3 ms·
Here is a thought experiment( no cats harmed or wetted). Show a cat how the toilet flushes, then try to flush the cat. You have two hands, the cat has 4 paws, w
by aurizon 8y ago
Here is a thought experiment( no cats harmed or wetted). Show a cat how the toilet flushes, then try to flush the cat. You have two hands, the cat has 4 paws, with sharp claws as well as teeth.
This will give you an idea....
Stars have gravity and mass- we do not, so we must try and compress the plasma, heat it AND stops the paws from grabbing the exterior.
In truth magnetic confinement is a poor way to constrain a plasma that wants to leave at high speed = quenches the reaction. There have been many avenues tried and they are making incremental advances, year by year. They say we are 5-10 yearsaway? The ITER Tokamak is well advanced.
https://www.iter.org/mach/Tokamak https://www.iter.org/mach/Tokamak
New approaches are being tried that might leap past the Tokamak.
- mdpopescu 8y agoControlled fusion has always been 5 to 10 years away, just as we've always been at war with Eurasia.
- aurizon 8y agoThat is partly true,but we ave advanced to the point where the next generation of machines take 5 years or more to build. They have reached the break even and gone substantially past it, but they have not been ablt to reduce it to the turn-key appliance stage.
- pfdietz 8y agoNo fusion reactor has reached breakeven.
- losteric 8y agoAll deadlines have an implied "with equivalently aggressive funding" addendum
- BurnGpuBurn 8y agoI remember distinctly reading a popular science magazine article when I was young (it had that great plasma picture with all the plasma arcs fizzing over the floor of a giant lab) that stated that we could have fusion power plants in 25 to 50 years. That was 30 years ago.
- mdpopescu 8y agoIt seems I was indeed wrong about the deadline but not about the "forever" part, see [1] and [2]. [1] https://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/11/forever-20-years-away-will-we-ever-have-working-nuclear-fusion-reactor https://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/11/forever-20-yea... [2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/03/23/nuclear-fusion-reactor-research/ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2016/03/23/nuclear-fu...