4 ms·
I looked at building one a couple of years ago before deciding I couldn't afford the equipment to make sure it was safe, but I always had this in the back of my
by kale 10y ago
I looked at building one a couple of years ago before deciding I couldn't afford the equipment to make sure it was safe, but I always had this in the back of my mind: Don't all nuclear reactors use heat as the main output? To drive steam generators (like a conventional plant) or solid-state devices like a peltier-based battery used in satellites?
If you put a bounding box around a Farnsworth Fusor, and put in 100W of energy, would you not get a little more than 100W output from the fusion reaction?
Obviously still not viable as self-sustaining, since 100W of electric energy in would be lower entropy than the 100W+ coming out, but it would be a method of producing some energy as long as it's fed from another source.
Obviously, using a heat pump would be a much better way of turning 100W of electricity in to >100W heat, but still, a Fusor isn't net energy negative (although it is terrible with conversion of entropy).
- Retric 10y agoYou are ignoring the energy in the fuel. Which is arguably a reasonable thing to do as we don't have great fusion reactors yet and H Bombs are not exactly sold at Home Depot. But, it's still the kind of fuzzy thinking that leads you to assuming bad ideas will work. As to 100W vs. > 100W. 100.001W might as well just be 100W in just about any meaningful way. However, Jet is vastly cheaper per watt of liberated fusion energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus
- stephen_g 10y agoIt depends what the main power output is. Neutrons from D-D or D-T (deuterium-tritium) are really hard to convert into electricity, but some types of fusion like p-B11 (hydrogen/boron) generates alpha particles that can be directly converted to electricity.