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British Researchers Say Fusion Is Close
sh00z writes: "The article quotes a leading scientist saying that Fusion power is 'within reach' in the next decade, with commercial plants to follow within another 10 or so years. Shhhh. Don't tell anyone at Texas A&M. They might just jump the starting gun again."
I wonder if this is a Boron-Hydrogen CBF reactor they are talking about. These sorts of reactors have two plasma streams guises by magnetic fields. The two plasma beams converge at high energy and Hydrogen whams into Boron fusing but causing the new Boron-12 radioisotope decays in about .0202 seconds down into three alpha particles with very high velocities which are guides through an energy converter (a magnetic coil) which generates electricity with a pretty high efficiency. You also end up with clean byproducts rather than Tritium-Deuterium fusion (heavy water fusion) I keep seeing pushed by researchers and oddly enough the DOE. I don't get how the DOE could keep a straight face whilst pushing the cleanliness of fusion power talking about heavy water plants. Tritium product isn't exactly cheap or easy considering you get it from sticking lithium into a laser implosion chamber because tritium is pretty damn rare naturally. Shit the only two facilities they've got working on the waste products are MIT and INEL (Idaho National Energy Laboratory) which is a fraction of the effort they're putting into everything else. This is what got us into the mess of nuclear waste disposal in the first place.
BTW, heavy water fusion (the fusion of H-2 and H-3) yields an alpha particle and a free neutron. Both of these byproducts are moving really fast after the reaction. The helium isn't much of a problem considering it has a charge and can be confinsed and controlled by magnetic fields. The neutrons however have no charge and thus fly in whatever direction they were originally headed. Thus heavy water reactors need lots of shielding and cooling systems due to the thermal pollution of the energetic neutrons. This adds up to alot of wasted energy in the form of heat (about two thirds of the total energy from the reaction). You can run the coolant through exchangers to get some energy back out of it but you're left with the same radiactive problems fission reactors have to deal with. Namely contamination. CBF's using Boron-Hydrogen or Helium3-Deuterium don't need this sort of extra bulk and also are more efficient since alot of their energy is being directed by the magnetic fields of the reactor and harnessed. They can thus be smaller and more efficient so instead of one big reactor you could have a handful of 100MW reactors distributed in a region. Oh yeah, for nuclear nuts I didn't go into He-3/H-2 fusion because He-3 is so fucking rare on Earth it would literally cost you billions of dollars to collect even a little bit for industrial use. Until we can efficnetly mine the Moon and asteroids and eventually the outer gas giants (Uranus and Neptune first and Jupiter and Saturn when we can have an efficient way of escaping their gravity) we're not going to be using He-3 for industrial purposes.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
...it's about 149 597 870 kilometers away.