Nuclear fusion on a truck ?

Yup... plenty of technologies start of funded as military projects before going mainstream - since defence buyers are not as cost sensitive.

Anything that would benefit from more controllable output power presumably.

Reply to
John Rumm
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Suicide trucks, of course. Only this time one such truck will take out the whole of Baghdad, not just 50 people or so.

Reply to
Tim Streater

Although they say truck-sized, quite what do they mean by that? Or, perhaps, what will be the end result (which might be much larger or smaller than what they mean at present) - 7.5 tonnes or multi-trailer road train?

Reply to
polygonum

Would it? How? Nothing like the inventory of a fission reactor (or a fission bomb). The activated structural parts won't disperse very widely. Might just as well dump the tritium in a water supply.

Reply to
newshound

It's like "size of a dinner plate". What size dinner plate?

jgh

Reply to
jgh

One of my favourites is the size of a football pitch; something that has no fixed size.

Reply to
Nightjar

"The initial design is for a 100 megawatt reactor measuring 10 feet by seven feet that could be loaded on to the back of a large truck."

Guess you missed that bit. ;)

Reply to
The Other John

a) I missed that bit! :-)

b) Is that really the complete thing? What about any generating equipment and coolant pumping, etc.?

Reply to
polygonum

Well that just claims to be the reactor... so the other stuff may be extra (although given the likely applications they probably want the whole thing to be a nicely integrated lump).

Reply to
John Rumm

Probably much the same as for existing designs for micro nuclear reactors, which, as power stations, need a fair area of ancillary equipment to turn their output into useful power.

Reply to
Nightjar

Inclined to agree with that.

Not so sure about this though tritium is a beta emitter with 12+ year half life. You really don't want to ingest beta emitters, they produce can rather nasty localised tissue damage if they get lodged inside somewhere.

The other thing about tritium as a fuel is that wonky pedia says it's "extremely rare" on earth, produced by the interaction of cosmic rays and the atmosphere.

Reply to
Dave Liquorice

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