Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
extremetech.com
Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
1–10 of 31 posts
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#2I hadn't heard of magnetized liner inertial fusion before. Is it really as promising as the article makes it seem?
What happens if they get just a little above break even?
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#3I hadn't heard of magnetized liner inertial fusion before. Is it really as promising as the article makes it seem? What happens if they get just a little above break even?
My guess is that if you achieve sustainable output beyond breakeven then it's a more reasonable engineering challenge to scale that up. The key here being sustainable, none of these technologies are too close to that yet it seems.
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#4Wow, fusion power in less than 15 years! Gee whiz!
Actually, the 15 years out time frame puts it beyond what I've expected, 10 years out. That's where fusion has been for most of my life, 10 years from now.
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#5Wow, fusion power in less than 15 years! Gee whiz! Actually, the 15 years out time frame puts it beyond what I've expected, 10 years out. That's where fusion has been for most of my life, 10 years from now.
20 years ago I remember everyone saying fusion was 40-50 years out and always had been. Honestly, I think the estimates where fairly reasonable when you consider the 30+ year gap between Jet which was designed in 1972 and came online in 1983 and ITER which is still being built. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus
PS: I have heard that the real issue was scaling up Jet was assumed to be work but doing so was to far from commercially viable to be useful.
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#6What about the combined fusion/fission options? I mean that's what the h-bomb and the sun do right?
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#7Wow, fusion power in less than 15 years! Gee whiz! Actually, the 15 years out time frame puts it beyond what I've expected, 10 years out. That's where fusion has been for most of my life, 10 years from now.
It should come out the same week as the anti-baldness pill...
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#8"Clean"?
Less dirty than fission, absolutely. Enough less dirty to make it manageable in a way that fission doesn't seem to be, more than likely. But not clean.
Any material in and around the reactor becomes nuclear waste in the same manner as it does for fission: by getting blasted with high-energy particles until it becomes radioactive. And while there wouldn't be any spent fuel rods to deal with, one of the products of hydrogen fusion, tritium, is also a source of concern.
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#9What about the combined fusion/fission options? I mean that's what the h-bomb and the sun do right?
Nope, both are fusion reactions. You fuse two particles together below 56 on the periodic table and achieve energy. After 56 and up, you have to use fission, where you split atoms apart, to achieve energy.
Re: Fusion power could arrive sooner than expected
#10"Clean"? Less dirty than fission, absolutely. Enough less dirty to make it manageable in a way that fission doesn't seem to be, more than likely. But not clean. Any material in and around the reactor becomes nuclear waste in the same manner as it does for fission: by getting blasted with high-energy particles until it becomes radioactive. And while there wouldn't be any spent fuel rods to deal with, one of the produc…
Tritium is part of the fuel for this type of fusion reactor. Since tritium basically doesn't exist in nature (due to its twelve-year half-life), the reactor will produce it by absorbing as many neutrons as possible in a blanket of lithium.