Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

Cracking the Fusion Nut

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CatalinaWOW:

--- Quote from: Amper on February 15, 2020, 09:26:08 am ---Pretty much all pulsed fusion reactors like z-pinch are at best useful for research and understanding but most of them are actually built for weapons research. They all have some sort of "we will revolutionize the world" story to get funds but then later on after doing a few shots are modified for mil applications, laser fused and scalable fusion bombs. Continuous is the only way that actual useful power production may be done.

If you are just after fusion, farnsworth fusor or beam on target is the way to go, you will have a nice neutron source but no energy production.

--- End quote ---

I am not sure of the basis for your assertion.  Discontinuous energy bursts are widely used for power production (although rarely, if ever, at Gigawatt levels).  They are called internal combustion engines.

Fundamentally all that is needed is for the pulses to repeat on a time scale that is short with respect to the period of the next item in the conversion chain.  If you are boiling water for steam I would assume that that means a large fraction of a minute.

NivagSwerdna:

--- Quote from: donotdespisethesnake on February 15, 2020, 11:49:19 pm ---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.  :-//

--- End quote ---
I remember a talk when I was at school in the sixth form about JET... sounded so convincing... must have been circa 1982... as you say... it's 2020 now... obviously a tricky problem.

jmelson:

--- 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 ---
Yes, actually getting the energy out is THE PROBLEM.  Unless the plasma is insanely compressed, it will radiate all the heat away in microseconds.  That's the issue, you have to prevent all the heat leaking away from the plasma.  So, you have this plasma at tens of million K, and the heat flows away from it, and the walls of the machine have some system to remove the heat.  That can be used to run a steam turbine.

And, I think that's the whole debacle of Tokamak-style fusion, drawing the plasma out into a many meters long torus, no matter how thin, leads to huge surface area from which the heat is lost.
That's why inertial confinement has an edge, the plasma is compressed into a tiny volume, therefore reducing the heat loss.

Jon

Amper:
Because internal COMBUSTION engines are not called internal detonation engines. Do you have a feeling for milli micro and nanoseconds and how matter starts becoming liquid at such pressures and times? To a piston the 20ms it takes for every revolution is a loooooong time. Also consider that Its at temperatures that solid matter can handle, not insane ones like in fusion that will blast layer by layer away from a surface in every shot.

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