171–180 of 182 posts
Would zero gravity be helpful in order to make it easier to get fusion working?
The particles in a fusion reactor are moving at 10 km/s. They don't particularly care about gravity. For components of the reactor, gravity tends to be helpful. It's much harder to cool superconductors or generate steam if your liquids aren't flowing along the bottom. Turbines don't work nearly as well if their inlets are sputtering like a coffeemaker.
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Even without new physics, processes can be improved with new tech. As far as I know current computers are based in the same foundations as in the past century, but they're many orders of magnitude more powerful. Then, after some threshold, quantitative changes become qualitative ones.
Physical processes cannot be made arbitrarily more efficient. There are thermodynamic limits to computation, the same as any other form of work.
Instead of trying to prevent the non-linear behaviour of plasma it should be utilized.
Look at (grossly underfinanced) attempts like focus fusion, where there is no attempt to confine the plasma, instead self-interacting nature of the plasma is used to focus high temperature regions to a small region where higher temperature fusion processes can occur.
Long time plasma confinement is a dead end.
This is why I have little confidence that Tokamaks and similar will have much success. Instead of trying to prevent the non-linear behaviour of plasma it should be utilized. Look at (grossly underfinanced) attempts like focus fusion, where there is no attempt to confine the plasma, instead self-interacting nature of the plasma is used to focus high temperature regions to a small region where higher temperature fusion…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_confi...
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Solid in a vacuum at what temperature?
Whatever's practical for your giant pea-shooter and reaction chamber. But lithium is a soft metal at room temperature, so this part doesn't seem too constraining.
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Whatever's practical for your giant pea-shooter and reaction chamber. But lithium is a soft metal at room temperature, so this part doesn't seem too constraining.
If you want to sustain a fusion reaction for generating power through heat, you're not going to do it at room temperature, and there're not many materials that will remain solid at fusion temperatures.
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Controlled fusion has always been 5 to 10 years away, just as we've always been at war with Eurasia.
That is partly true,but we ave advanced to the point where the next generation of machines take 5 years or more to build. They have reached the break even and gone substantially past it, but they have not been ablt to reduce it to the turn-key appliance stage.
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If you want to sustain a fusion reaction for generating power through heat, you're not going to do it at room temperature, and there're not many materials that will remain solid at fusion temperatures.
I said "shoot pellets at each other at a sizable fraction of c". The point is to hold together before the splat, so that by high density enough nuclei actually hit each other. This is a bang-bang kind of thing, not a continuous reaction.
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I said "shoot pellets at each other at a sizable fraction of c". The point is to hold together before the splat, so that by high density enough nuclei actually hit each other. This is a bang-bang kind of thing, not a continuous reaction.
We don't have any trouble creating fusion explosions. The whole trouble of fusion is sustaining a reaction. Fusion bombs already exist, and what you're describing isn't that different from an Ulam-Teller device.
To dismiss my half-assed idea by pointing to another, I'd bring up something more comparable, like inertial-confinement fusion.
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Provided you could keep the plasma contained in magnetic fields, it would certainly generate plenty of free neutrons to provide heat for substantial power generation.
It would produce negligible quantities of neutrons.