Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough in Japan!
- Thread starter The Predaking
- Start date
My favorite part about this is the idea of them creating more helium in the process. Hilarity would ensue when the reactor has a leak.
Disaster strikes when no one can stop laughing about the high-pitched warnings coming from the reactor floor personnel.
I want to believe. When I was a kid studying civil engineering I thought we'd have this by now. It's the obvious solution. Let's do this already.
This is basically a further refinement of the old Tokamak concept, which they've gotten to work in short bursts for decades, but which they could never sustain. (Among other things, the plasma would tend to escape magnetic containment and melt the magnets.) I presume that advances in computing power and speed have let them overcome the instability issues at least somewhat through brute force rapid adjustments.
The rival laser implosion method has also been successful recently, hitting break-even point for certain definitions of that, but still pretty far from being a power plant technology. (Laser implosion basically zaps a pellet containing tritium and deuterium with lasers from all directions, not just heating it up but also compacting it significantly. But just making the pellets takes a lot of energy, which isn't counted in the "break-even point" results.)
---Dave
The rival laser implosion method has also been successful recently, hitting break-even point for certain definitions of that, but still pretty far from being a power plant technology. (Laser implosion basically zaps a pellet containing tritium and deuterium with lasers from all directions, not just heating it up but also compacting it significantly. But just making the pellets takes a lot of energy, which isn't counted in the "break-even point" results.)
---Dave