For many, nuclear fusion is the Holy Grail of energy, offering the possibility of limitless clean energy through harnessing the very same chemical reaction that keeps our Sun burning.
Journalism!
… and plasma is “electrically charged gas”.
The engineering arguments against DT fusion are pretty much independent of the plasma confinement design. I have very low expectations about any new scheme providing fusion power.
I view fusion as a kind of fake state-provided vision of the future. Governments produce such things to make themselves seem more legitimate and valuable, even if what they are doing is worthless.
In my not entirely ignorant opinion the Lockheed CFR should work very well, if they can keep the supports for the interior magnets from killing confinement.
My Holy Grail would be finding some simple mechanism that allows matter-energy conversion for some boson, lepton, or quark that is not a photon. We can make and destroy photons reasonably efficiently, and very cheaply.
I’ve been hearing about “General Fusion” for what feels like several years. It certainly is a novel approach. May work well if they can solve complex fluid dynamic issues with implosion of the liquid metal surrounding the plasma.
Haven’t heard a lick of progress. I’ve heard more out of the much lower funded LPP.
General Fusion has been making noise and getting $$ from investors successfully for a few years now. NextBigFuture.com covers them with some regularity. They are clearly the most “steampunk” of the alt.fusion crowd. For most, it starts with Robert Bussard.
ITER is the SLS of fusion. It’s safe, You can predict what it will do relatively reliably. It has been downselected over 60 years by People Who Know What They Are Talking About. It uses the most current technology while at the same time totally ignoring it. Both projects are akin to a 3 year old asking a professional artist to color in the lines better than anyone else.
I encourage you to check a few other projects. There’s Helion, which got a good chunk of funding but is very shifty about their technology. Call them the Blue Origin of fusion. There’s Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and EMC2, stringing along the holy grail of very compact megawatt-size reactors on a minimal cashflow – Mojave-type ventures. Then there are the out-there operations like Blacklight with quantum fusion which can’t possibly be true but… hmmm, maybe. Definitely a rich field akin to NewSpace but maybe a few years behind. No Elon or multi-billion government contract yet but definitely a Space Access vibe about the whole community, complete with intrigue and infights and defectors and the like.
Indeed, General Fusion gets major style points for giant pistons and a vat of swirling molten lead. It is indeed the most steampunk solution we’re likely to get, short of building a gigantic piston and setting off hydrogen bombs inside it (which honestly I think might be viable. I wonder if anybody has ever done the math on that?).
“building a gigantic piston and setting off hydrogen bombs inside it “
Like Project Orion in a tube?
Here is a pretty good short discussion on the Physics Forum about such a thing, with some links to Orion as well as discussion about the relative efficiencies/inefficiencies and other proposals for underground caves with explosions and turbines and such.
Seems terribly inefficient, though, even absent the material costs.
Not obviously cheaper than conventional fission plants, sadly.
Helion makes it sound like it’s working. So what’s the holdup?
It sounds like the holdup at Helion is actually getting all of the steps to work together.
To wit, their “Technical Achievements” claim that they can create a plasma field inside a reactor that lasts for more than 1 ms; their process is pulsed in 1 second intervals.
Another achievement is about the temperature of the plasma field, which is a proof, but not really a scaled proof.
They developed, but haven’t demonstrated, a closed-loop He3 cycle.
They’ve shown it possible to repetitively pulse magnets to generate 20 Tesla, but without mention of how frequently or what the lifetime of the magnets would actually be.
They’ve had their costs and models externally audited.
More importantly, they haven’t:
Demonstrated their method of “directly converting” the energy for electricty (as opposed to using heat generation).
Demonstrated the ability to feed the energy back into the system to pulse the magnets.
Mentioned anything about how the deuterium works into the whole process for each pulsed cycle.
Gotten up to the 100 Million Degree figure in their diagram (5 keV ~= 58 Million Kelvin)
And then, once they’ve proven all of the pieces, they have to be able to sustain the plasma field considerably longer, get the magnets to pulse fast enough and last for years at a time, and actually prove their closed-loop He3 cycle.
Not that I don’t think they can do it, but based on what’s on their website at this moment, they still have quite a few pieces to work out, in addition to the not-altogether-insignificant task of actually putting the pieces together into a fully-realized design.
Exciting, though, for sure!
I don’t think anybody’s actually done any Internal Fusion-bomb Engines (though I can’t vouch for the Russians), but later developments of Project PACER (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER) did involve energy generation via fusion bombs in man-made containers. (The earlier idea was to do it in underground caverns to generate steam.)
If we’re bombing-for-fusion power, connect two of the underground test sites with a tunnel filled with a turbine.
Just promise me that I can be in the room when we pitch it to the EPA.
Al,
That’s brilliant. forget the EPA, that’s a sideshow. Just think about the cash this project can throw off (to the Feds) based on ticket sales alone! Medicare ain’t gonna fund itself, you know.
Nothing wrong with a bomb-based power plant. If the plant is compromised on one shot, you just don’t take the next one. No runaway possible.
What I’d like to see is if some of the other proposed fusion reactions (boron-proton, boron-deuteron, and helium 3) can be produced under bomb conditions. If they can’t, there’s little hope for them in power applications. In particular, replacing the lithium deuteride in a W76 with partially deuterated decaborane. All else would remain the same. If all you got was the yield of the primary, you know B-p is a bust.
BTW, Norm Augustine is working with some group on nuclear fusion. Can’t wait to see if that bears fruit.
I find myself put off by the first sentence:
For many, nuclear fusion is the Holy Grail of energy, offering the possibility of limitless clean energy through harnessing the very same chemical reaction that keeps our Sun burning.
Journalism!
… and plasma is “electrically charged gas”.
The engineering arguments against DT fusion are pretty much independent of the plasma confinement design. I have very low expectations about any new scheme providing fusion power.
I view fusion as a kind of fake state-provided vision of the future. Governments produce such things to make themselves seem more legitimate and valuable, even if what they are doing is worthless.
Then there is this
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html
In my not entirely ignorant opinion the Lockheed CFR should work very well, if they can keep the supports for the interior magnets from killing confinement.
I’m more a fan of Helion’s approach: http://www.helionenergy.com
~Jon
My Holy Grail would be finding some simple mechanism that allows matter-energy conversion for some boson, lepton, or quark that is not a photon. We can make and destroy photons reasonably efficiently, and very cheaply.
I’ve been hearing about “General Fusion” for what feels like several years. It certainly is a novel approach. May work well if they can solve complex fluid dynamic issues with implosion of the liquid metal surrounding the plasma.
Haven’t heard a lick of progress. I’ve heard more out of the much lower funded LPP.
General Fusion has been making noise and getting $$ from investors successfully for a few years now. NextBigFuture.com covers them with some regularity. They are clearly the most “steampunk” of the alt.fusion crowd. For most, it starts with Robert Bussard.
ITER is the SLS of fusion. It’s safe, You can predict what it will do relatively reliably. It has been downselected over 60 years by People Who Know What They Are Talking About. It uses the most current technology while at the same time totally ignoring it. Both projects are akin to a 3 year old asking a professional artist to color in the lines better than anyone else.
I encourage you to check a few other projects. There’s Helion, which got a good chunk of funding but is very shifty about their technology. Call them the Blue Origin of fusion. There’s Lawrenceville Plasma Physics and EMC2, stringing along the holy grail of very compact megawatt-size reactors on a minimal cashflow – Mojave-type ventures. Then there are the out-there operations like Blacklight with quantum fusion which can’t possibly be true but… hmmm, maybe. Definitely a rich field akin to NewSpace but maybe a few years behind. No Elon or multi-billion government contract yet but definitely a Space Access vibe about the whole community, complete with intrigue and infights and defectors and the like.
Indeed, General Fusion gets major style points for giant pistons and a vat of swirling molten lead. It is indeed the most steampunk solution we’re likely to get, short of building a gigantic piston and setting off hydrogen bombs inside it (which honestly I think might be viable. I wonder if anybody has ever done the math on that?).
“building a gigantic piston and setting off hydrogen bombs inside it “
Like Project Orion in a tube?
Here is a pretty good short discussion on the Physics Forum about such a thing, with some links to Orion as well as discussion about the relative efficiencies/inefficiencies and other proposals for underground caves with explosions and turbines and such.
Seems terribly inefficient, though, even absent the material costs.
Ah, outstanding! Here we go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER
Not obviously cheaper than conventional fission plants, sadly.
Helion makes it sound like it’s working. So what’s the holdup?
It sounds like the holdup at Helion is actually getting all of the steps to work together.
To wit, their “Technical Achievements” claim that they can create a plasma field inside a reactor that lasts for more than 1 ms; their process is pulsed in 1 second intervals.
Another achievement is about the temperature of the plasma field, which is a proof, but not really a scaled proof.
They developed, but haven’t demonstrated, a closed-loop He3 cycle.
They’ve shown it possible to repetitively pulse magnets to generate 20 Tesla, but without mention of how frequently or what the lifetime of the magnets would actually be.
They’ve had their costs and models externally audited.
More importantly, they haven’t:
Demonstrated their method of “directly converting” the energy for electricty (as opposed to using heat generation).
Demonstrated the ability to feed the energy back into the system to pulse the magnets.
Mentioned anything about how the deuterium works into the whole process for each pulsed cycle.
Gotten up to the 100 Million Degree figure in their diagram (5 keV ~= 58 Million Kelvin)
And then, once they’ve proven all of the pieces, they have to be able to sustain the plasma field considerably longer, get the magnets to pulse fast enough and last for years at a time, and actually prove their closed-loop He3 cycle.
Not that I don’t think they can do it, but based on what’s on their website at this moment, they still have quite a few pieces to work out, in addition to the not-altogether-insignificant task of actually putting the pieces together into a fully-realized design.
Exciting, though, for sure!
I don’t think anybody’s actually done any Internal Fusion-bomb Engines (though I can’t vouch for the Russians), but later developments of Project PACER (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_PACER) did involve energy generation via fusion bombs in man-made containers. (The earlier idea was to do it in underground caverns to generate steam.)
If we’re bombing-for-fusion power, connect two of the underground test sites with a tunnel filled with a turbine.
Just promise me that I can be in the room when we pitch it to the EPA.
Al,
That’s brilliant. forget the EPA, that’s a sideshow. Just think about the cash this project can throw off (to the Feds) based on ticket sales alone! Medicare ain’t gonna fund itself, you know.
Nothing wrong with a bomb-based power plant. If the plant is compromised on one shot, you just don’t take the next one. No runaway possible.
What I’d like to see is if some of the other proposed fusion reactions (boron-proton, boron-deuteron, and helium 3) can be produced under bomb conditions. If they can’t, there’s little hope for them in power applications. In particular, replacing the lithium deuteride in a W76 with partially deuterated decaborane. All else would remain the same. If all you got was the yield of the primary, you know B-p is a bust.
BTW, Norm Augustine is working with some group on nuclear fusion. Can’t wait to see if that bears fruit.