/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.10157891]

Why haven't we made profitable nuclear fusion power plants yet?

[Anonymous No.10157895]

because no one wants to give the ARC researchers a fat stack of money to get their plant up and running with +Q results

[Anonymous No.10157909]

My enemy would have to acknowledge that I was right all along.

[Anonymous No.10157923]

>>10157895
This and also it just takes a long time to hash out a bunch of technical difficulties because it can pretty much only be done experimentally by trial and error, but although progress is slow it is actually creeping along gradually.

[Anonymous No.10157924]

>>10157891

[Anonymous No.10158120]

>>10157891
>Why haven't we made
What do you mean by "we", Peasant?

[Anonymous No.10158135]

>>10157909
You have to acknowledge you were wrong all this time

[Anonymous No.10158139]

>>10157891
Because it's hard

[Anonymous No.10158315]

>>10158120
go back to the shithole site you came from and fucking stay there

[Anonymous No.10158321]

MIT SPARC here

China is Bitch

[Anonymous No.10158666]

>>10157891
China hasn't got to spending tens of billions of dollars on fusion to BTFO the west yet. They've been busy with near-term energy solutions like improving solar panel yields to the point they're actually profitable.

[Anonymous No.10158671]

who wins
>20 billion dollars and ITER
>a couple of MIT students with big magnets

[Anonymous No.10158731]

[Anonymous No.10158778]

>>10158731
>vector equilibrium

topkek

[Anonymous No.10159052]

>>10157891
Because we have not even build our first fusion reactor yet.
But we can harvest fusion energy in a profitable way by building solar power plants.

[Anonymous No.10159059]

>>10158139
Also profiting is an issue. Nuclear fusion would have to be profitable and the infrastructure of domestic power grids doesn't require a very large power source in a single area. Rather most power grids run on several smaller coal and natural gas plants.

[Anonymous No.10159088]

>>10157891
It may come as a surprise to you, but plasma physics is hard.

[Anonymous No.10159096]

>>10157891
You need to build huge, expensive devices that need sometimes decades of planning and assembling to make any large steps towards fusion.
Right now the long construction of Iter is dragging things out, although they claim to now have their shit in order.

[Anonymous No.10159319]

>>10159052
We've built dozens of fusion reactors. None of them put out more energy than it takes to run them.

[Anonymous No.10159324]

>>10159319
If it is not energy positive it's not an real fusion reactor. It's just an plasma experiment.

[Anonymous No.10159619]

>>10159052
>Because we have not even build our first fusion reactor yet.
Fusion reactors have been produced commercially as a source of neutron radiation.

But we haven't been able to make power off of them because high energy electrons prefer to fuck off in any which direction rather than stick in the comfy holes we give them. Imagine that you had this magic circle that would produce tones of energy as long as you could keep a bunch of elementary schoolers high on sugar and monster energy drink in it. You'd think a wall or short fence would do it, but those little fuckers find a way out every time.

[Anonymous No.10159621]

>>10159088
Its a lot like hydrodynamics, except the water is on fire and made out of magnets.

[Anonymous No.10159633]

Does someone have a link to a material article on neutronic tunneling?

It was development of a material that "cracked" and the cracks permitted neutrons to tunnel through the material, losing energy before coming out. The material itself still decayed under neutron radiation, but it did so at a remarkably slow pace, relatively speaking. Since neutron radiation causes decay of everything we know of, the development of neutron-resistant material should be priority #1 in a long-term fusion facility.

[Anonymous No.10159637]

>>10157891
Because there is no economical drive to do so. Fuel makes a tiny cost of fision plants already, and we still have plenty of uranium and thorium. Breeder reactors are now what fusion reactors wants to be. They can run on natural uranium and even destroy Z > 92 waste which is where the nastier nuclides are.

[Anonymous No.10159869]

>>10157891
So real talk, what's all that bullshit they have going on on the inside of the walls of the torus? Is it really necessary to have all those different patterns of blocks and crap?

[Anonymous No.10159876]

>>10159637
This

[Anonymous No.10159935]

It's happening, and will happen eventually.
One part is funding, but more importantly it's historical funding. (EU funding is also painfully slow: see ITER).
We simply lack experience.
Also, as some have stated, it's terribly complex. Mapping a magnetic field, calculating particle orbits and methods to containing the plasma is hard enough as it is.
You're basically trying to contain an explosion with magnets.

[Anonymous No.10159937]

>>10159637
>Because there is no economical drive to do so
Nigger do you have any idea how astronomical amounts of money is being dumped into fusion research on a yearly basis? ITER alone has already cost over 10 billion and its doomed to fail, NIF was another 3.5 billion and it didnt even manage to ignite fusion plasma.

>>10157891
Because its extremely fucking hard. Even if you by some holy miracle manage to build a stable D-D or D-T fusion reactor that produces net-positive energy, it isnt going to be profitable because of neutron radiation. 80% of D-D fusions energy is released through neutron radiation and the number is around 35% for D-T fusion. That is going to absolutely rape all the structural components in the vicinity of fusion chamber and the entire reactor has to be replaced several times a year, which produces metric craptons of radioactive waste (nothing compared to depleted uranium rods, but it still requires couple hundred years of storage).

The only actually promising project is the Heinrich Horas aneutronic fusion reactor design that has been very promising in experiments so far. The only problem is that it requires 3 billion degrees to fuse hydrogen with boron... atleast here the ignition system has the theoretical potential to reach those temperatures, unlike the retarded NIF.

[Anonymous No.10159953]

>>10159937
t. brainlet

[Anonymous No.10159963]

>>10159953
>t. brainlet
Is that your basic defense mechanism whenever you read something you dont understand?

[Anonymous No.10159986]

>>10157891
This entire ITER shit won't work, there was a theory that those particles would move more efficiently if we build a reactor based on moebius band shape, not pretty curves

[Anonymous No.10160038]

>>10159937
>ITER alone has already cost over 10 billion
Apparently it is not nearly enough. So much spending and they are building the thing at turtle pace.

Problems become proportionally smaller as one increases the scale. If they put 1000 times the money into it perhaps they could make it 10 times as big in each dimension and reduce surface effect by the same factor.

[Anonymous No.10160115]

>>10159324
If it is facilitating fusion reactions it is a fusion reactor

[Anonymous No.10160124]

>>10157909
>every change in stock value is caused by single, discrete events

[Anonymous No.10160136]

>>10160115
This.

>>10159324
Just say fusion power plant and you‘d be correct though.

[Anonymous No.10160326]

>>10157891
nuclear fusion power already works. Look up project PACER. The problem with pacer was demoing the steam generation in front of journalist and having a leak of radioactive steam.... That and detonating a bunch of H-bombs for power just don't sit well with some people.