3 ms·

How are they planning to extract energy from these reactors, and how will they refuel them?

• loblollyboy 10y ago
  Same as all current power plants - heat energy to a working fluid to spin turbine but I don't know details. Seems like you would need a much bigger device than today's to fit that in - need to be a lot bigger anyway as their effectiveness scales with size.
  • Sir_Substance 10y ago
    If you're burning fuels that result in charged particles, you can use direct energy conversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion
  • vilhelm_s 10y ago
    The Wendelstein 7-X is already water-cooled --- it has too be, or it would melt. (It has a 10 MW heating system to create a hot plasma like what would be in a fusion reactor, and then the cooling system has to remove 10MW of heat). So I think you could hook that up to a turbine already. However, it is too small to break even. A smaller device will loose plasma faster (bigger surface area/volume), so too make it produce enough energy it needs to be big. See this picture of the planned ITER, note the human figure for scale: https://www.iter.org//doc/www/content/com/Lists/Stories/Attachments/2567/tok_smaller.jpg https://www.iter.org//doc/www/content/com/Lists/Stories/Atta...