OT: A small step for fusion

[The Natural Philosopher]

[Jeff Layman]

A small, /slow/, step: "FLF Ltd, was spun out from the University of Oxford in July 2011"

But I guess seven years isn't that long in the scheme of JET, tokomaks, etc.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Given theh amount of investment, they obviously are running with a small team: designing stuff takes man hours.

Go figure.

[Nick Odell]

Isn't getting useful power out of nuclear fusion one of those things that's been only ten years away for the last fifty years?

Nick

[The Natural Philosopher]

WEll that is of course why this project exists.

Tokamak (torus) containments for *steady state* fusion have simply not happened.

This is a pulsed system. a shock wave generates the temperature and pressure for an instant, fusion happens and then stops.

The real issue is whether a positive energy balance can be demonstrated.

I guess thats a year or two away.

[Chris Hogg]

"Machine 3 will be capable of discharging up to 200,000 volts and in excess of 14 million ampere - the equivalent of nearly 500 simultaneous lightning strikes - within two microseconds, FLF said"

I bet that make the lights of Oxford flicker! (1.5MWh if my maths is correct.)

[Brian Gaff]

Well, small being the operative word here. I mean, where is all this power for all of these devices coming from, and if you need to hit the target all the time and need to replenish this, which supposedly is the fuel, say Deuterium or some such, how on earth do you achieve magnetic containment while doing this and one supposes removing the waste and trying to get the power gain to some kind of generation system to be efficient enough to offset the hug energies needed to sustain the fusion. Also but unless somebody has invented unobtanium, the vessel anywhere near the device running at millions of degrees will be surely melted or the radiation close in will crystallise it and it will fail. These are the real issue here to my mind. Of course fusion works, but at the moment we see it only in the stars, and only because of that mysterious weak force, Gravity, which by all accounts is not a force at all but a field acting on the atomic nuclei etc, that make up matter.

I will believe it when they can prove it. Till then you might as well simply gather the heat of the sun. Brian

[tim...]

Fusion: the technology for which the great breakthrough is forever "five years away"

tim

[Andy Burns]

Presumably it charges a capacitor bank over a long period to avoid that ...

[Robin]

I think you can pretty well swap those those numbers round! ITER has been in planning for years already and isn't expect to deliver full fusion experiments until 2035 - with the aim of 500 MW for less than half an hour at a time (all of which will be "waste heat"). Electricity generation comes later with DEMO in 2048.

[Jethro_uk]

I posted about this a few months ago, after it was plugged (no other word for it) on the BBC4 2-part series with Dr. Helen Czerski

Cold fusion sprang to mind then ....

[Jethro_uk]

Snake oil salesmans dream ...

[GB]

Lockheed said they would have a working prototype in 5 years time. This was in 2014, so it should be ready next year. :)

[PeterC]

It's being delayed by the slow progress of room-temperature superconductors.

[Jethro_uk]

pulsed-power-device

If, indeed, such things are possible.

[newshound]

Some of these numbers are not tying up.

Isn't the Oxford figure 1.5 kWh? 0r 5.6 MJ?

This link says a lightning strike is about 1000 MJ, so (if if is right)

500 of them would be 500 GJ.

[Chris Hogg]

Here's a rework of my calculation.

200,000 V * 14,000,000 A = 2.8*10^12 W 2 microseconds is 5.56*10^-10 hours So energy is 2.8*10^12 * 5.56*10^-10 = 1556 Wh, or 1.56 kWh

Which makes my original estimate out by a factor of 10^3, and yours the correct figure. I did say 'if my maths is correct'. Clearly, it wasn't!

1.56 kWh isn't very much in the grand scheme of things.

I agree with you about the lightning strike analogy, but given my error above, that may not give you much comfort! :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

well lets review that.

200kV and 14MA is 2.8TW is it not?

2.8TW for 2 microseconds is 4.8MWs or 1.3KWh

sounds in tegh ranfge calkculated above.

Lightning strikes are much longer than 2 ?s.

Interestingly enough a lightning strike creates up to 7kg of Nox - More than a modern diesl is likley to produce in its lifetime.

Anyway - never let facts get in the way of journalism...

[Jethro_uk]

And termites farting far exceeds any CO2 we're producing ?

And any number of big volcanoes could throw more shit into the atmosphere in one big bang than mankind could in a century ?

There are obvious (?) practical steps we should take to accommodate climate change (based on history, if you want to avoid a debate). But sometimes h*mo sapiens should realise it's not all about us.

[Tim Streater]

More likely to be methane, isn't it, if they're farting?

They produce CO2 just by breathing out or whatever they do. Just like the 9 billyun humans on the planet, who all produce a lot of CO2 all the time.