3 ms·

fusion is quite costly in capital isn't it?

• PaulHoule 2y ago
  Yeah. Personally I think the most plausible fusion power plant is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_ion_fusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_ion_fusion which is like laser fusion but 10-100x more efficient in terms of wall plug to energy delivered to the pellet and also capable of multiple shots per second compare to laser systems that are doing good if they fire a few times a day. Nobody is interested in developing it because the high energy requirement for the ion beams to transfer energy effectively into the pellet means you need multiple big accelerators so you can’t demonstrate it at less than a full scale power plant. Such a thing would cost about 1/10 of what a certain billionaire spent to buy a washed up social network. Advanced particle accelerators are an area that could be proliferation sensitive and I think you might get some trouble if you tried to advance the technology. For instance a particle accelerator that drives a spallation neutron source could be used to make Plutonium with a smaller thermal footprint than a nuclear reactor. For that matter, a D+T fusion reactor produces copious very high energy neutrons which would be great for making Pu239 or U233.