. Once anything is working, progress on scaling it up is likely to come quickly. The hard part is getting to the point where it works at all.
The first nuclear power plant attached to a grid was only 6MW. The first "full-scale" plant, according to Wikipedia and the BBC, had four reactors producing only 60MW each.
Does scaling up mean making a bigger setup with magnets of the same strength? If so, I agree it is just a matter of making the effort, but this 150-ish MW thing is "half the size of ITER", which means it already is enormous (ITER will be gargantuan with its 1400 cubic meter vacuum vessel).
Even at 'to the fourth power', I fear this would get really huge before it significantly improves on our largest fission reactors.
Alternatively, can one inject more fusion material while keeping the same magnetic field strength to get more power out without building a larger device, or would that require stronger magnetic fields? If so, are we sure we can make those stronger fields? (Correction welcome, but I don't expect we can; if we could, we likely could scale this design down)
I still think that, if this works as advertised, it will be both a huge result and only one important step on a long road ahead to 'free' clean energy.
Fusion, is one of those things that scales really well so being able to build a small power plant is a good thing.
Also, ~3,000 for the US seems like a lot. But it's only ~60 per state which is not that bad. Also, we often have multiple nuclear reactors on the same site for a range of reasons and we could do the same with this tech.
In the end we create and use crazy amounts of electricity in the US and we need any solution is going to be a large scale effort.
As long as the cost per kWh is reasonable, smaller unit size is a good thing, since it lowers capital requirements. That's why a lot of people are pushing for small modular fission reactors.
> That's why a lot of people are pushing for small modular fission reactors.
Also smaller reactors have less fuel inside and the new MSR designs don't produce plutonium or other weapons-usable byproduct, so they're less attractive targets for terrorists, dirty bomb builders and other threats, not to mention the reduced risk in failure case with the MSR technology.
It would be a huge step forward if this can be built, but there still would be a long way to go. To scale that to "electricity for everyone in the USA", you would need to build about 3,000 of these (or build much bigger ones). And that's for _current_ electricity use, not if everybody starts driving an electric car.
For comparison, a 1000MW nuclear reactor produces electricity for 690,000 _households_ (http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-Center/Nuclear-Statistics/US-Nu...), and US nuclear electricity generation is about a honderd times that (same page)