4 ms·
Deuterium is readily available- you can get it from sea water if you've got the right equipment and enough patience. Tritium is more rare, but you can actually
by brian-armstrong 11y ago
Deuterium is readily available- you can get it from sea water if you've got the right equipment and enough patience. Tritium is more rare, but you can actually use those released neutrons from the reactor to make some, if I understand correctly. Either way, you only nees just a tiny amount of fuel- fusion reactors leverage e=mc^2 pretty well
Unlike fission reactions, there are no leftover radioactive byproducts. There's nothing to bury and there are no carbon emissions (like e.g. coal). The reactor itself does become radioactive but this should be a much easier problem to deal with.
Fusion is the transformation that powers the sun. Harnessing nuclear fusion is one of the ultimate acts of power over nature that man can do.
- funkyy 11y agoGreat, explanation like that should be associated to majority of their articles. Sounds like a great thing so good luck to them! Thanks for explanation!
- brian-armstrong 11y agoThis is likely because they have a science bias, not a product bias. This particular team and design will never produce more energy than it will consume. It's specifically made to validate some ideas about reactor design. Fusion reactors become more energy efficient as you scale them up, but also more expensive. As a result, all such designs have to be vetted through a series of cheaper but "nonfunctional" designs. It would be hard for them to extoll all the virtues of this without knowing if this design can work. One possible outcome from this test is that the reactor design, the stellerator, is not presently feasible for power plant design. That would be disappointing but at least they would have paid relatively less to figure that out.