“Things Aren’t Looking Good For Nuclear Fusion”
“…Basically it’s a way to circumvent proof of commercial viability…”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVw5TKUil3o
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The budget has a 20% decrease to DOE office of science, 20% cut to NIH. NASA also gets a cut. This will have a huge negative effect on the ...
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6 comments:
Looks like well polished press releases to get investors “ginned up” for a pump and dump.
And how exactly, does NIF differ, from a DOE/NNSA pump and dump to USA taxpayers? Maybe ask Ed?
Commonwealth is designing only for pulsed operation. In the past the power companies have said this does not work. Commonwealth hopes to get around this by a large energy storage facility, not batteries, to produce electricity when the fusion is down. Another detail to be added to magnetic confinement. The pulsed operation is caused not just by the current decay in tokamaks but in addition by disruptions from thermal quenches in the plasma and quenches of the superconducting magnetics.
Energy storage is trivial compared to generating fusion. This is merely misdirection designed to imply fusion is a done deal.
In thinking about it I am very inclined to agree that energy storage is not a solution for pulsed operation. Another point. The fusion people are always talking about magnetic confinement but this is always about charged particles. In a fully operating reactor the charge neutral energetic neutrons and xrays are not confined. The total energy production of the reactor is carried by the neutrals and all hits the first wall. As demonstrated by laser drive inertial fusion, this will cause ablation of the first wall.
I tried placing this comment on Sabine Hossenfelder's blog but comments are not accepted; will place it here. I encourage people to read and to draw their own conclusions from the science literature written by the fusion community themselves. This is not difficult. Some of what I have learned. It is clear that electricity from fusion will be more expensive than fission, coal, natural gas, wind, or solar. The neutron activation creates large volumes of radioactive waste that has to be remotely handled; half life large enough to need burial. ITER will exhaust the world wide supply of tritium and tritium breeding is not going to work. Tritium decays and diffuses into everything. JET lost 40% of the tritium into the walls and recovered half of that. Thermal, current, and magnetic quenches allow only pulsed operation. This is why Commonwealth is designing for pulsed operation. The steam driven piston approach has instabilities that produced spray. It is another pulsed approach; after compression you have to reset, clean up the mess. Remember you have had a drive explosion and fusion explosion in the device. All this and more is out there from the fusion community.
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