181–190 of 375 posts
I'm happy if that is true, but guys: the first thing you think of is putting a potentially massive explosive on the back of a truck? Driven by humans? What could go wrong...
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I think you could make the argument that fusion is more or less feasible if someone would just get around to building it too...
I don't believe this is the case. I'm pretty sure there have been "hard" limits so far on what can be achieved. I'm not a physicist, not even close but as I understand it two issues remain. One is that sustaining the fusion reaction has been problematic. I believe the longest sustained reactions have been less than one second. Two is that currently we have to put more energy into creating and sustaining the reaction…
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The Bugatti Veyron 16.4 has 1200 hp and therefore probably produces around 2.5 MW waste heat at full power. A factor of 40 is still quite a difference but it does not sound like an unsolvable problem.
That's peak power, though. Basically no street car is designed to be able to produce peak power for more than a minute or two at a time, and probably very few can do it for more than a few seconds. I'm pretty sure that car doesn't have the cooling capacity to cool itself at full power like this plant would have to.
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
Time sell any oil company stocks, mutual fund holding?
> could be ready for use in a decade. That's the standard issue joke. "Nuclear fusion has been just ten years away for the last fifty years" It is so common as a joke I'm surprised the article didn't mention it.
No, the standard joke is "thirty years away." Or at least it was. Strangely enough the number keeps decreasing with the passage of time.
They're more of a rounded (hence the clustering at or away from given numbers) measure of the remaining 'effort' versus 'difficulty'. Very likely there is some absolute time required (experiments take time to run), but throwing more people (and more importantly, more resources to run experiments and gather data) at the problem /would/ get to an end result faster (though how much faster is open to debate; it's sort of like asking how much effort does it take to win a top 30th percentile prize from a lottery).
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device? Similar to radiation, worst? Time sell any oil company stocks, mutual fund holding?
Actually even if you believed there's a chance this Lockheed concept can work, the time to buy airline stocks would be on the back end of this dead bull market that's about to fall off a cliff. And then there's the 20 year wait before it's finally deployed to a commercial airplane.
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
How much dangerous are the neutrons from such device? Similar to radiation, worst? Time sell any oil company stocks, mutual fund holding?
Neutrons are interesting in that they dump all their energy into a very small region. Instead of losing energy continually and gradually, they travel a ways and then dump all their energy into one spot. This makes them potentially very useful for things like cancer treatment (you can select neutrons to ensure they deliver most of their energy into the cancer, rather than evenly along their travel path). I suspect this effect means that, for reactors, the wear and tear is more localized, but of a larger amplitude.
I'm not seeing any top physicists working in this program (McGuire is not one). I would be willing to bet 1000 EUR that their math and modeling does not add up, or they have skipped some details. Problem with fusion research like this is that the closer you get self sustainment or energy generation, the harder it gets and problems pile up. This project looks like many other similar projects that have gone bust. They…
Betting on a math error from Skunkworks? Highly unlikely. If anything, scalability will be the issue, as it always is
The challenges of fusion power are largely fundamental nitty gritty engineering issues. We know fairly well how to design most of a fusion reactor; in a lot of ways they are conceptually easier than fission reactors.
The two main hurdles are the materials problems and how to keep the reaction critical with radiative heat loss. These are big problems that so many times have been ignored by people claiming to have solved fusion power. You just can't get away from them, but solving them would be truly revolutionary.
I'm not saying they don't have something novel here as they really are some fine researchers at Skunkworks. Just temper your expectations.
> 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.