Im just going to keep plugging my reactor effort every time fusion is mentioned here... http://www.DDPROfusion.com
Good luck with the fund-raising!
Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
251–260 of 373 posts
Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is still exciting given how anemic advancement in the fusion space has been for 50+ years At the top of my list for when I'll be king for a day is - massive, national-scale investments (think: reaching towards one percent of GDP) in fusion research. This is a major roadblock, but things look awesome on the other side. We just need to get our stuff together to hop over this fence somehow.
I think it’s generally very hard to force technological progress along by just throwing money at it. Let’s suppose this proposal works out, ITER will become a very expensive boondoggle. A technological dead end. But if you’d taken the ‘Manhattan Project’ approach and thrown 10x as much money at fusion research 20 years ago we’d most likely have spent most of it on a super-ITER. It might be operational by now and migh…
It worked for WW2 and the nuclear bomb. It is hard but also effective.
Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they're using Yttrium (i.e. YBCO), right? It's hard to find that info.
Buried in the wiki page for YBCO is a note that REBCO is a synonym of sorts. The superconducting tapes that are discussed in the talk thus would seem to be YBCO.
Yes. Re stands for "rare earth," and yttrium is probably the most common one used for ReBCO, but lanthanum is also used.
Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
> this is still exciting given how anemic advancement in the fusion space has been for 50+ years. "Nuclear fusion. 30 years away since 1950" Joking aside. I too am glad to see some progress of any kind, and new (seemingly credible) initiatives being funded and pursued
Have you seen this? I'd love to find an updated version, but they've been making exponential progress on it since the 70's. https://i.imgur.com/BN0pz.png
There's a version of this graph about 18 minutes into the Dennis Whyte talk linked in the top comment, though if I understand it it's measuring "power out per pulse" where your graph has "power out per unit power in".
He says progress stalled in 1995 and is not projected to continue until ITER is built, 10 years from now. Then the rest of the talk is actually about an alternative to ITER.
Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Make an efficient fusion reactor the size of a truck, and the solar system becomes your backyard.
Make an efficient fusion reactor of any size, and you can power Fischer-Tropsch plants to synthesize carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuel for the existing fossil-fuel infrastructure.
I really hope that phase is as short as possible and we don't use it as an excuse to prolong the use of burning crap to generate usable energy. Air pollution is gross.
Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just the little bit responsible for Chernobyl and Fukushima is not a part of the design at all. No big deal. :-)
I am really tired of this line - the taunami killed 18,500 people. The reactor incident killed no-one through radiation and 32 people through physical injuries. One failure of Banqiao Dam killed an estimated 240,000 people. That's more than all people who have ever died from anything to do with nuclear, reactors and bombs combined. Air pollution kills about 2,000 people every single day. Reactor incidents are like pl…
Tsunami and earthquakes are not man generated events, so we can dismiss them. Yes, they killed a lot of people, but cancer kills even more: about 10 millions per year. In part, cancer is caused by contamination of food by radionuclides from reactor leaks (Chornobyl) and nuclear bomb testing.
Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#257I never quite understood the math behind power densities in a fusion reactor. In the sun, isn't energy production occurring at something like 100-1000 W/m3? So, if you want to build a multiple MW fusion plant, shouldn't these plants be ridiculously huge compared to, say, a wind turbine rated at a couple of MW? Is the density of the plasma so much higher in a fusion reactor? Also, something else I never grokked, how d…
The density is actually lower than the sun in magnetic confinement fusion (MCF) devices because we can’t squeeze plasma together as hard as the sun’s mass can. Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) can squeeze harder than MCF devices, but has serious unaddressed engineering issues. The trick is in higher temperature plasma. The sun fuses protium (lone protons). We don’t have the confinement necessary on Earth to do this,…
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Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#258Let’s say this works. What do you do with all the neutrinos? How do you deal with all of the radioactive waste from the containment equipment?
Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#259So, I'm a physicist, and I went to a number of talks from people involved with the JET fusion reactor over the years, though fusion is not my area. And my understanding is not that it's difficult to make plasma, or even build a reactor in particular that is the main problem (though instabilities can be problematic), but it's that the internal structure degrades very rapidly and becomes highly radioactive, because you get helium bubbles forming inside the steel which causes fractures and the heavy metals that are often put into steel to increase strength are highly fissionable. So you need to use special types of steel to actually construct the reactor, and these need to have a lifetime that's ~5 years+ and it needs to not have very very radioactive steel at the end of it's usable life. And this is basically an unsolved materials science problem at the moment. So while you might even be able to build a fusion reactor, it's not going to last long enough to make it commercially viable using current technology.
Re: Compact nuclear fusion reactor is 'very likely to work,' studies suggest
#260So, I'm a physicist, and I went to a number of talks from people involved with the JET fusion reactor over the years, though fusion is not my area. And my understanding is not that it's difficult to make plasma, or even build a reactor in particular that is the main problem (though instabilities can be problematic), but it's that the internal structure degrades very rapidly and becomes highly radioactive, because you…
That's a luxury problem at the moment. A fusion reactor that can sustain positive output operation for 5 years is still a dream.