How much fuel does fusion take?

[CaptainChewbacca]

This is something I've wondered, but not been able to figure out; In the (hypothetical) first generation of fusion power that will be coming down the chute eventually, how rapidly is deuterium consumed? Is it grams per hour, or gallons, or hundreds of gallons?

[Starglider]

This is something I've wondered, but not been able to figure out; In the (hypothetical) first generation of fusion power that will be coming down the chute eventually, how rapidly is deuterium consumed? Is it grams per hour, or gallons, or hundreds of gallons?

A few kilos of pellets or gases a day for the most probable designs.

[Admiral Valdemar]

This obviously depends on power output, since a larger tokamak will use more fuel just as a V12 will chug more juice than a V6.

And I really don't know about fusion coming down any time soon. ITER has not even been barely laid down foundation-wise, so it'll be a long time before we get anything better than JET to see if breaking even and getting net energy is feasible.

Always optimistic, but some people are looking into the likes of sonofusion and Pons & Fleischmann's work again. That's pretty desperate.

[Starglider]

And I really don't know about fusion coming down any time soon. ITER has not even been barely laid down foundation-wise, so it'll be a long time before we get anything better than JET to see if breaking even and getting net energy is feasible.

Dr Robert Bussard said 'the physics is done, it's just engineering now' and I believe him. A genuine crash fusion program, Apollo Project style, should have the first power stations running within a decade. You'd go ahead and build multiple a handful of pilot plants using the best magnetic and inertial confinement schemes and see what works out best, Manhattan Project style. We could use standard materials for now and work out the low neutron activation issues later - a little more nuclear waste and refurbishment cost is irrelevant when the problem needs to be solved as fast as possible. The transition isn't obvious to people who aren't following the field closely and say 'oh, you've always said it'll be done soon, it never is'. But the physical understanding did genuinely mature in the late 90s/early 2000s. Unfortunately we're still working towards this kind of 'theory now understood, the rest is just engineering' breakthrough in AI (plenty of people have declared this to be true for their own personal theories/projects, but to date they've all been wrong).

[metavac]

Well, ITER and JET are as Apollo crash program as you can get in plasma and fusion research. Of course, the thrust of study is on perfecting tokamak magnetic confinement techniques that have been the mainstay of Big Science and Hero projects for decades. There is still a very rich mid-tier body of basic science and engineering being conducted by labs that while less ambitious about power output are equally or more ambitious about finding plasma physics sweet spots that might unveil more efficient and less costly methods of going about it. You've got LDX and VTF at MIT and NCSX at Princeton working on improving our understanding about MCF science and engineering. Los Alamos is still the tip of the spear for ICF. On top of that, lessons in confinement are being applied to other areas, including fission power research and antiparticle production.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'd like to believe the hype, really I would. But given fission is getting more of a push than fusion and is seen as economically and practically more viable too, it makes me think fusion is still only a pet project for nuclear physicists rather than a viable method of mass energy generation for the future. The price of uranium and lack of decent minining expenditure along with the threat of climate change make fusion a godsend only a fool would dismiss.

[metavac]

Since very few of these ventures are truly orthogonal, I wouldn't give up on the nuclear fusion dream yet, but even if we did the consequences for present-day nuclear power is real and ongoing. I'd be really interested to see how LDX impacts gas core fission reactor research now that they're actually levitating the magnet.