How to power a fusion engine?

[Daymare17]

How would you power a future fusion engine? What's it's fuel? In one article it said helium-3. But are there other kinds of possible fuel? It seems so from the wiki article but I sadly don't understand much of that article.

 

Where would you get helium-3? I know of Luna and Uranus, how about Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune? I also read that with only the helium-3 on Uranus you could send a fusion-driven ship to every star in the galaxy, is this true?

[[Tycho?]]

You'd power a fusion engine with stuff that fuses. The most likely possibilities are deuterium-tritium fusion, deuterium-deuterium fusion, and deuterium-helium3 fusion.

 

I got these straight from the wiki article by the way, perhaps you should look at it again

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion

[mmalluck]

Deuterium and tritium are not mined, nor do I believe they will ever be. They are manufactured. I imagine we'd have to do the same with helium3

 

The general concept involves taking standard nuclear reactor and then adding hydrogen to the core in an effort to capture fleeing neutrons.

[swansont]

Deuterium and tritium are not mined' date=' nor do I believe they will ever be. They are manufactured. I imagine we'd have to do the same with helium3

 

The general concept involves taking standard nuclear reactor and then adding hydrogen to the core in an effort to capture fleeing neutrons.[/quote']

 

AFAIK heavy water (i.e. deuterium) is just separated out from normal water by chemical separation and distillation. Tritium requires a reactor or accelerator, since it's radioactive with a relatively short half-life.

[[Tycho?]]

Deuterium and tritium are not mined' date=' nor do I believe they will ever be. They are manufactured. I imagine we'd have to do the same with helium3

 

The general concept involves taking standard nuclear reactor and then adding hydrogen to the core in an effort to capture fleeing neutrons.[/quote']

 

Helium3 is available on the moon, although if it is economically feasible to get it off the moon is an open question.

[Asimov Pupil]

yes but doesn't fussion fuel last a very long time? if so then you may not need it to be economically feasible.

[[Tycho?]]

yes but doesn't fussion fuel last a very long time? if so then you may not need it to be economically feasible.

 

Well tritium is radioactive, and so doesn't last for very long.

 

Or do you mean that it goes a long way when used as a fuel, like a little bit of fusion fuel will run a fusion engine for a long time?

 

Either way the question still remains, economic feasibility doesn't depend only on the resource being aquired. There might be a bit of gold on the bottom of the ocean, but if it costs billions of dollars to get it out nobody will bother unless the gold they can exract is worth billions of dollars. Same with helium3 on the moon. Sure it might be useful at some point, but it might end up we would use so much energy in extracting it that it wouldn't be worth using it as a fuel.

[Halash]

sooo you could use an element heavier than iron... fuse it, and have a coolant??????????

[Bio-Hazard]

Yeah man. Totally. Maybe using the soul of child orphan would work.

[Molotov]

lol

[[Tycho?]]

sooo you could use an element heavier than iron... fuse it, and have a coolant??????????

 

What? I can't see any reason why anyone would ever want to fuse anything heavier than iron, since iron is the cutoff point- after that, no energy is gained from the fusing process, you need to put more energy in than you get out.