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It's not my area, but I suspect that the heat extraction rate for a fusion reactor must be several orders higher than current fission reactors if we are to run them continuously. Fission reactions can be actively controlled by using reaction moderating material (control rods), which means we can tune the reactor activity to match the amount of heat extraction available.

Fusion plasma must be sustained at a few million Kelvin or it shuts down again, and I'm not sure how finely we can control the operating temperature without either overheating the reactor or shutting down the plasma. I think it will take a lot more than dumb engineering to accomplish this.




The heat flux management from the plasma is certainly not dumb engineering, true. However, the actual heat transfer technology is, I think it's fair to say, "dumb" compared to all of the plasma physics that has to enable the reactor in the first place. It's more or less just running cold water through the lithium blanket, which they hope to keep under around 1000 Celsius or so.


It is moot: it would cost far, far more than other power generation methods, so will never be built.




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