Ya gotta love it when somebody writes their first article fusion, and assures us that the future just barely exceeds our grasp….
Link: Engineer Live!.
Power generation: nuclear fusion closer
The holy grail for researchers in power generation is nuclear fusion. It promises the clean power of conventional fission with the safety of non-nuclear technology.
One kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuel. There are no chain reactions, no production of radioactive actinides and the radiotoxicity of fusion waste materials decays rapidly.
But there are still two major hurdles to overcome. One is containing the tremendous heat given off by fusion, 100 million degrees centigrade; the other is generating sufficient power for the fusion process.
Yup, just figure out how to bottle the star and the rest is easy….
Curious that he confuses the Tokamak with the Z-pinch.
Now the big excitement is the new alleged “cold fusion” palladium reaction. Still no thereotical explanation, but they claim it’s replicable at least.
Personally, I thought the Pollywell IEC stuff was more intriguing. If he’s really got a working, scalable electron bottle giving 10^5 electron transits before exit… well, ITER’s going to look pretty silly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell
EngineerLive claims are inaccurate and incomplete.
It is known that fusion reactors are likely to cause high level radioactive waste from neutron irradiation of the reactor shielding.
(Jaochim Gruber,2006, http://www.acamedia.info/sciences/J_G/fusion.html)
That depends very much on what kind of fuel you use. Most realistic goal right now is D-T, which DOES cause allot of neutrons, thus radiation. He3-D, or the holy grail, p-B11 causes no neutrons (99% of the time).
However, it is true that even with aneutronic fuels, there will be SOME radiation. Difference though, will be measured in tons of shielding.
But judging by the link, you know more about this then I do.
The link is cool.