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The title is terrible, but what is interesting to me is whether this could allow the direct draw of power from a nuclear reactor, instead of just through heat.
by eximius 6y ago
The title is terrible, but what is interesting to me is whether this could allow the direct draw of power from a nuclear reactor, instead of just through heat.
- bookofjoe 6y agoMy shortened to fit the 80-character-limit title or the Phys.Org one? or both? >Researchers find unexpected electrical current that could stabilize fusion reactions
- soperj 6y agoHow much more power would you get from a direct draw vs just through heat?
- iaw 6y agoThermal efficiency in the Rankine cycle (which powerplants apparently leverage) is around 30%. So it sounds like there's a lot of potential improvement. Of course, given we're talking fusion and not fission any power plants are purely hypothetical at the moment as all publicly known fusion facilities are for research.
- falseprofit 6y ago>publicly known Do you feel that this is an important qualifier?
- mwilliaams 6y agoI’m sure there are plenty of secret evil lairs powered by fusion reactors.
- Ericson2314 6y agoI doubt it because anyone with secret fusion could immediately dominate the energy sector and become much more powerful than they already are?
- bawolff 6y agoGiven we are talking about nuclear technology, an area more secretive than most, i don't think its an utterly unreasonable qualifier
- iaw 6y agoEnergy generation is a national security concern. While all signs point to engineering issues preventing creation of a successful fusion plant, the reality is there are only a small handful of issues left that prevent energy generation from fusion. The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird first flew in 1964, the titanium used for its construction was purchased in secret via front operations by the CIA from the USSR. The Soviet Union was the only country that had enough titanium to build the SR-71. The reason I reference this is because with enough money and resources anything is possible to do in secret. The SR-71 included some revolutionary technological innovations to solve the problems created by super-sonic flight. Energy viable controlled fusion is a little farther than the SR-71 was but not so much so that it is impossible. Hence the qualifier.
- falseprofit 6y agoThanks for the interesting historical example!
- twic 6y agoThere's already a technology that can do that - magnetohydrodynamic generation [1]. A conductive material moving through a magnetic field develops a voltage across it, which can be used to produce power; a hot plasma is a conductive material with lots of energy that can drive movement. The problem is that most of the energy produced in fusion is in the kinetic energy of neutrons. To capture that energy, you need to slow the neutrons down by collisions with some material, turning the kinetic energy into heat in that material, and then harvest the heat. AIUI, neutrons being neutral, you need that material to be dense (lots of nuclei per unit volume) and have a high neutron cross-section. The plasma in a fusion reactor is neither, so you can't collect the neutron energy in the plasma. Rather, you have to let the neutrons hit some dense blanket surrounding the plasma, collect the energy as heat there, and then harvest that. There are fusion reactions which don't produce neutrons [1], and so where the energy goes into the kinetic energy of charged particles, which is readily collected in the plasma, using MHD or direct conversion [3] (is MHD considered a kind of direct conversion?). But they are much harder to do than the reactions which do produce neutrons, and those are already hard enough! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_energy_conversion