81–90 of 93 posts
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if we do not maintain expertise in nuclear weapons then we will end up like Ukraine.
We already know everything that’s to know about nuclear weapons if used for defense and deterrence. A pure fusion bomb would be relatively clean so it would be much more tempting to use as a regular weapon. What if Putin had such bombs right now?
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SLS only started in 2011. If SpaceX learned anything from it, it was not much and it was after they'd proven themselves. Starship has been quite from-scratch outside of the engines.
I mean, SLS was definitely a waste of money, and arguably so was STS. But that's easier to say in hindsight, and it's also easy to say in hindsight that SpaceX had an obviously better approach, but that was harder to support in 2011.
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Calling fusion research underfunded is rich(no pun intended). Costs for ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD it's one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in the world to date. That's not even accounting for all the other fusion projects. There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding. I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially…
fusion research is underfounded while ITER is overfounded. I worked with it and it is clear that 1) it is too big of a step from the previous nuclear fusion reactor. 2) french regulatory agency is being way too strict 3) the procurement mechanism with in kind contribution has been a total failure.
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So how's the Lockheed Martin skunkworks project going? That was the last poster child for "REBCO tape will quickly solve all the problems". Oh right - incepted in 2010, cancelled in 2021. 11 years - over a decade - and no reactor in sight.
They never mentioned REBCO or HTS. It was obvious bullshit from the beginning. It was more likely a cover for a black project, like the SR-72.
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Calling fusion research underfunded is rich(no pun intended). Costs for ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD it's one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in the world to date. That's not even accounting for all the other fusion projects. There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding. I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially…
ITER is like electric cars. There’s no point in spending millions to design a new EV until the battery technology exists. That’s the key limiter, not the “rest of the car”. For fusion, this key technology limiter is the superconducting magnetic tape. Even small improvements in field strength have a dramatic non-linear improvement in fusion power gain. ITER started their design work decades ago and will continue const…
The most plausible IMO DT fusion scheme is Zap's, since it allows thick liquid lithium to cover much of the exposed inner surfaces. Zap's scheme doesn't even use magnets, never mind high temperature superconducting ones.
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Calling fusion research underfunded is rich(no pun intended). Costs for ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD it's one of the most ambitious and costly science projects in the world to date. That's not even accounting for all the other fusion projects. There are many areas in science that receive significantly less funding. I would also argue that the prevelant perception that fusion would lead to to essentially…
Let's read again what you just wrote and think: "ITER are estimated to 45 to 65 billion USD" That's not the most costly costly project, not even close (prices in current dollars and total costs) Apollo project: $257 billion ISS: $150 billion. STS: $196 billion. Fusion energy has been constantly underfunded.
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fusion research is underfounded while ITER is overfounded. I worked with it and it is clear that 1) it is too big of a step from the previous nuclear fusion reactor. 2) french regulatory agency is being way too strict 3) the procurement mechanism with in kind contribution has been a total failure.
4) even if it "succeeded" it would be a dead end.
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4) even if it "succeeded" it would be a dead end.
not true. if it works it will demonstrate a huge number of technologies that any type of fusion reactor will face. it is just not efficient in pursuing these
There is the larger issue of whether anything like ITER, with solid surfaces exposed to DT neutron flux, could ever be successful. ITER itself is very far out of the running as a prototype for a competitive source of heat, with volumetric power density of the reactor 400x lower than existing PWRs. A substantial part of that problem is limits on power/area through the exposed surfaces.
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So how's the Lockheed Martin skunkworks project going? That was the last poster child for "REBCO tape will quickly solve all the problems". Oh right - incepted in 2010, cancelled in 2021. 11 years - over a decade - and no reactor in sight.
They never mentioned REBCO or HTS. It was obvious bullshit from the beginning. It was more likely a cover for a black project, like the SR-72.
So ITER is the correct bet: take boring technologies and build a functional fusion device with them that gets Q > 1. Because there's a fairly obvious corollary, which is that if you can somehow build better magnets, then the next reactor - DEMO, and actual power plants - can obviously be redesigned to take advantage of those magnets - they will not fundamentally change the internal dynamics of a tokamak, since it's the magnetic field shapes which matter, not the physical generators.
Everyone working with REBCO has always talked about "rapid breakthroughs" in about 5 years, and then 5 years later the story is always the same: it's considerably harder to build with these things then you'd think, they're still working through the engineering etc. It's not that it can't work, but it's not magically faster in the way people keep claiming and nor does it get you any closer to the actual goal, which is to get a Q > 1 fusion device functioning - which will, at all times, fundamentally require a very large vacuum chamber to do so unless magnetic field intensities are being vastly increased (and they're not: low-temperature superconductors can achieve far higher field intensities then high-temperature ones which is why the LHC and other particle accelerators use them[1] - some YBCO tapes might be able to do it, but manufacturing suitable quantities, of suitable quality, in long enough reels, and then winding magnets with them is an unsolved problem).
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Engineering-critical-cur...
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not true. if it works it will demonstrate a huge number of technologies that any type of fusion reactor will face. it is just not efficient in pursuing these
Anything exposed to neutrons is not going to be "demonstrated" in the sense of shown to work in an environment of a working production DT reactor. The integrated neutron flux over the lifetime of ITER, assuming it works at all, is just a few percent what would be needed. This will not be sufficient to show the devices or materials are adequate or to conduct necessary reliability growth. There is the larger issue of w…