241–250 of 285 posts
If new fusion startups like this one are interesting to folks on this thread, here's a list of companies working on fusion energy that I've compiled: https://www.fusionenergybase.com/organizations/
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I really hope that fusion power can become a major power source in the future and humanity really needs it to expand off planet, but like you said above, nuclear fission power got to stage 7 and then stalled. I think the nuclear fusion community should drop the word nuclear completely from their vocabulary or they are likely to end up with the same fate, if they ever get to stage 7.
How about "Smart Plant"©™?
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According to the article, the energy is generated by alpha particles, which are in principle a very dangerous form of radiation. It's not clear to me, though, whether the radiation stops as soon as the fusion does or not.
Substances which continuously emit alpha particles are dangerous. This is something different. With every laser shot there will be a burst of alpha particles. Then they'll slow down and just be plain old helium. If the direct energy conversion works, they'll get slowed down very quickly.
Only if you eat or inhale them. A sheet of paper will stop alpha particles.
Can somebody with more understanding tell me if this idea I had is stupid or has some merit? Fusion will deliver an incredible amount of energy, making it cheap. Everybody then turns up their energy consumption since it costs nothing. Raise heating in houses, use AC everywhere, longer showers, more transportation, etc. All this energy eventually becomes heat. Can it get to a threshold where it can influence temperatu…
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Why not?
I don't know why, but AFAIK there are no countries investing heavily in fission to make that happen.
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Sorry to get away from some really nice physics and suggestion of some really good news for some of relevant reality: The cooling towers? The photographs in the news commonly show huge clouds of water vapor escaping from the tops of the towers with a picture caption about "nuclear" power or some such. So, the suggestion is that nuke plants generate huge clouds of dangerous radioactive byproducts. Such news content is…
Nuclear plant operators show the steaming cooling towers on their own web sites: https://www.exeloncorp.com/locations/power-plants/limerick-g... The same imagery shows up on the covers of nuclear textbooks: https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-Engineering-Handbook-Mechanic... If anything, laypeople think that radiation is scary because it's invisible, tasteless, and odorless.
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I expect that you lose efficiencies with respect to security. I.e., it's not easy to secure one large nuclear reactor (fission or fusion), but it's a lot easier than securing dozens of small reactors.
There might also be less security needed if you have dozens of smaller reactors. You have to secure the one because losing it affects so much. If losing a couple is not as big a problem, you an rely more on the redundancy of the system than on the redundancy of the component. This depends on the threat model to some degree, but there's security in knowing that it's vastly harder for a threat to affect multiple target…
That might be different for this fusion device, but for outdated looking fission reactors it’s artificial dilution for NPT purposes and by no way a technological limitation.
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Good answer! > Same can be said for fission, but it only powers 5% of the world due to what can be called complications But weren't these complications obvious before deciding to scale up fission power plants? The ones I know about: - Radioactive waste - Risk of failure - Unavoidable EOL
Certainly the generation of radioactive material in fission plants was considered potentially fatal all the way back to Fermi, who said way back when: > It is not clear that the public will accept an energy source that produces this much radioactivity and that can be subject to diversion of material for bombs. However, the nuclear fission industry has arguably shown that it can technically manage radioactive wastes w…
https://www.nwmo.ca/en/A-Safe-Approach/Facilities/Deep-Geolo...
Always happy to see people doing new and interesting stuff with fusion. I got into nuclear technology because of ITER back in the early 2000s. Worked on it continuously (mostly in advanced fission) ever since. > "The timeline question is a tricky one," he says. "I don't want to be a laughing stock by promising we can deliver something in 10 years, and then not getting there. First step is setting up camp as a company…
Off-topic question: is there some software part in nuclear energy systems that is restricting plants or research? I'd like to contribute to the industry as a non-physicist, but it's hard for me to imagine what kind of software might be missing or is being sold by too expensive specialist companies. I imagine most software is tied to the specific devices they run on, but perhaps there's coupling or analytical software…
In my device, sometimes, some ions will be traveling in a vacuum with a high mean free path, and at other times, the plasma will be as dense as lead. It's VERY difficult to simulate, to the point that it's almost better to just estimate and start building to see if I can start to get close to a solution through careful experimentation.
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I expect that you lose efficiencies with respect to security. I.e., it's not easy to secure one large nuclear reactor (fission or fusion), but it's a lot easier than securing dozens of small reactors.
Nuclear fission reactors need more security than other power plants because of the implications of stolen fuel/waste, or fallout from sabotage. A fusion reactor like the one this group is working on probably doesn't have as high as security concerns. In fact the only concern might be that it is critical infrastructure(like our entire power grid), and a distribution of smaller reactors would be better for reliability…