421–430 of 1001 posts
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I'd imagine commodity tritium breeders would be a part of the infrastructure build out and that it will be a highly competitive space as fusion-to-the-home nears reality.
What is fusion-to-the-home?
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yes. fusion funding has been sliding downwards for decades which is a large reason why it takes so long to do anything. It's largely the same reason why NASA takes so long to do anything. 1. Shortage of funding 2. failure can result in loss/exhaustion of funding 3. extremely low risk tolerance 4. physical experiments needing new HW only happen when the likelihood of success is extremely high 5. projects are over engi…
I can't agree that funding is "largely the reason" why NASA takes so long to do anything. I doubt funding is a top 3 reason. NASA just isn't about high-risk / high-reward "moonshots" anymore. The overarching political environment doesn't allow it, never mind the office politics. NASA will get back to the moon using easily an order of magnitude more funding than it should have taken, with a launch system that costs an…
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Let's take a step back and remember something: If Russia and the USA had a "war" it would consist of reducing each other to the Stone Age in a couple of hours, then struggling not to starve to death
The idea that any armed conflict between the two is guaranteed to escalate to nuclear weapons is widespread, but certainly not proven. A US invasion of Russia seems likely to result in nuclear war, but an engagement between conventional forces over a third-party nation like Ukraine seems quite unlikely to. Neither side is suicidal at the leadership level. US and Russian aviators directly engaged in Vietnam without nu…
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I mean almost all of the power in a nuclear bomb comes from fusion. The fission part of it is just like the detonator for the real explosion.
Almost all nuclear weapons rely heavily on fission of the tamper for yield. Suggest "Ripple: An Investigation of the World’s Most Advanced High-Yield Thermonuclear Weapon Design" from the Journal of Cold War studies to read about a predominantly fusion device family.
That could be carbon-copied to a fusion power plant, and indeed, there are many proposals of hybrid fusion-fission plants in the literature that only require Q values marginally greater than 1. But if you go that route, you have radiation just like a fission plant, and one starts to question why you don't just build a fission plant (indeed, why don't we?).
My personal pet theory of the future is that, one day, we'll progress so far in fusion research that we get economic energy. But at the same time, the line blurs between both fission and weapons technology, so people are unhappy with the result. This doesn't feel particularly contrarian but no one ever seems to bring it up.
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It’s potentially just a much better version of fission. Fusion won’t cause a runaway reaction — in fact it’s brutally difficult to get it to react at all, hence why this is an achievement. It also doesn’t use materials that can be used for a bomb, again unlike fission. As a result it has the potential to be cheaper to implement, cheaper to fuel, with no meltdown risk.
Depending on the scale and reactor design, we have really good examples of run away fusion reactions. Run away reactions are easy, controlled ones are hard. And whilst I won’t doubt that if fusion ever becomes commercially viable the reactors would be walk away safe it doesn’t mean that you don’t need to account for that in your design.
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The question on my mind is: where do I sign up to join this effort?! Edit: I'm Canadian, the question is rhetorical.
Assuming you have experience in software, then https://www.llnl.gov/join-our-team/careers/find-your-job/0d6...
Since I absolutely decided to take this in the worst possible way (get the downvotes ready) What is the timeframe for those lasers to light a bulb somewhere, vs the timeframe of those lasers killing someone on a battlefield ? (As in, how much of is applicable for the military?)
The lasers in question are mediocre for battlefield use. The consequences for the military are trivial, unless you're talking about 70 years from now when the US military is using fusion to power some of its military bases, subs or carriers.
So many questions. Pardon my ignorance.
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If you look at the mass before of their fuel, 1 deuterium atom + 1 tritium atom: 2.01410177811 u + 3.01604928 u = 5.03015105811 u vs the mass of the fusion products of 1 helium atom and 1 neutron: 4.002602 u + 1.008 u = 5.010602 u You'll notice that even though we started with 5 neutrons and 2 protons and ended up with the same number there was some additional binding energy that is unaccounted for in the new configu…
Do we know how much tritium is needed for a city's energy generation? What about a state etc? Reason I ask is the only uses I have seen for tritium is on old watch dials made in the pre-90's. Curious how much of this resource is out there.
2.01410177811 u = 3.34449439340696e-24 g deuterium
3.01604928 u = 5.008267217094e-24 g tritium
17.6 MeV = 7.832863e-19 kWh energy
Divide through, and you will see that you need 4.27 ug/kWh of deuterium, and 6.39 ug/kWh of tritium.
A random source [1] says that New York will use 50.6 TWh per year by 2027. That would require ~216 kg/yr of deuterium and ~323/yr kg of tritium.
This is all assuming 100% efficiency. A quick read suggests 50% efficiency might be practical, so double those quantities.
Also, i could easily have messed up that calculation somewhere, so please do check it!
[1] https://www.buildingcongress.com/advocacy-and-reports/report...
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I wonder if it might be possible to gain not percentages but orders of magnitude more or less just by making the targets bigger. Is it conceivable that the same basic approach and a comparable amount of input energy could be used to ignite a 100 MJ or even 1 GJ target ? Of course that would present some containment challenges but perhaps not insurmountable ones. I'm also a bit concerned that this type of research may…
I don't think a pure fusion bomb will have any form of advantage compared to the current hydro-bombs. They wouldn't produce more energy, but will need more gear to reach ignition.
This is probably a bad thing; politicians might decide the bombs are clean enough to use.