Europe Plans a New Type of Fusion Facility

SR71Blackbird writes "European physicists have put forward a plan for a facility that uses lasers to produce fusion. From the article: 'The laser would be used to compress and heat a small capsule of deuterium and tritium until the nuclei are hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion and produce helium and neutrons. In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste.'"

Comments

Re:The usual name for this is

[CastrTroy]

I have a coffee table that hits the break even point for producing energy. No energy in, no energy out. Is this where we've gotten to? There are lots of things we can do that don't produce any energy. It amazes me that they've been talking about fusion forever, and they aren't even at the point of producing usable amounts of energy.

Re:Three Words

[Markus Registrada]

"We're nowhere near break-even, but Sandia's been doing all right!" ... "Whatever are you talking about? The Z-machine at sandia has only produced millijoule fusion yields, the JET at cullham has produced kilojoules."

Enormous transfers of funds are effected from the public till to Sandia, for very small investment of lobbying effort. Your employer must be realizing similar immediate gains, even neglecting the advantages realized for landing beam-weapon system development contracts.

"electrically-accelerated boron-[hydrogen] reactor ..." "that is a nonequilibrium system which was proven impossible for generating excess energy."

The young rarely understand that graduate theses are to be read for the analyses, never for the conclusions. This is not because the youth of the graduate lends overconfidence (although it may), but mainly because the thesis conclusion must satisfy the prejudices of the examiners -- in this case, most likely hot-neutron careerists.

Even skimming the document reveals, for example, that 10^8 W is taken (evidently by analogy with a hot-neutron reactor) as a lower limit to economic viability, despite that for such a system a 10^6 W yield, or even 10^4 W, might well be preferable, if it could be mass-produced. (Cue "Mr. Fusion" remarks. The 1.21x10^9 W required might be accumulated capacitively; 10^5 W is plenty for a normal car.) A factor of three orders of magnitude can change fundamentally the engineering involved in implementing an idea.

The thesis author's true colors are revealed in Appendix E. Despite the disclaimers, he is evidently eager to develop the measures he proposes.