ARC is not designed to be cheaper or faster to build than ITER. Its purpose is closer to that of DEMO (engineering breakeven). ITER data will be critical for verifying the ARC design.
I thought that one of the very fundamental ideas behind ARC was about trying to get the scale down so that it can be built more cheaply and quickly (not requiring global collaboration).
In the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 he talks about ITER being too slow. Certainly the smaller SPARC reactor looks like they want to get things up and running far before ITER is performing fusion experiments, and the possible timescale for ARC is before
While their timescale might be optimistic or wrong, it doesn't sound like they're planning to wait for ITER.
I'm not in the field though so things might not match up with this output or I'm missing something obvious.
IanCal|8 years ago
In the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 he talks about ITER being too slow. Certainly the smaller SPARC reactor looks like they want to get things up and running far before ITER is performing fusion experiments, and the possible timescale for ARC is before
While their timescale might be optimistic or wrong, it doesn't sound like they're planning to wait for ITER.
I'm not in the field though so things might not match up with this output or I'm missing something obvious.