What ever happened to fusion?

[gxlundgren]

Since I was a college student, 20 years ago, I have been touting the virtues of nuclear fusion. It has been my belief, and still is, the our government should throw all available resources into the development of fusion. The break even point for extracting more energy from a lab fusion experiment than was put into the process has been successful. Fusion power could provide us with limitless electricity which could be used to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen is the ultimate power source as the only byproducts from burning it is vapor of dihydrogenoxide.

 

Greg Lundgren

gxlundgren@yahoo.com

[ecoli]

the problem with fusion, is that it takes a lot of energy to get it going, and the end result, to date, is still a net loss in energy.

 

the reason fusion works well for nuclear weapons, is that you don't really have a need to control the energy output (which is the reason for the inefficiency). It works on the sun, because it's so far away from us, and our atmo blocks most of the harmful stuff.

 

I agree tho, it does have great potential. I read somewhere (though I'm surely completely mis-repeating it here) that a minute of energy produced by the sun could power a city for countless years. If we can use this type of energy, we could be well on our way to energy dependence.

[ajb]

People still work on fusion, (my dad for example).

 

Have a look at JET.

[insane_alien]

ITER hopes to break through the break-even point and actually put some watts back into the grid. It will also be used to test what sort of materials we shoul make the inner reactor wall out of.

 

Fusion is a nice idea but does have a lot of problems that scientists and engineers are working very very hard on. Its going to take some time, maybe 50 years before we have a viable fusion reactor. After that who knows.

[Klaynos]

ITER hopes to break through the break-even point and actually put some watts back into the grid. It will also be used to test what sort of materials we shoul make the inner reactor wall out of.

 

Fusion is a nice idea but does have a lot of problems that scientists and engineers are working very very hard on. Its going to take some time, maybe 50 years before we have a viable fusion reactor. After that who knows.

 

I can't remember, but I understood that ITER wasn't really designed to produce more energy than it gives out, as it was more concerned with the materials used.... I know that JET was never designed not to produce an energy loss...

[insane_alien]

i thought ITER planned to break even as well.

 

Ah, just looked it up, while they are aiming to produce more energy than they put in, it will not be made into electricity. they are hoping for a momentary Q value of 10 and a sustained value of 5. still getting more energy out than they put in but just not harnessing it.

[Severian]

the problem with fusion, is that it takes a lot of energy to get it going, and the end result, to date, is still a net loss in energy.

 

That isn't true. They have run where they have had a net output of energy for a short time. It is just that they have not yet managed to sustain the reaction for very long.

 

I am 100% sure that if we had pumped as much money into fusion research as we have into oil exploration, we would have had working fusion reactors by now. (This would probably be true with just 0.001% of that investment.)

[CPL.Luke]

meh money doesn't solve everything, we would still have the same technical difficulties that we do now, its just that we would build more prototypes, and not neccessarily make improvements.

[insane_alien]

but if we built more prototypes we can perform more experiments and get results faster as we wouldn't have the backlog of proposed experiments(well, wwe would still have lots of waiting experiments just different ones and more of them)

[Enoch]

Recently, i've just learned about the fission reactors. The fuel for them is U(235) and Pu(239)

Now, as to the question, the "stuff" (radioactive material) being produced, is there any use for the material?

(i was thinking about it being used for fison reactors, or does it work differently?)

[CPL.Luke]

when you run a fusion reactor you usually use isotopes of hydrogen and get helium as a by-product, you could theoretically continue burning the helium and all the other elements up until iron and still get energy, but after iron you put in more energy than you get out of the reaction, thus if you kept burning the iron and such up until you got to uranium or somethin like tha you would have put in alot more enery than you get out.