Something I've been asking my AIs to do when modelling with them is to ask for the algebra for the model so I may recreate it by hand. Including such a PDF with these links would be helpful because it succintly presents the logic in a denser form than an explainer article.

fantastic PBS Space Time on what the last steps are going to be to finally make fusion possible

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAJN1CrJsVE

(fusion is -always- just a decade away, perpetually, lol)

For those interested not only in simplified energy balance of a fusion power plant as shown in Fusion Power Plant Simulator, but in more realistic engineering of heat extraction from a tokamak I recommend the following lecture by Dr. Dennis Whyte from MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center.

Fusion Reactor First Wall Cooling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHJyoqDO0zw

One of the designs uses 3D printed silicon carbide vacuum vessel cooled by a layer of molten lead and a layer of FLiBe (a molten salt made from a mixture of lithium fluoride (LiF) and beryllium fluoride (BeF2)).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLiBe

The lithium component of FLiBe is used for breeding of the radioactive isotope tritium, which will be extracted from the salt and used for making the deuterium-tritium fuel of the tokamak.

No melt down? This game sucks.

On a serious note: I wonder how practical and safe it would be to build fusion pants close to city centers in order to harvest the excess heat for district heating. Would be a boon in e.g. NYC which already has a large district steam system. You can do cooling too, look up "steam absorption chiller."

This would sell on Steam with a light Godot reskin

For whatever reason the game doesn't load until I switch to the dark mode

If I enable advanced mode, the "exiting" in Heating Power (exiting) gets overlapped with corresponding numbers

Display menu doesn't allow switching to Energy mode

I think the first thing I thought when every man opened this project was: how to make this thing explode.

Those who like playing with this sort of thing might like to play with this superconductor-coil-as-a-battery exploration where electricity just goes round as storage![1]

[1] https://stateofutopia.com/experiments/wheeeeeloop/wheeeeeloo...

reminder - there's tech out there capable of reading your mind remotely

A good addition would be the sales price per MWh, price for the power plant, and the loan interest rate.

Because IMO all that is extremely critical. I fully support the pursuit of fusion as a scientific endeavor, but given that we're probably at least 30 years away from having anything approaching commercial deployment (assuming ITER is built, works, is followed promptly by DEMO, it works, and is followed promptly by people building more reactors. That's a heck of an assumption), it's not at all a given that it'll ever make a profit. That's a lot of time to build a lot of very cheap renewables.

And there's also opportunity costs. I see a lot of hopes put on fusion and don't really understand this chasing of the perfect solution. Even best case, it's not happening in decades, and it'll take decades more to build fusion as anything more than one off multi-decade-long research projects. That's a lot of time for the world to get worse for fusion to happen, and we might as well just throw renewables at the problem now instead of waiting.

So opportunity costs would also make for an interesting thing to calculate. Given that fusion will likely not make a major difference climate/pollution-wise for half a century, what else could we build in that time, and how much and what effect would that have?