There is no possibility of a Tokamak ever producing one commercially-viable erg of energy. It wouldn't matter if every nation on Earth joined in. The entire concept is useless. Even with absolute success at every step, such energy could never get below even 10x the cost of solar + wind + storage, even ignoring all the $billions already poured in.
There is exactly one reason we spend $billions every year on Tokamak: it is a jobs program for high-neutron-flux physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work.
That is not to say fusion is itself a dead end; just that Tokamak is stealing the funding that could otherwise develop practical fusion power. E.g., the FRC DFD project shows every sign of near-term viability, but is starved for the small amount of money that would take them to fully practical power generation and also spacecraft propulsion.
The project is in "Phase II" development under NASA, and needs just $50m to get to a viable prototype -- pocket change for the Tokamak club.
Precisely. Instead of one sunk cost fallacy after another used to justify ITER and its enormous bureaucracy, there should be a billion each thrown at a couple dozen likely alternative ideas.
I read a paper recently that basically said that the best bang for buck is to just work on better superconducting magnetic tape. Stronger fields make everything better, and the scaling law is cubic!
Even if such a tape is developed but doesn't lead to fusion, we'd have better MRIs and DC power lines as a side effect, so it's not even wasted effort!
Even the best HTS tapes won't make fusion competitive. Limits on power/area through the first wall guarantee fusion will have bad volumetric power density compared to fission, even at high magnetic fields.
It is my understanding that FRC fusion could make good use of HTS tape.
We can still say that no amount of HTS tape, or of anything else, will ever make Tokamak hot-neutron fusion competitive. But that is not a reason to abandon HTS tape development.
There is exactly one reason we spend $billions every year on Tokamak: it is a jobs program for high-neutron-flux physicists, to maintain a population to draw on for weapons work.
That is not to say fusion is itself a dead end; just that Tokamak is stealing the funding that could otherwise develop practical fusion power. E.g., the FRC DFD project shows every sign of near-term viability, but is starved for the small amount of money that would take them to fully practical power generation and also spacecraft propulsion.
The project is in "Phase II" development under NASA, and needs just $50m to get to a viable prototype -- pocket change for the Tokamak club.