Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff
Cracking the Fusion Nut
donotdespisethesnake:
I have a hunch that fusion will never be a practical commercial proposition. The reality may never match the dream. We may be able to achieve something a little better than existing sources but at a greater capital cost. Investors don't like putting all their eggs into one basket, getting funding is already an issue for nuclear fission.
I am quite certain that the path being followed by ITER will not lead to a practical commercial reactor. The field is open for a different approach, I have trouble seeing what that will be. Wrangling a hot plasma seems like something that is never going to be easy.
I am also pretty sure that I won't live long enough to see the result.
ejeffrey:
Getting the energy out isn't really that hard. It's obviously not entirely trivial but if you can get the fusion part working with enough heat output building a power plant around it is not going to be the obstacle.
Nerull:
There's an entire group of hobbyists who build fusion reactors in their garages. Fusion is easy, useful fusion is really, really hard.
donotdespisethesnake:
--- Quote from: ejeffrey on February 15, 2020, 09:23:53 pm ---Getting the energy out isn't really that hard. It's obviously not entirely trivial but if you can get the fusion part working with enough heat output building a power plant around it is not going to be the obstacle.
--- End quote ---
Most of the energy output of the D-T reaction is in the form of fast neutrons? I think capturing those and turning them to heat on a GW scale is fairly hard.
A lot of the steps look doable on paper or in a lab, but putting it all together in a working power plant is something we just don't know until we've tried.
By comparison, nuclear fission is so easy it only took a few years to develop a power plant. And despite being easy, fission plants are expensive and complex. A fusion plant is only going to be more expensive and complex.
The ITER reactor will not generate electricity, they will dump the heat to cooling towers. The one after that, DEMO will have generation capability. Then the one after that, PROTO, will be a template power generation plant. So sometime near 2070, maybe...
I went to visit JET at Culham in the 1980s, and they of course repeated the adage "fusion is always 30 years away". That was 40 years ago. Now it's 50 years away. It seems the longer they spend on it, the further away it becomes. :-//
RoGeorge:
@21:55 Wow, just one shot and the vacuum chamber looks kind of ruined ::)
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