Why carbon dioxide makes stellarators so important

Abstract

The increasing level of atmospheric carbon dioxide has driven public discourse throughout the world. An immediate implementation of carbon-free energy sources is demanded with little discussion of costs, technical constraints on the sources, or implications of high residual levels of carbon dioxide. Residual carbon-dioxide can be removed from the air, but the cost to remove the carbon-dioxide produced by human activity during a year is thought to be trillions of dollars---otherwise it remains in the atmosphere for centuries. Economic considerations may limit wind and solar sources to less than 40\% of the electricity production. Fission or fusion may be the only choice for most of the rest. Development costs are orders of magnitude smaller than implementation costs, which are tens of trillions of dollars for fission. A needless delay in the development of fusion has enormous financial implications. As will be shown stellarators are better positioned than any other concept for a fast path to fusion. A computationally derived conceptual design for a stellarator reactor may allow final design and construction to be initiated without the delay of intermediate generations of experiments. The most urgent issue is the development of conceptual designs.

18 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Influence of massive material injection on avalanche runaway generation during tokamak disruptions
• Direct construction of optimized stellarator shapes. II. Numerical quasisymmetric solutions
• Verification of the global gyrokinetic stellarator code XGC-S for linear ion temperature gradient driven modes
• Simulation of non-resonant stellarator divertor
• Curl-free magnetic fields for stellarator optimization

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Mapping the space of quasisymmetric stellarators using optimized near-axis expansion
• Stellarators as a Fast Path to Fusion
• Optimized finite-build stellarator coils using automatic differentiation
• Plasma steering to avoid disruptions in ITER and tokamak power plants
• Vacuum magnetic fields with exact quasisymmetry near a flux surface. Part 1: Solutions near an axisymmetric surface
• Isodrastic Magnetic fields for suppressing transitions in guiding-centre motion
• Generalized Grad-Shafranov equation for non-axisymmetric MHD equilibria
• The interaction of the ITER first wall with magnetic perturbations
• Using Deep Learning to Design High Aspect Ratio Fusion Devices
• Required toroidal confinement for fusion and omnigeneity