3 ms·
10 billion reactions sounds like a large number doesn't it? But if they told you how much energy this would release, and how expensive it is going to be to fabr
by ohiovr 5y ago
10 billion reactions sounds like a large number doesn't it? But if they told you how much energy this would release, and how expensive it is going to be to fabricate fuel pellets to this precision it isn't going to sound all that sexy. If they had bountiful energy past break even today THEN maybe in 10 years a commercial plant could be possible. Lockheed promised similar commercial results in a similar time frame. People who were familiar in the matter knew it was never going to happen.
- ncmncm 5y agoThe hb11 project is 3 orders of magnitude short of break-even. Despite that, it is overwhelmingly more promising than Tokamak schemes like ITER or SPARC, which we can be certain will never produce one solitary erg of commercially competitive energy. Certain people are profiting from construction contracts, and bunches of physicists are employed. They will be the only people who benefit. Since bunches of plasma fluid dynamics experts are being traind up, there should be some spinoff value, anyway, e.g. for solar physics.
- ohiovr 5y agoSadly, it would take 7 orders of magnitude more yield per run (as it stands in the article) to be equivalent to about two oxidized teaspoons of sugar.