91–100 of 141 posts
It's remarkable and humorous how it's just a gun. Like this is how the Victorians would have approached fusion. More power to them! We need to test a myriad of approaches. This could well turn out to be the best one.
The amount of cynicism around fusion is stupid. It reminds me a lot of the learned helplessness that surrounded the idea of reusable spacecraft. A little engineering later: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf4qRY3h_eo Fusion is a harder problem than that but we have no physical reason to believe it is not possible and the surrounding technology like compact higher temperature superconductors has advanced significantly…
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>So either this key detail was kept secret for 50 years, or somehow history has been changed to confuse would-be bomb makers. I wonder how this detail came to light. Making a nuclear bomb has nothing to do with the knowledge of its' construction. Detailed plans are freely available to anyone who is interested. The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material req…
> The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output Is this still true in the 2020s?
Another possibity is building a breeder reactor first to breed Plutonium.
Also, where to get Uranium ores in the first place? You can be sure that governments keep close tabs on who takes funny stones out of certain mines.
You too can achieve nuclear fusion! https://makezine.com/projects/nuclear-fusor/ And just like everyone else, you'll suck up a lot more energy than you'll produce
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> The reason you can't make a nuke is that the enrichment process of a suitable amount of fissile material requires nation-state level of industrial output Is this still true in the 2020s?
>Is this still true in the 2020s? The laws of physics haven't changed in 80 years. Even if you started with yellow cake uranium (~70% enriched, and itself already nearly impossible for a non-state actor to acquire), to reach weapons grade at >95% you'd need hundreds of tons of it, and massive industrial scale chemical facilities to convert that into uranium hexafluoride and pull out the U235 isotopes [0], where the r…
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>Is this still true in the 2020s? The laws of physics haven't changed in 80 years. Even if you started with yellow cake uranium (~70% enriched, and itself already nearly impossible for a non-state actor to acquire), to reach weapons grade at >95% you'd need hundreds of tons of it, and massive industrial scale chemical facilities to convert that into uranium hexafluoride and pull out the U235 isotopes [0], where the r…
> So far, only 5 countries in the world have been able to do it. I think you’re a tad optimistic there - sadly we have many more than 5 nuclear powers today.
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It's so cool, though. The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand!
Solar panels harness the power of the sun too. Fun fact: The sun's energy density is only a few watts per ton. A thousand-pound chunk of the sun could barely run a flashlight. Practical fusion requires H/He conversion rates exponentially faster than stars. Yes, i meant to say power density rather than energy. My bad.
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Cynicism is well justified, given history and the present landscape. Suppose they get this working, and able to produce, what, 300 MW worth of hot neutrons. They have to capture the neutrons and turn them into heat to boil water to drive a turbine to get out 150 MW. Thus, handle the, what, 1000 tons? 10,000 tons? of lithium needed to capture all those neutrons. And, I guess, sieve it for tritium? Maybe chemically sep…
"But fission is already not competitive with solar/wind + storage." Any source about that ? It just sounds like an arbitrary anti-nuclear opinion without any evidence backing it. But I'm still cursious if you have anything serious to prove this claim.
Innumerable commercial entities are building out solar and wind farms as fast as they can scare up capital. Literally not a single purely commercially-backed nuke plant has ever been built in 70+ years. Not one. Capital did build and operate coal plants, at a profit. But nobody is building new coal plants, anymore. Even operating an existing coal plant is not competitive any more; coal plants are being shut down with no plan ever to re-open, exactly as fast as solar and wind come on line.
Nukes are made out of steel, concrete, plumbing, and pumps. None of those are getting cheaper. They produce power by blasting steam through enormous turbines, that need regular expensive maintenance, not getting cheaper. Mining and refining uranium is expensive and not getting cheaper. Solar and wind generation cost have been declining at an exponential rate for two decades, and are still falling. Can you even conceive of an exponentially declining cost not crossing any given constant cost?
Suppose you figured out a way to get power from nukes at half the cost, and that was less than renewables just now. How long would it be before they undercut that, again? Would you be able to finish building one, in that amount of time?
There is no future for fission, and even less for fusion.
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It's so cool, though. The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand!
Solar panels harness the power of the sun too. Fun fact: The sun's energy density is only a few watts per ton. A thousand-pound chunk of the sun could barely run a flashlight. Practical fusion requires H/He conversion rates exponentially faster than stars. Yes, i meant to say power density rather than energy. My bad.
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Short story, they are shooting small plastic cubes with gas inside. The cubes are called "targets". The "bullet" is fast enough to compress the gas inside the cube, creating fusion. It works. But in the scenario it does work, a machine is manually opened, loaded, prepared, and then they do the shot. Whole process takes days to prepare. For it to be viable they need to do this every five seconds. That is a hard proble…
Ok. So dumb question. What complicates this beyond a conceptual belt fed heavy machine gun?