/sci/ - Science & Math

It's already being done on the sun.

>>5931227

The Sun has a much better economy than we do right now.

depends on the type
magnetic confinement or inertial confinement? decades, maybe half a century

magnetized target fusion? maybe a little as 15 years, depends on how swimmingly the general fusion prototype goes

>>5931280

Hasn't that bitch feinstein changed the NIF's focus to nuclear weapon stewardship now? Won't that be an obstacle for MTF?

so fission never occurs naturally?

is the polywell works out, pretty soon.

I am pretty skeptical about it though.

40+ years

2027 ITER starts it's main operations, it's predicted to be net producer of energy and after that it's only a matter of finding out how much improvements there needs to be done to make it commercially viable.

>>5931224

I had the privilege of speaking briefly with an engineer who researched on the Tokamak project for several years. He said "15 years away, it's always 15 years." He still believes it will eventually work but not right now. Funding isn't great and it's very difficult.

I didn't have Wikipedia to brush up on my knowlege of nuclear fusion so I couldn't ask him anything particularly interesting.

>>5931947
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor

2050

It's always 50 years away. Just like the singularity.

Do solar panels count?

>>5931224
Should have been a few years ago. But we messed it up. The original plans called for the reactor to be three times the size of what we are testing at, at that size it should work fine, it all checks out nicely.
I do not know how or why but for some reason the plans were changed and that made things much much harder. It has that volume/surface area ratio thing going on, so the larger containment systems are much easier to use. Add to it that the budget is nowhere where it needs to be because so much of its funding was diverted to the LHC. At the rate is going now I would say never. If we really wanted it 15 years tops and most of that is in just physically building the reactor as the tech is already here and fine tuning can be done in less then 3 years.

>>5931224
LOL, some jerk scientist knows he's going to be retired in a decade or so, so they just project a number knowing they will never make a break through.

They always say "50 years away". They are utterly giving up.

I wonder if we're closer to getting viable energy from the Weak Nuclear Force than from fusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon-catalyzed_fusion

Now if someone could just figure out a cheap way to make muons.

Maybe it could be done in space, where you could get a higher muon flux.

If I won one of those big jackpots like 400 million. I would literally wanna give like 100 million to something like this, would that even make a dent?

>>5933904
Can you explain please?

>>5933904
>I wonder if we're closer to getting viable energy from the Weak Nuclear Force

We have.

It is called fission.

>>5933868
Someone designed a fucking fusion reactor and some bean counter made them shrink the size to save money?

Holy shit, is this for real? Do they not know how these things work?

>link plz

>>5932273
you know, yeah.

Probably never.

It is easier to just drill a well.

If we could suspend specific atomic structures within the fields such that they would realign specific field effects / elements only, then we could drastically reduce the threshold for stability. Otherwise, Need stronger and stronger fields for containment.

>>5933926
>>5933934
I'm talking about the newest experiments by NASA using nickel, hydrogen, and terrahertz frequencies to strip the electrons off of nickel's protons, and convert nickel into copper. This releases a "prodigious" amount of energy according to some articles I've read, and melted the glass windows of the laboratories (or blew them up).

>>5933943
>can't drill wells fast enough
>oil is finite in the end

>>5933949
>and melted the glass windows of the laboratories (or blew them up).
and melted or irradiated to death the scientists I presume?

When it gets economically viable to invest in fusion. At that point, progress will skyrocket.

>>5933938

It's just not that easy to get funding for these things. You have to work with the money you get given.

>>5933924

I don't get why someone like Prince Charles doesn't finance this directly. He's very big on the environment and progressive thinking in general. I guess he's too stupid to realise the benefits of fusion, and would rather spend his energy promoting homeopathy and complaining about grotty architecture.

>>5933957

Who cares? Not people with money. Their goal is to make money now, not in some vague future.

>>5934012
Young people should be very very afraid.

>>5934008
That's a load of bullshit, if you build a fusion reactor too small to make fusion, you just don't fucking build it.

It's like buying an Easy Bake Oven™ and expecting to make a Thanksgiving fucking dinner.

>>5934054

Better to build it as big as you can with the pittance you are granted, to try to learn something. The alternative is learning nothing.

>>5931224
Depends
>when will we be mining the proper helium 3 from the moon, and shipping the dust back up to replenish itself?

>>5934091
>not just siphoning deuterium out of the oceans
We can capture the energy of 400 combusting gallons of gasoline by fusing the 2H of one gallon of seawater.

>>5933949
you're talking about LENR which is still kind of dubious but nasa is sort of looking into it for possible validity
there's some strange stuff going on which we understand only poorly, neutrons being generated without any excess energy and immediately fusing with things nearby.
the "melting windows" thing happened to a small team working on this back in the pons&fleschman days, they let the little thing run for about a week and one day came back to the lab basically incinerated and the windows mildly melted from the heat. they nevere figured out what aspect of the reactor led to that.

in any case i trust nasa's word on this and absolutely nobody else.

>>5933938
Some key problems are neutron damage, temperature and magnetic containment.
By making the vessel bigger the neutron damage and thermal load is spread over a larger area so the lining is not exposed to as harsh of conditions making things easier, by doing lots of things namely. Lowering the material requirements and/or allowing longer operating times before maintenance which would both speed up research and increase the commercial viability later on and more space for the heat exchanges.
The larger vessel has more room to install the magnetic containment parts and/or more can be used. The spacing does require more energy for an equal amount of containment at the smaller internal magnetic containment size they were going to test with, but it also easily allows for more output later once we have better understanding as the magnetic fields are change not the whole vessel assembly, this would have eliminated the need to build a larger one later, see DEMO. It would have avoided the need to make breakthroughs to miniaturize the equipment and build more complex magnetic control systems, at the time they knew of no way to do it. Thankfully advancements in magnets and computer controls have met this need, but it worth noting that most of these solution came for other unrelated projects.
The funding for this project ... could've been done a lot better. At the time of starting they did not even have the funding they thought they would need then, but started it anyway under the fear that it was going to be their best shot for a vary long time with the plan to get the remaining money later somehow. Cost have of course grew as projects often do, but many requirements were made on where and how they could get the parts basically forcing them to buy for select dealers, this was all part of politicians manipulating things to create jobs and bring money to their area. Some of the same parts came from different places, which is a pain when dealing with such small tolerances.

>>5934107
You would be using deuterium with the Helium
>instead of losing energy in the form of a Neutron as in with normal Hydrogen based fusion you would only lose the equivalence of a proton in an aneutronic reactor.

>>5934081
That is basically the argument I heard when asked why they did it. However I think it actually did more harm then good. You see the public was expecting Fusion power to be successful, that is why they paid a lot for it. When it ran too far behind schedule and did not produce the near the promised results, people got angry and declared it a waste of money. The stigma of being "a waste of money" severally hurts any future projects as people just point to the last time someone tried as evidence it can never be done. This has stopped many neat ideas. Historically the bigger the financial loss the stronger the stigma, and given the amount of money already sunk it a pretty bad case.
Bottom line is
Public opinion matters a lot when it comes to funding a big project, if you lose the public you often lose your funding.

>>5934158
I'm talking d-d fusion silly goy

We'd need regular fusion first