>"How do you scale it up to generate power for a city or an entire town? That’s all ahead of us,"
If they think they can get a working fusion reactor capable of powering 80,000 homes into a shipping container, I'd suggest not building them any bigger. Being able to scale in container sized units over time via the existing transport links sounds just peachy. Is quite a big 'if' there.
Why was this downvoted? I had the same idea. If you can power 80000 homes with a container sized reactor, why not start deployment? Easy to transport, you could power small neighbourhoods. No more wide spread black outs.
Not sure how much maintenance will factor in, but a reactor that size sounds already practical.
It's still a nuclear reactor... You don't just put them into containers and ship them around, or turn them on or off by pressing a switch. They require specialized staff to operate, maintenance, handling of materials, safety and protection precautions and so on. Either you built them big or they are not worth it to operate.
Exactly. The reasons we have giant centralized power production is that it's cheaper to fuel and maintain one big electrical power station than it is to do so with many small ones. If a new technology doesn't need frequent refueling or maintenance and doesn't become dramatically less efficient when scaled down, it's probably better used in a distributed fashion with the power grid just helping to load level.
One of the other reasons nuclear power plants in particular have tended to be large is NIMBY. The amount of opposition and regulatory burden you get to a 5GW plant is about the same as you get to a 0.5GW plant, but then you get ten times as much power from it.
There is now a new theory to handle this, which is to build smaller reactors and put them on barges or railcars. Then you can mass produce them in one place with one regulatory approval and the time it takes to go from there to supplying power to a new city is the 24 hours it takes to tow in the barge. Which deprives NIMBYs of one of their most annoying obstruction methods -- raising construction costs through intentional red tape and changing requirements after construction has already begun. That can't happen if you can go from local approval of operations to selling power in the course of an afternoon. And then you can't lose your investment due to an unfavorable or changing regulatory environment because in the worst case you tow the barge to some other place with lower hostility.
McMurdo ice camp in Antarctica briefly was run via contained nuclear reactor.
I also wouldn't call it a Nimby issue. If a disaffected terrorist decided to blow up a small nuclear unit the issues would be considerable. Currently nuclear power plants are guarded like wartime POW camps.
The army did also try to build portable nuclear power generators
Right up until the barge sinks or crashes and the spilled waste renders an area uninhabitable for 40 years.
This is the real reason why fission reactors are either large, or military. The organisational capabilities that are required to manage them safely require scale and funding.
Not necessarily, a cargo container sized unit would have a limited quantity of fissile material making it more readily dealt with by proper authorities. Given newer self-shutdown models that don’t go critical or meltdown tons of highly reactive material on failure removes issues similar to Fukushima where melted nuclear material erodes containment and embeds into the ground and/or seeps into ground water. During transport, if the system is off, you could end up with readily contained debris given the containment system is designed to withstand external forces (think black boxes, but with nuclear material). Nasty still but much more controllable. I’d argue it’s on par with some of the nastier chemicals already routinely transported.
Another benefit of smaller scalable units would be the ability to readily transport aging units back to a central factory that routinely handles old units before major structural degradation occurs. One issue at Fukushima (and a majority of other nuclear reactors) is that the size and scale of each one is enormous requiring a lot of one-off resources to clean up, and so the incentives are to run them far past designed lifetimes and safety recommendations. Nuclear fission is very detrimental to materials, even in modern failsafe designs. But having an organization which routinely “recycles” units long before failure could allow both economic efficiencies, better safety due to constant practice, and dealing with smaller units which could be largely handled with industrial robotic systems.
The issue I’d worry about with such units would be security. Smaller units could mean potentially less security which would make for easier targets for motivated terrorists or rebels.
Fusion reactors, unlike fission reactors, are best in the smallest workable units. That's because they are limited by the power/area at the first wall, so (by the square-cube law) their volumetric power density gets worse as one makes them bigger.
Unfortunately, there is a lower limit set by the need to absorb neutrons. The blanket has to be roughly 1 meter thick.
One might be able to evade that if one could have a large number of tiny, or at least thin, reactors sharing a common blanket, much as the fuel rods of fission reactor share a common moderator. However, it's still likely to be inferior to a fission reactor in power density, as these tiny reactors would irradiate each other.
Beyond that, there's the need to confine the plasma to these very small reactors. Even in complete absence of plasma instability and turbulence, ions will scatter off each other and diffuse out and be lost. This classic diffusion takes time proportional to the square of the minimum reactor dimension / ion gyroradius.
If they can make it cheaper than a similarly sized fossil fuel plant, they‘ve got a market. The military would be interested, too. That new russian nuclear power plant on a boat can’t have been cheap, either.
Fission power plants are not now competitive even if the nuclear part were free. The turbines, generators, cooling towers, etc. make them too expensive. So unless fusion can do away with those (that is, use direct conversion of plasma energy into electrical energy) it's unlikely to be competitive either.
If they think they can get a working fusion reactor capable of powering 80,000 homes into a shipping container, I'd suggest not building them any bigger. Being able to scale in container sized units over time via the existing transport links sounds just peachy. Is quite a big 'if' there.