Oh, that's fascinating. The tape has fantastic properties. The superconductive layer is only 1μm thick. The superconductor itself doesn't quench at high magnetic field strengths, which is different from most other superconductors. The insulator is stainless steel! Compared to a superconductor, anything with more resistance is an insulator.
His key points are 1) now we can have much stronger magnetic fields, and 2) with stronger magnetic fields, some of the other hard problems, such as plasma instability, go away. Also, this tape is much easier to work with than other superconductors. Not brittle, less damaged by radiation, not too hard to terminate, superconducts below 43K. So some expensive engineering problems also go away.
ReBCO is a huge boon for magnetic-confinement fusion. The comment from their CEO that "In fact, from a physicist’s standpoint, our machines look kind of boring [...] we could get extremely high performance through the brute force of the magnetic field” hits the nail on the head.
Experiments like DIII-D have spent the last 20-30 years trying to eek out a few dozen percent more performance by fine-tuning the shape of the plasma & the current distribution inside it, etc. Some of the configurations they've tested are right on the edge of instability, requiring high-speed control systems to walk up to (but not over!) the edge of an invisible cliff in parameter space. If we learned anything from Three-Mile-Island and Chernobyl, we do not want that kind of twitchiness in a nuclear context. Sure, the worst-case fallout isn't as bad, but the multi-billion dollar reactor could be crippled for months/years, depending on how things play out. Boring is good, in a nuclear context.
The downside to the use of brute force is literally the forces involved. The original design (a class project) estimated that the structural steel required to hold the coils of a reactor together would run almost $5 billion & account for ~80% of the total cost of the core. (See Table 11 of [0]) This is for a power plant that would deliver ~ 250MW of electricity. The total plant cost would probably be $10-15B, which is not economical. However, they say "there likely exists a better economic optimization of magnetic field strength versus mass for a full power plant." Most likely, that involves reduced field but larger size reactors, which might be slightly more expensive but significantly more powerful. (IIRC, the latest designs for ARC are inching up toward 4 meters major radius.)
I doubt this approach can reach economic breakeven, but I think they have a good shot at exceeding energy breakeven. OTOH, I'm a physicist rather than an engineer, and I work for a competitor, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.
Oh, that's fascinating. The tape has fantastic properties. The superconductive layer is only 1μm thick. The superconductor itself doesn't quench at high magnetic field strengths, which is different from most other superconductors. The insulator is stainless steel! Compared to a superconductor, anything with more resistance is an insulator.
His key points are 1) now we can have much stronger magnetic fields, and 2) with stronger magnetic fields, some of the other hard problems, such as plasma instability, go away. Also, this tape is much easier to work with than other superconductors. Not brittle, less damaged by radiation, not too hard to terminate, superconducts below 43K. So some expensive engineering problems also go away.
All this is very encouraging.