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Which design will be the first to break even?
Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 2:20 pm
by joedead
That is, which will lead to a net power reactor first?
Mods, feel free to add to/edit the poll as you see fit.
Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 2:38 pm
by Helius
A fission / Fusion hybrid.
Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 9:10 pm
by Torulf2
Maybe a Laser Inertial Devices but the Sadia Z machine is a good candidate.
Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2009 7:22 pm
by joedead
Over 100 views and only 9 votes. Was this a dumb idea for a poll?
Posted: Sun Mar 22, 2009 7:53 pm
by pstudier
joedead wrote:Over 100 views and only 9 votes. Was this a dumb idea for a poll?
Well, there should have been an option for fusion never to be commercially successful.
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 8:01 pm
by Roger
Didnt a Tokamak already go to net power?
I mean come on, the question is who is going to be second to net power?
>grumble, whine, complain>
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 8:53 pm
by chrismb
It will be a closed orbit, highly velocity-resonant device that can maintain and recover scattered ions back into a tight region of phase-space.
Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2009 10:34 pm
by KitemanSA
Not to be TOO picky, but your subject line and your question were TOTALLY different, leading to a cognative diss... oh heck, it were confusing.
What did you REALLY want to ask?
Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 3:07 am
by joedead
Not to be TOO picky, but your subject line and your question were TOTALLY different, leading to a cognative diss... oh heck, it were confusing.
What did you REALLY want to ask?
LOL, good point. I guess I'd like to ask... both!
But for the sake of the poll, I guess I'm most interested in seeing which design people think will lead to successful commercialization of fusion power.
(Although I'm just as interested in which one will break even or achieve net power first. Is that even stated correctly?)
Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 2:03 pm
by chrismb
Why do you wish to discount the tokamak, then?
General Atomics/Boeing have been making money out of tokamaks for years with their Starlite/ARIES/DIII-D programmes, or do you think they were doing it for the benefit of mankind or something??? Are there other examples?
Fusion power has already been commercialised! It's currently a research(/useless??) product, but it has been commercialised.
If you were to try to refine your question to 'the first watts of grid-power converted from fusion energy' then I would refer you to whoever first sold solar panels!
Ah! The joys of clarifying ambiguous questions!
Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 5:03 pm
by Skipjack
Ooops, I actually voted without rereading the question.
I voted in response to the headline. What a mean trick!
From all that I know the JET had break even by calculation. Just for a very short period of time. Dont ask me numbers, its been what? 20 years?. Oh, hehe I remember also, that back then as it is today, commercial fusion was 30 years away...
Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 6:26 pm
by chrismb
Skipjack wrote:
From all that I know the JET had break even by calculation. Just for a very short period of time. Dont ask me numbers, its been what? 20 years?. Oh, hehe I remember also, that back then as it is today, commercial fusion was 30 years away...
That is the claim. Though plenty of ways to debate it.
I can limit input into a capacitor to 1 watt, yet get megawatts out of it. Is this a Q=>1E6 device?? I think not.
JET's magnetic fields consume ~1GJ to energise, whereas the total energy output in its best run was about 22MJ I think. Sure, if the thing could be run continuously, the 1GJ 'investment' in energising the field would eventually be paid back, but not in the unit-seconds that tokamaks actually push neutrons out.
...and no-one's been counting all the ancillary parts, so 'net-power system output', no.
Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 7:34 pm
by alexjrgreen
Helius wrote:A fission / Fusion hybrid.
Los Alamos have this cracked already...
Use the pressure to push water up a mountain and you have net power.
Like this only bigger:
http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm
Posted: Tue Mar 24, 2009 8:13 pm
by chrismb
Have you ever visited Dinorwig? They do tours. It is, truly, almost unbelievable. Imagine cutting a big hole into the centre of a mountain, then building a cathedral half a mile inside it.
....
Probably a bigger cathedral than you're imagining!!
Now dig another hole out of the mountain next to it, the length of a football pitch, plus grandstands.
Now drill a hole connecting a lower and upper reservoir....a 30m diameter drill...and put a half-gigawatt motor/generator set in it.
Well worth a visit. Engineering at its best....
Posted: Wed Mar 25, 2009 12:58 am
by alexjrgreen
chrismb wrote:
Have you ever visited Dinorwig?
It wasn't finished last time I was there.
chrismb wrote:They do tours.
The Electric Mountain part 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1ho2yCvOXo
The Electric Mountain part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VONAYCsLRc