top | item 45704195

(no title)

sodaclean | 4 months ago

Unfortunately, no- while atoms fusing has a fixed mass to energy conversion... getting them close enough that they'll fuse takes a lot of energy. The three hurdles to effective fusion are: 1) getting more energy from fusion than was spent making it happen 2) extracting the extra energy 3) (this never gets covered) avoid neutron flux turning the whole thing into radioactive scrap before it can pay for itself and storage.

National ignition facility (NIF) recently got exited about more energy out than they put in. They don't have a plan for #2 or #3- but as a research facility focusing on #1 thats OK.

Numerous tokamak designs try to handle #1 and #2, but handle #3 by putting rails into the reactor for robots to replace and repair things.

I'm very pessimistic about #3- nothing is immune to neutron damage from fusion, it's just engineering it to fail in a way thats useful. And, once the public accepts the problem, produces less nuclear waste than fission.

discuss

order

No comments yet.