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Off Topic > Space News
Fusion Power in 5 years?
Andrew:
http://www.dvice.com/2013-2-22/lockheeds-skunk-works-promises-fusion-power-four-years
I don't know if anyone else has seen this but it looks interesting. More credible than most of the claims to be able to produce working fusion powerplants
HaliRyan:
I'd love for it to be true, and for them to pull it off, but I'd bet the house that they won't.
MarcAFK:
I think It's more likely that NASA will get that fusion rocket going before any large-scale power-plant prototype manages to break even.
And if not, I still think the cost of getting duterium for the near future will rather limit the application to more expensive applications like warships and rockets, etc, at least compared to more conventional energy generation.
TallTroll:
A semi-commercial fusion reactor is being built in France right now. It's designed for 500MW/50MW, 1000s pulse, so not really ready to take up duty as a main source of power, but its only a matter of time now.
Paul M:
Uhm...
ITER (the experiment in Cadarache, France) is not a reactor. It is not "semi-commerical" it is an expirment test bed to show proof of princple things about fusion power generation. It has no ability to generate power at all. It is designed to demonstrate Q=10, and while ignition is sort of a "stretch goal" it is not in the planning. The pulse length should be 3600 seconds (at least we in the NNBI community have been pressed to develop a 3600 s injector system).
ITER is the first step machine, with the next step DEMO (a demonstraton commercial plant) to come...well depending on which road map one looks at...say 10-30 years after ITER.
I am dubious in the extreme of any claim by anyone that they will be bringing electricity generated by fusion before that. The people in the business aren't stupid and ITER isn't being built because alternatives that are viable exist. While it is possible someone might come up with something out of the box on this it is at this point unlikely. I've seen a Ph.D. thesis that analysesed a lot of alternatives and the result of the analysis was basically that the magnetic confinement of a deuterium-tritium fuel mix is the probably the best choice due to energetics.
But there are a lot of technical hurdles between what we have now and comercial fusion power. But because they are largely just technical issues I'm fairly confident that they will get resolved. I'm not aware of any basic physics that says a stellerator or tokamak based reactor would not work, leaving aside the question of "how well." Keep in mind that the only working fusion device in our neighborhood is our sun, and it is working based on the two weakest forces in the universe and the fact it is huge. So it isn't a case of reproduction but doing the same thing in a completely different manner...and that is a lot more complicated.
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