NPCI is building two 700MW pressurised heavy water reactors (PHWR), including Units 3 and 4 at Kakrapar, where there are two 220MW power plants. Officials say that in July, the fourth unit recorded 97.56% progress.
Wonder why they’re building these instead of thermal coal plants
ITER will adress almost all of your concerns and is the capstone of international fusion collaboration. It’s also well on its way to being completed. It is still a research reactor, so it won’t actually be generating for the grid. It is expected to achieve long pulse fusion with Q=10 where the majority of heating to sustain the reaction comes from the fusion.
They will spend a while testing the plasma conditions and very low fusion amounts to test shielding before moving on to full power fusion runs. If the full power fusion runs work as designed, that should provide enough data to prove out commercial generating designs. ITER should be the final plasma dynamics research tokamak needed. Demonstration plants should be simpler, and hence faster and cheaper to build than ITER.
Full power runs will generate 500MW from 50MW input power. That’s plenty of efficiency to still produce meaningful power after collection and generating inefficiencies.
I’m not denying the science, it is mathematically possible and I actually love the science behind it and reading about it.
I just say we are not yet near fusion power, I think. ITER will start experiments probably this decade. After that they plan to build DEMO, a follow up project which will deliver a little power.
Keep in mind that these reactors are very difficult to built, still. It takes decades to build even without delays.
Fusion is a beautiful source of energy, but it’ll still take time. I don’t think for example that fusion will play a major role in the transition away from fossil fuels as that needs to happen much faster.