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By scooby
LLNL made a fusion breakthrough. Now, a startup company wants to make it into a power plant.


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Anonymous said…
You do not have the tritium to fuel it, among several other problems. And to breed tritium is BS. There are several research articles published on this including by those who believe in fusion. And the tritium process produces neutrons that activate surrounding materials. The volume of radioactive material produced is greater than in a fission reactor. This was seen in JET and modeled. They had to use remote handling on JET. This is not clean.
9/02/2025 6:36 PM
Anonymous said…
People need to look at the economics of large power plants, 1 GW. The standard size. The cost for building the plant is about the same for coal and fission and gas is about 1/3 of them. Over the life of the plant the fuel is a small fraction of the total cost. The fusion part of a fusion plant is expensive to build and maintain. The outside power demand to drive a fusion plant is higher than for coal, fission, gas. You have lasers, magnets, cooling to low temperatures in a hot environment. Gas needs less cooling water for the turbines because a gas plant is twice as efficient as the others. The front end turbine of a combined cycle plant is a gas turbine running at much higher temperatures, thus higher efficiency. The back end steam turbine exhausts standard temperatures but at reduced volumes per GW, thus less cooling capacity is needed. Coal, fission, fusion all drive a steam turbine. There are several other little engineering details that intrude for fusion, but of course we can always blame the engineers for failure.
9/02/2025 7:56 PM
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