Physics lesson here. Sun makes energy by converting mass to energy: mostly mashing element H into He, the weight of the final He is slightly less than the H involved, and the extra mass becomes energy. That's nuclear fusion. On earth, we mash heavy elements, like U into other lighter elements. The mass of the resulting lighter elements is less than the mass of the U involved, so the excess mass becomes energy. That's nuclear fission. All practical reactors today do fission. E=mc^2 baby. Fusion is still not in practice.
In this application, harnessing the heat and keeping it cool are analogous.
It’s a tricky problem to solve. Impractical, bordering on impossible, because the fusion itself operates at about 5million F! No materials known to man, even rocks, can withstand that kind of heat.
The current method is the same as was thought up decades ago: containing the fusion material within a magnetic flux so that we can sidestep the problem of having to design a material that can safely contain a 5million F substance. The only problem with that is it’s a bitch to control large scale magnetic fluxes. Think about what happens when you push two magnets together such that they repel each other: it’s virtually impossible to find a way to push them together consistently, that is, they’ll always repel each other in slightly different directions. Now try scaling that up to a power plant lol. In a sense, the reason for that is that magnetic fields just don’t interact with matter the same consistent way that matter interacts with matter. Which makes designing a flux to contain such a huge temperature very difficult.
Well you're in the toroidal design issues there. There's lots of other options too like open field, laser and z-pinch that don't have those issues. Remember that the toroidal design is based on the gravimetric of the sun itself, believing that replicating that would allow safe containment of the plasma and ion discharges.
As you properly point out there's lots of issues with that. There's also been a lot of different breakthroughs in magnetic field designs, one of the big breakthroughs in the last 5 years was simply an accident. What happens if you rotate your outer core and suspend the intermediate layer using the directional field differential? Right. Free floating magnets which also produce an amplified field effect.
This shit is way beyond my understanding, but I find it really interesting because my areas of expertise is removing the human factor in mission critical equipment in ultra-dangerous conditions. That is automation of critical stuff with fail-overs, so some poor bastard doesn't have to go get irradiated to death to save everyone else.
Anyway, while fusion is the future. I strongly expect short term especially with the 4th gen fission and low-scale designs(about the size of a tractor trailer), will be where we'll end up in a few years...providing the commies don't kill everyone. MOX designs are great, especially various reactor designs that incorporate high-waste products into it's fuel cycle.
Awesome, thanks for those details! It’s not my expertise at all but I thought my explanation would be sufficient for a general audience just to give them the gist of what the hold up actually is with regard to fusion. Definitely not up to date either, I haven’t heard of any significant breakthroughs that were significant enough to filter through the general engineering population.
I love hearing about accidental breakthroughs! I once knew a materials scientist who’s team was tasked with designing a new alloy. Well they went nowhere very slowly until one day he was tipsy in the lab after a boozy lunch meeting. He ended up accidentally producing the perfect material but of course: he forgot to write down the recipe!! Took them the guts of a year to figure out what he did right, but they got there in the end and everyone made bank!
Free floating magnets are a bitch at large scale. Especially in 3-D! 2-D control is apparently difficult as hell to produce reliably. But if that’s the trick then they’ll figure out the practicalities given sufficient R&D I guess.
Let’s hope we get to subvert the commies long before then!
Potayto, potahto, the problem is basically "there's too much heat here, we want it there instead" You're not going to do that by adding AC systems. :-P
Physics lesson here. Sun makes energy by converting mass to energy: mostly mashing element H into He, the weight of the final He is slightly less than the H involved, and the extra mass becomes energy. That's nuclear fusion. On earth, we mash heavy elements, like U into other lighter elements. The mass of the resulting lighter elements is less than the mass of the U involved, so the excess mass becomes energy. That's nuclear fission. All practical reactors today do fission. E=mc^2 baby. Fusion is still not in practice.
Maybe the real issue with fusion is not finding a way to keep it cool enough, but finding a way to harness all the heat.
In this application, harnessing the heat and keeping it cool are analogous.
It’s a tricky problem to solve. Impractical, bordering on impossible, because the fusion itself operates at about 5million F! No materials known to man, even rocks, can withstand that kind of heat.
The current method is the same as was thought up decades ago: containing the fusion material within a magnetic flux so that we can sidestep the problem of having to design a material that can safely contain a 5million F substance. The only problem with that is it’s a bitch to control large scale magnetic fluxes. Think about what happens when you push two magnets together such that they repel each other: it’s virtually impossible to find a way to push them together consistently, that is, they’ll always repel each other in slightly different directions. Now try scaling that up to a power plant lol. In a sense, the reason for that is that magnetic fields just don’t interact with matter the same consistent way that matter interacts with matter. Which makes designing a flux to contain such a huge temperature very difficult.
Well you're in the toroidal design issues there. There's lots of other options too like open field, laser and z-pinch that don't have those issues. Remember that the toroidal design is based on the gravimetric of the sun itself, believing that replicating that would allow safe containment of the plasma and ion discharges.
As you properly point out there's lots of issues with that. There's also been a lot of different breakthroughs in magnetic field designs, one of the big breakthroughs in the last 5 years was simply an accident. What happens if you rotate your outer core and suspend the intermediate layer using the directional field differential? Right. Free floating magnets which also produce an amplified field effect.
This shit is way beyond my understanding, but I find it really interesting because my areas of expertise is removing the human factor in mission critical equipment in ultra-dangerous conditions. That is automation of critical stuff with fail-overs, so some poor bastard doesn't have to go get irradiated to death to save everyone else.
Anyway, while fusion is the future. I strongly expect short term especially with the 4th gen fission and low-scale designs(about the size of a tractor trailer), will be where we'll end up in a few years...providing the commies don't kill everyone. MOX designs are great, especially various reactor designs that incorporate high-waste products into it's fuel cycle.
Awesome, thanks for those details! It’s not my expertise at all but I thought my explanation would be sufficient for a general audience just to give them the gist of what the hold up actually is with regard to fusion. Definitely not up to date either, I haven’t heard of any significant breakthroughs that were significant enough to filter through the general engineering population.
I love hearing about accidental breakthroughs! I once knew a materials scientist who’s team was tasked with designing a new alloy. Well they went nowhere very slowly until one day he was tipsy in the lab after a boozy lunch meeting. He ended up accidentally producing the perfect material but of course: he forgot to write down the recipe!! Took them the guts of a year to figure out what he did right, but they got there in the end and everyone made bank!
Free floating magnets are a bitch at large scale. Especially in 3-D! 2-D control is apparently difficult as hell to produce reliably. But if that’s the trick then they’ll figure out the practicalities given sufficient R&D I guess.
Let’s hope we get to subvert the commies long before then!
Potayto, potahto, the problem is basically "there's too much heat here, we want it there instead" You're not going to do that by adding AC systems. :-P
And you’re not going to do it in the vacuum of space where the heat has literally nowhere to go.
Miles and miles of radiators to emit IR.