Nuclear fusion on brink of being realised, say MIT scientists
This is greatly overrated.<p>The design of the ARC reactor in the 2014 arxiv paper produced 500 MW(th) fusion power.  The FLiBe bath contained some 90 tons of beryllium.  The annual world production of Be is just 220 tons.   If the world&#x27;s entire estimate resource of mineable Be (100,000 tonnes, according to USGS) were used to make ARC reactors, they might supply 1% of the world&#x27;s primary energy demand.<p>The FLiBe also contains about 1&#x2F;4 the 6Li produced by the entire US hydrogen bomb program.  The facility that enriched that lithium used 10,000 tons of mercury and is an environmental problem even to this day because of leaks.   That process is also now illegal in the US due to this pollution, and there is no facility in the world that could make that much 6Li.<p>Perhaps those problems could be worked around, but there&#x27;s a deeper issue.   The power density of the ARC reactor is around 0.5 MW&#x2F;m^3.   This is an order of magnitude, or more, lower than the power density of a PWR fission reactor core.   The ARC reactor is also much more complex, and will require very expensive maintenance operations every couple of years (manufacturing a new pressure vessel and remotely installing it, as the innards of the reactor will be too hot for hands-on access.)<p>So, how could this possibly be cost competitive with fission reactors, never mind the energy sources that are currently beating fission?<p>It&#x27;s ironic that the ARC reactor is just demonstrating the fatal flaws with DT fusion reactors, flaws that were also pointed out at MIT by Lawrence Lidsky some 35 years ago.  ARC is better than ITER, but that&#x27;s damning with faint praise.