4 ms·

Oops missed that. ITER is not necessarily the best approach to fusion, although it's the best funded. In any case if we can't breed tritium than we either nee

by api 4y ago

Oops missed that. ITER is not necessarily the best approach to fusion, although it's the best funded. In any case if we can't breed tritium than we either need to shoot for higher energy D-D fusion or some other reaction or fusion will never be cost-competitive.

GuB-42 4y ago
Is there any other approach to fusion than ITER? I mean fusion capable of practical power generation. D-T fusion is the easiest, and yet super hard. Tokamaks are the only design that we know how to build in order to meet the goal, with maybe stellerators in second position. Inertial fusion work for scientific and military experiments, but are far from being a usable power source. Things like fusors and its derivative are great hobby projects with a few limited practical applications, but we are not even sure if it is physically possible to produce more energy than we put in. As for LENR (aka. cold fusion) we are essentially at the "thought experiment" stage, when it is not a scam. One other idea that may work with current tech is to dig a large cave, line it with really thick material and detonate hydrogen bombs inside it, extracting energy from the heat of the explosion. I don't think I need to tell you that even if we can do that (unsure), we certainly shouldn't (absolutely sure). Or, take, advantage of that really big fusion reactor we already have and makes us go around in circles.
- DennisP 4y ago
  Most conservatively, there are tokamaks that use more modern superconductors, able to support much stronger magnetic fields. Tokamak output scales with the fourth power of the magnetic field, so that allows the same output as ITER from a much smaller, cheaper reactor. The MIT spinoff CFS is doing this, along with Tokamak Energy in the UK. CFS is shooting for a net power attempt in 2025. There are also various alternative designs, like Zap Energy's z-pinch, General Fusion's magnetized target fusion, and Helion's field-reversed configuration. Helion is attempting hybrid D-D/D-He3 fusion, the other two are D-T.
  - pfdietz 4y ago
    All the DT approaches suffer from poor volumetric power density, for fundamental reasons independent of the details of magnetic fields or confinement schemes. For that reason I feel Helion's approach is the least dubious.

by api 4y ago

GuB-42 4y ago

Is there any other approach to fusion than ITER? I mean fusion capable of practical power generation. D-T fusion is the easiest, and yet super hard. Tokamaks are the only design that we know how to build in order to meet the goal, with maybe stellerators in second position. Inertial fusion work for scientific and military experiments, but are far from being a usable power source. Things like fusors and its derivative are great hobby projects with a few limited practical applications, but we are not even sure if it is physically possible to produce more energy than we put in. As for LENR (aka. cold fusion) we are essentially at the "thought experiment" stage, when it is not a scam. One other idea that may work with current tech is to dig a large cave, line it with really thick material and detonate hydrogen bombs inside it, extracting energy from the heat of the explosion. I don't think I need to tell you that even if we can do that (unsure), we certainly shouldn't (absolutely sure). Or, take, advantage of that really big fusion reactor we already have and makes us go around in circles.

DennisP 4y ago
Most conservatively, there are tokamaks that use more modern superconductors, able to support much stronger magnetic fields. Tokamak output scales with the fourth power of the magnetic field, so that allows the same output as ITER from a much smaller, cheaper reactor. The MIT spinoff CFS is doing this, along with Tokamak Energy in the UK. CFS is shooting for a net power attempt in 2025. There are also various alternative designs, like Zap Energy's z-pinch, General Fusion's magnetized target fusion, and Helion's field-reversed configuration. Helion is attempting hybrid D-D/D-He3 fusion, the other two are D-T.
- pfdietz 4y ago
  All the DT approaches suffer from poor volumetric power density, for fundamental reasons independent of the details of magnetic fields or confinement schemes. For that reason I feel Helion's approach is the least dubious.