According to the article I posted, the National Ignition Facility is thirteen years old and based on outdated technology from the 1980s.
It looks like ITER is newer and still in development?
Yes, ITER is a massively huge international project. Interestingly, all of these designs actually go back to the 50ies. There are basically two set-ups being researched nowadays: the Tokamak and the Stellarator. The nice thing about the Tokamak is that it has been very promising from the start, it's robust and doesn't require highly complicated computations to get a magnetic field arranged. The Stellarator design is tricky to get to work at all, and requires a lot of number crunching to tune the magnetic field keeping everyting together. There have been very interesting advances in Stellarator design in the past decades, however. Wendelstein, which I mentioned previously, uses a stellarator setup.
Tokamak designs are "pulsed", i.e. they yield energy in bursts. Stellarator designs keep the fusion reaction going continuously.
Regardless of which design is chosen, the engineering challenges are endless. You are dealing with plasma, i.e. an electrically charged gas-like aggregate state. Where in "normal" gases, you have to deal with things like turbulences (eddies in the gas) and that is full of challenges in itself, with plasma, the turbulences will generate their own magnetic fields! So you can set up your field carefully, superconducting magnets and all, and then the plasma inside your reactor will just create its own chaotic turbulent magnetic fields and interfere with your nice designs...
One thing that never gets mentioned in reporting about civilian fusion power somehow, is the question of
where the fuel comes from. This topic tends to get glossed over in favor of the "clean" image of fusion power - after all, it's hydrogen, which is part of water, which is ubiquitous, right? But while there are fusion reactions involving "normal" hydrogen atoms, the so-called proton-proton-cycle which occurs in stars like our sun, this is not economical for the purposes of fusion power plants. All of the fusion power plant designs use a different fusion reaction, which requires other isotopes of hydrogen, and you get those heavy hydrogen isotopes from - conventional nuclear power plants. Now, there are
plans to have fusion reactors "create" their own fuel by capturing some of the neutrons freed in the reaction, in the long run, but with all the other challenges, handling the plasma, getting the magnetic fields right, cooling the superconducting magnets, and so on... that item is rather on the back-burner for now.
Hope this was interesting.
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