3 ms·
I never saw Lockheeds "show your work" on their proposal for a fictitious reactor that could supply 100 megawatts from a tractor trailer bed. Yet they got billi
by ohiovr 5y ago
I never saw Lockheeds "show your work" on their proposal for a fictitious reactor that could supply 100 megawatts from a tractor trailer bed. Yet they got billions of dollars of funding for it. If I had a 100 tesla magnet wouldn't that be useful for tokamaks? Because iter's 17 tesla magnet isn't going to lead to a revolution. It is only another iteration over the JET tokamak which barely had success, but enough success to be a viable lead. If the government listened to crackpots like me they could have saved billions of dollars.
Its pretty simple really. A charged particle when it slams into another will gyrate in a magnetic field. If that magnetic field is twice as strong, the gyro-radius is half as wide. And the containment vessel would require half the volume. It takes many many strikes to fuse two nuclei. That is why it is necessary to have ultra powerful magnets. Because it might take dozens or hundreds of strikes, each one potentially enlarging the radius of the circulating plasma. Maybe stellerators have an edge but I don't see it with my limited knowledge. But simple brute force ought to get 'the job done'.
- DennisP 5y agoI'm talking about Commonwealth and Tokamak Energy, which use fields quite a bit stronger than ITER, taking advantage of newer superconductors than ITER. The relevant scaling law is that tokamak energy output goes up with the fourth power of magnetic field strength. According to the presentation I linked, that allows ITER-level output from a reactor a tenth the volume of ITER. Assuming that works out, a reactor somewhere between those two sizes should get us to commercial levels.
- ohiovr 5y agoThis kind of goes along with my theme. By the time the expensive experimental reactor is at the end of the planning stage an new magnetic force regime is introduced changing the whole perspective of the experiment. It would be best to scrap those experiments and focus attention on the new technologies because 17 tesla magnets are not the most powerful magnets in the universe and we have a long way to go to find what is possible on our home world. The magnetic field is the foundation of fusion energy at this time sans xray compression.
- refulgentis 5y agoTake a breathe...hold....and exhale...now go take another pass at the article, you're far off from it, its basically an answer to the questions you're raising. Then riff on this: The reply, and article, reference CFS, a public/private initiative by MIT, where the gentlemen whose laws you are referencing had a major breakthrough via a materials science breakthrough that allows the ITER magent you're discussing to be produced a couple orders of magnitude smaller, changing all of the problems.