I don't believe the hype yet. Fusion numbers do not represent the practical power output [1]. 2025 seems a bit too optimistic.
2025 is the date that they will complete their demonstration system and show net energy gain. But it will not be a fully functional power plant. Their slightly larger successor system will do that.
But you’d have to listen to their lectures to really understand. The tokamak is a well understood system. They are just using more powerful magnets than ever before, and they recently proved their magnets work. They published their physics basis research paper in Nature, and these are academics from MIT who have talked very openly about their system design. It doesn’t sound like there are any big unknowns remaining except the engineering design of the system itself which is well underway.
Maybe building this tokamak will be harder for some reason. But it really sounds like they can make it happen.
At a fundamental level, our lowest cost energy options are really simple - wind blows and makes stuff spin, dig a black rock and throw it into fire, inject gas into fire, let sun shine on a blue brick, chop wood and burn, make water flow and spin stuff
Now compare that to - keep superconducting magnets 250 degrees below ambient temperature, inject high precision beams of deuterium and tritium into a vacuum chamber, capture escaping neutrons in blankets of pure lithium and berylium. Eventually, capture the generated heat in a primary-secondary heat exchange loop of pressurized water, generating steam and spinning a turbine. All of which requires thousands of highly specialized scientists and engineers to design and operate
I doubt it will ever be cost efficient. And we're not even talking about the cost of fuel. Tritium is mind-boggingly expensive - we need deuterium-deuterium fusion, tritium is just an experimental stepping stone
Actually if you have fusion you start to think of power hungry things to use it for that were previously infeasible. Carbon capture is one.
For tritium, I’m a little fuzzy on this but I thought maybe the system generates the tritium from duterium inside the reactor? It sounded like it only needs duterium as an input.