Page 1 of 1
UK plans first nuclear fusion power plant
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 12:41 am
by mad_derek
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 12:56 am
by kurt9
Its a laser-driven ICF concept, with all of the limitations that such concepts have.
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 1:50 am
by mad_derek
kurt9 wrote:Its a laser-driven ICF concept, with all of the limitations that such concepts have.
Ummm ... yes just so. I'm just not sure these guys are serious.
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 3:43 am
by Helius
mad_derek wrote:kurt9 wrote:Its a laser-driven ICF concept, with all of the limitations that such concepts have.
Ummm ... yes just so. I'm just not sure these guys are serious.
They're Absolutely serious. Hiper needs to be checked out. ICF, researched by the NIF might be scale-downable and possibly economic enough for a power plant.
Hopefully you don't have to fry 10 gold nuggets every second, with a 192 beamline laser bank generating 2MJoules / shot.
Hiper is to have a compression laser and a separate heating laser; We won't know the parameters until after the NIF experiments are underway.
Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 3:58 am
by kurt9
The HiPER concept is supposed to allow for the use of much less powerful lasers than the NIF. This, in turn, means that much less input power into the lasers is require for successful fusion.
Nonetheless, I remain skeptical of this process.