131–140 of 375 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the standard joke is "thirty years away." Or at least it was. Strangely enough the number keeps decreasing with the passage of time.
Plotting a "Year vs Years away" graph would then give us a good estimation on when we can expect to meet that expectation.
I know there are some very smart people at skunk works who've done incredible things in the past but humans have cried wolf so many times on fusion it's sort of hard to just accept until they've actually built a working reactor, shown it and had it independently verified.
If you haven't hung around talk-polywell.org before, you might want to. It's focused on the polywell but they seem to at least try to fairly evaluate all contenders.
New confinement techniques (NIF, this article, Helion, Polywell) are actually making real progress. So it's becoming less likely that an announcement like this is 100% vapor.
Put another way, we're getting to the point now where we have tools sufficient to actually know what the results will be. That, more than anything, is the benefit from the billions spent on tokamaks.
I know there are some very smart people at skunk works who've done incredible things in the past but humans have cried wolf so many times on fusion it's sort of hard to just accept until they've actually built a working reactor, shown it and had it independently verified.
Now this sounds way more serious than Andrea Rossi's saga. But I did get a lot tougher on my wait and see stand.
Here is more on the tech, including a drawing: http://aviationweek.com/technology/skunk-works-reveals-compa...
Seems premature to call this a breakthrough when they haven't even built a prototype yet.
https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/charles-chase-on-energy-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a reactor when used, for a couple of nanoseconds....
While Wiktionary has "A device which uses atomic energy to produce heat" as one definition, other dictionaries all include the ability to regulate/control/sustain a nuclear reaction. I'm inclined to agree with them.
> 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck A typical thermal power station has an efficiency below 50% for electricity generation, so the plant dissipates at least as much heat as it generates electrical power. I wonder how you could get rid of 100MW of waste heat from a volume small enough to fit on a truck. That's a heat flux of more than a megawatt per squa…
In addition, in the step before where the heat is transferred away from the reactor walls to the turbines, a heat flux is needed of 100MJ/s. Assuming a contact surface of 100m2, that is 1MJ/s per m2. That sounds like a huge flux and I am not sure if there is any medium that could do this. Or are my assumptions way off?
> 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck A typical thermal power station has an efficiency below 50% for electricity generation, so the plant dissipates at least as much heat as it generates electrical power. I wonder how you could get rid of 100MW of waste heat from a volume small enough to fit on a truck. That's a heat flux of more than a megawatt per squa…
That's an excellent point! Perhaps they intend the truck to be sitting at the bottom of a fast moving river. But what gets me is that they are burying the lead. No fusion reactor of any size has reached sustainability...so why is the story here talking about size at all? Small size would be a very nice added bonus; fusion reactors that don't consume more energy than they produce are earth-changing.
"But on the physics side, it still has to work, and one of the reasons we think our physics will work is that we’ve been able to make an inherently stable configuration.” One of the main reasons for this stability is the positioning of the superconductor coils and shape of the magnetic field lines. “In our case, it is always in balance. So if you have less pressure, the plasma will be smaller and will always sit in this magnetic well,” he notes."
As far as I understand this (IANAP), they're saying that smaller size = less pressure, and that helps their design to work (in theory).
> 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck A typical thermal power station has an efficiency below 50% for electricity generation, so the plant dissipates at least as much heat as it generates electrical power. I wonder how you could get rid of 100MW of waste heat from a volume small enough to fit on a truck. That's a heat flux of more than a megawatt per squa…
In addition, in the step before where the heat is transferred away from the reactor walls to the turbines, a heat flux is needed of 100MJ/s. Assuming a contact surface of 100m2, that is 1MJ/s per m2. That sounds like a huge flux and I am not sure if there is any medium that could do this. Or are my assumptions way off?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems premature to call this a breakthrough when they haven't even built a prototype yet.
This is HN. If the hyperloop was a technological breakthrough, so is this press release.