/sci/ - Science & Math

and speaking of which

Looking cool

DPF > ICF

>fission

git oot

>>5968302
any nuclear engineering majors or actual engineers?

>>5968347
>DPF
i have a soft fuzzy spot in my heart for plasma pinch fusion <3

>>5968385
few if any on /sci/, and generally it's in threads of the form
>what type of engineering should i go into /sci/?
or navy nukes

Will the jokamak ever produce fusion energy with more output than input?

>>5968489
>jokamak

Damn it, Nuka-Cola, your idea of a nuclear energy thread IS /x/ spam.

>>5968489
Magnetic confinement works better as you scale it up. We'll probably be able to make giant fusion plants in space eventually.

>>5968521
i'm sorry i can't hear you over my 90% fusion neutron capture

>>5968531
The problem with fusion was never finding a way to capture the neutrons.

>>5968534
i know, but it certainly helps with efficiency
the plasma gremlins will still rear their ugly heads though

>>5968541
Plasma gremlins are mythological creatures.

Take you magic to >>>/x/

>>5968541
It really doesn't help with efficiency.

At best, it'll help with durability and maintenance requirements to have a liquid moderator/breeding blanket between the core and any solid parts of the system.

But when it's in doubt that the system will work at all, this is not where to focus your attention.

If you want a system where catching neutrons actually does improve the efficiency, look into Winterberg's MTF fusion bomblets.

It starts out in a similar way to the lead/lithium fluid plasma compression, by blowing a "plasma smokering" into a confinement chamber with a reduceable volume, but in this example, the confinement sleeve is compressed by a chemical explosive.

It all happens very quickly, so when fusion starts up, the explosion will be approximately as dense as the explosive was before it was detonated. This means that if the reaction products from the explosive have high neutron cross-sections, much of the fusion energy will be added to the chemical energy producing the compression, creating positive feedback leading to a high efficiency thermonuclear detonation. The reaction can thus be propagated from easily-triggered deuterium-tritium plasma, into a body of cheap, dense liquid deuterium, and the whole bomblet is converted to a plasma which can be harvested by highly-efficient electromagnetic means rather than with some mechanical heat engine.

The minimum blast is still inconveniently large for a power source, but still much smaller than a fission-initiated thermonuclear detonation.

>>5968524
>We'll probably be able to make giant fusion plants in space eventually.
Wait wait wait...
We're already struggling to build one on earth...

What do you guys think of Lockheed Martin Skunk Works' claim that they will have a prototype for a compact, 100Mw, fusion reactor in 5 years, and a production model in 10?

http://youtu.be/JAsRFVbcyUY

while you crybabies whine about the scapegoat of environmentalists, the cheapness of natural gas is kicking your ass and will for another half century. same with coal.

natural gas, coal > nuclear

>>5968644
There are major problems with building it on Earth: Earth's atmosphere, and Earth's gravity.

It's very difficult to build large hard-vacuum chambers on Earth, and you can't scale things up without limit if they have to support their own weight.

It's a much more workable concept in space. Obviously, it's not the kind of thing we're going to do with expendable chemical rockets.

>>5968665

inb4 it doesn't pan out and you never hear about it again.

Skunkworks tried to build a SSTO for NASA in the late 90s, but their design was godawful and the project ended up in failure. So the notion that they are some secret superexcellent group that can solve anything is bunk. All the stuff that gave them notoriety was designed in decades past and all the people involved are adios, so the past accomplishments don't translate to the new crew, either.

As for opinions about the project itself, I don't have any.

>>5968691
>It's a much more workable concept in space.
The fact that you can't rely on gravity is both a good and a bad thing.
Of course it's easier to manipulate tons of steels in space. But considering the high number of pieces required for a fusion plant, you better have some godtier kind of coordination to get everything right, without any incidents.
Also you need to get those tons of steels in space, which is really tricky.

>>5968548
>reduced durability and maintenance requirements
>not helping with a power plant's efficiency

>>5968713
I think you've got entirely the wrong idea of what I'm talking about.

I'm not saying something like, "It'll would be easier now to build it in space." but rather, "This technology may not be feasible until the distant future, when we can do things like build it in space."

>>5968723
If you use "efficiency" to mean "whatever aspect of operations I feel like talking about", then sure, it helps efficiency.

>>5968665
What I think about the Skunkworks fusion is that the image you posted is pretty much their most detailed design document.

>>5968725
Depend on the materials available.
Definitely possible in the asteroid belt.

>>5968729
If it's possible in the asteroid belt, it's possible with lunar material.

Meteors have been piling up on the moon for billions of years, with no weather to smear them out, and tossing stuff from the moon to orbit would be very easy and efficient once you got set up properly.

>>5968644
>giant fusion plants in space
>stars

>>5968665
i cant hold all this lack of data and results
they didn't even give a peek at the confinement geometry
it's basically vaporware

>>5968302
Have they given a date when they plan to turn it on?

>>5968684
>CO2 > no CO2
you sound this retarded

>>5969059
>b...but they showed a picture of the team in a laboratory, and a picture of a timeline!

>>5969069
nope, there's been lots of in progress images though, like an image floating around of the injector
http://hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/FPA12_Richardson_GF_PlasmaInjector1_500x373.jpg

>>5968385
Yes.

Also, despite it not getting as much love in this thread, MCF has my money for getting to commercially viable fusion first. It's been said a few times already, but it scales ridiculously well. Unfortunately, brehmstrallung scales just as well and as Nuke noted, will be the biggest energy sink in something the size of DEMO. I have high hopes for ICF too, but more for propulsion than industrial scale power production.

>>5969611
MCF shows every sign of having no potential to ever be commercially viable.

Remember that other energy technology isn't going to sit still. Advances in solar and energy storage can be made with small-scale experiments, and put into production in a matter of months if there's a compelling value proposition. We already have the example of leaves, for how cheap solar collection and chemical energy storage can be.

There's no potential for MCF to ever be cheap on Earth. You need a huge vacuum chamber and all sorts of special materials. You're spending a fortune just to produce the energy, let alone to generate electrical power from it.

The experiments need a gargantuan budget, involve major construction projects, and take decades to do. It's going to develop slowly compared to other options.

Tokamak fusion is a boondoggle, a way to keep scientists employed indefinitely and to make a show of doing something for science and for the environment.

>>5969664
>solar ever being profitable
>shiggy diggy doo

Except there's only one real problem that you stated, and that's the materials issue. Building that big of a vacuum chamber isn't an issue and aside from its inefficiency in higher temp region, radio heating and magnetic field manipulation is strangely effective at heating plasmas. It simply comes down to scaling and finding suitable materials to withstand high neutron flux. The energy density is MUCH higher in MCF than earth-based solar could ever be.

>>5969718
Power density doesn't matter for grid power, and MCF is obviously good for nothing else, and solar's already profitable, and competitive in many applications.

The real difference is that it's easy to work on solar power. You can do interesting research on a budget provided by personal credit, and be a world-leader with a couple of good ideas and a few million dollars.

Consequently, solar power is taking off like computer technology did, not just getting more cost-effective, but doing so at an accelerating rate.

To aim for something commercially viable, you can't just say, "Oh, in 50 years it will only be five or ten times as expensive as coal, so if there are carbon taxes and things, maybe fusion can compete." you have to compete with people putting shingles on the roof that convert the sunlight that hits them to electricity at something like 50% efficiency, and don't cost more than today's shingles.