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China's Fusion Reactor Reaches 100 Million Degrees Celsius (abc.net.au)
hackingbear shares a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: The team of scientists from China's Institute of Plasma Physics announced this week that plasma in their Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) -- dubbed the 'artificial sun' -- reached a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius which is six times hotter than the core of the Sun. This temperature is the minimum required to maintain a fusion reaction that produces more power than it takes to run. The Chinese research team said they were able to achieve the record temperature through the use of various new techniques in heating and controlling the plasma, but could only maintain the state for around 10 seconds. The latest breakthrough provided experimental evidence that reaching the 100 million degrees Celsius mark is possible, according to China's Institute of Plasma Physics. "While the U.S. is putting new restrictions on nuclear technology exports to China, inventions and findings of EAST will be important contributions to the development of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)," writes Slashdot reader hackingbear. The reactor is currently being built in southern France with collaboration from 35 nations. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, it is expected to be "the first device to consistently produce net energy, producing 500 megawatts of clean and sustainable power."
after which time the facility and everything within about 8 miles surrounding it ceased to exist
Some of the researchers still felt it was too cold in the office and would prefer to bump up the thermostat a little more
Also I'm pretty sure the Sun, which is considerably cooler than this, is producing more power than it absorbs.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Great! So soon I can get my Chinese takeout much faster, right?
I'm thinking a really fast pizza oven. Why settle for dirty old coal-fired pizza, when you can have fusion pizza!
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I remember a beaker of water and a palladium electrode.
The protons in the core of the sun are in a temperature distribution, like a bell curve, and the average of this bell curve is way to cold for fusion. The only reason fusion happens is there are so many protons, a very few have freakishly high temperature way up the high end of the bell curve. Only those statistical outliers are fusing.
They achieved the temperature required to maintain a reaction above energy break-even, but likely they could not maintain it because of instabilities.
As an AC poster suggested, there is more than one criterion for maintaining a fusion reaction.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Let me guess: domestic pets.
So serious question: how many oceans will that boil? It's one thing to have the moon that hot, it's another to have the head of a pin that hot. Or are the just going after temperature quantity rather than size/mass?
You're on the right track. Temperature != Heat. The plasma in the outer magnetosphere of the earth has a temperature of thousands of degrees kelvin, but it doesn't melt a spacecraft that's in it. Why? It's sparse. The average kinetic energy of particles in the plasma is high (i.e., high temperature) but the power per unit area that strikes the spacecraft is very low.
That being said, the plasma inside a Tokomak can certainly melt something. That's (part of) why there is so much effort put into magnetic confinement.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
That is 212 million degrees in Fahrenheit. If they did it in America it would have been much hotter.
I'm afraid that all deuteriam and tritium based fusion reactors rely on fuel that is in extremely limited supply, especially tritium. Since the main source of tritium on Earth is nuclear decay from fission reactors, if there are enough fission reactors to generate enough of the very inefficiently used fusion fuel to generate significant, they can generate many times more energy from the fission reactors without having to engage in dangerous refinement of the tritium.
It's theoretically possible that thallium, which is much more plentiful than hydrogen isotopes, can be used for susion. But I'm sad to say that hydrogen fusion _cannot_ be effectively used for energy. Every technology that harvest or generate enough of the hydrogen isotopes manages and can harvest so much other energy that hydrogen isotopes re only a useful research byproduct, not a comparable energy source.
Fusion cuisine
One fusion dirty secret is that it produces neutrons that cannot be confined by electromagnetic fields, because they have no charge. They will damage the reactor, and the only way to get rid of them is to use some a-neutronic fusion reaction such as hydrogen+boron.
But hydrogen+boron fusion require much more input energy than hydrogen+hydrogen. Is 100 million degrees hot enough?
Not just instabilities, but lack of a mechanism to capture and feed the excess energy back into the device, which was not a goal of the experiment.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
While the U.S. is putting new restrictions on nuclear technology exports to China
How about instead, saying "While China is repeatedly caught attempting to steal nuclear technology from the United States"...
OK, and a linked article bashing Trump admin policies based on testimony of officials who briefed New York Times journalists under condition of anonymity? Yep, this is without question legit and unbiased.
China's Fusion Reactor Reaches 100 Million Degrees Celsius
Plasma energy sounds really large when you express it in temperature. But a more convenient gauge may be the voltage needed to accelerate the particles to velocity magnitudes correspondng to that sort of energy. This is also directly applicable to fusion systems, such as the Farnsworth-Hirsch or Bussard's Polywell, which use electric fields to accelerate the particles into the reaction volume.
Both electrons and hydrogen nuclei have a charge magnitude of 1, so dropping them across a potential difference of N volts adds N electron volts of energy to each particle. Then, if you let the plasma thermalize to a Maxwellâ"Boltzmann distribution, the electron temperature will be (by definition) the temperature of the distribution is about 2/3 that corresponding to the average electron energy.
So to go from degrees Celsius degrees (of a thermalized plasma) to electron volts: .003% drop in the bucket. (Kelvin step sizes are the same but Celsius starts at 273.15 Kelvin.)
- Subtract 273.15 - a
- Divide by 11,605 to get electron volts.
- Multiply by 2/3 to get the average energy of the electrons and ions.
That's an acceleration voltage of 6,025 volts (or 9,037 if you're going to react them before they thermalize). That's right in the ballpark for high-end vacuum tube technology - like the second anode on a CRT. (Those ran about 3000 to 6000 V in the 1940s, and about 25,000 V when modern color tubes were being replaced by flat panels.)
You can see why we all had high hopes for things like Polywell, where (if it worked as expected) a "gassy vacuum tube" that would fit in a strip-mall store's back room, with all supporting equipment (mostly mid-20th-century style electronics), and provide 100 MW of DC at cross-country power line voltages.
Of course many of the other methods for directly heating plasma heat the electrons much more than the ions. So the average energy of the plasma may be substantially lower.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Sun can be cooler because it has a couple of things going for it: it's optically dense and gravitationally confined. That is, the core is SO big and SO dense that radiation doesn't just leak heat out into space. So the plasma doesn't cool down immediately. Also, the plasma density is maintained by the weight of all the mass of the rest of the star.
Lab experiments, and in fact any plasma on earth, have neither of these advantages going for them.
That is why the Sun can maintain its fusion reaction and why it is so hard to create fusion on earth.
Proton-boron fusion requires temperatures 10x higher than D-T.
What's more, because of the higher atomic number for boron, Bremsstrahlung radiation will cool the plasma (if it's thermal) faster than the fusion reactions heat it.
If the plasma isn't thermal, it's actually really hard to keep it nonthermal (entropy tends to win very quickly.) So it seems to me that aneutronic fusion reactions are hopeless for a plasma where losses due to Bremsstrahlung are larger than the fusion power will be.
--PeterM
By neutron activation of lithium-6. There are a number of proposed ways to do this.
There is a company called General Fusion http://generalfusion.com/ that is attempting to use liquid metal fusion containment. Sounds very cool, in an almost steampunk sort of way. Being a physics noob, I'm wondering if anybody who actually knows this stuff can comment on whether or not their idea makes any sense?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
It will run at 400 - 600 seconds and will produce more energy than it consumes, that is all. There is no power plant attached nor will there ever be: https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals
And the power production is not clean as long as we use deuterium + tritium, the reactor vessel will have to be replaced around every 10 years and discarded as highly radioactive waste.
Regarding sustainability: ITER will attempt to breed tritium ... lets see how good that works. Otherwise we had to farm tritium from the sea, which is energy intensive and causes another spot in the chain to work with an radioactive element.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes,the catch is:
they want american funding and like to attract european and american PhD students to their facilities (*facepalm*)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You Frenchies and Chinese... Clean Coal 4Ever.
Ya you know a few people so it makes the legendary corruption baked into the very Chinese culture moot
https://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/china/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_China
Yes but if there's another thing the Chinese are known for it's having trouble maintaining a reaction. So there might be something to it.
Advice: don't study science. With your deep, keen insight you'll a be natural for sanitary management.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Pleased to observe that I am not on the opposite side of the planet to China if that stuff gets out of control.
My understanding is that the energy output, per cubic meter, is about the same as the human body, 50-100 watts or whatever. Just that there are a lot of cubic meters in the core of the Sun, so it adds up. As the AC says, proton-proton fusion is slow, even at the pressures and temperatures at the core.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Sure the raw material may be plentiful but how do you get new hydrogen?
Plasma is unstable. If it's not held at suitable density under suitable conditions, it will tend to pinch off. That is the problem. Nothing to do with energy.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
They're trying several methods. Laser fusion is one, the Chinese reactor is another.
Find out the specific heat of materials to calculate temperature of one given the temperature of the other.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My understanding is that the energy output, per cubic meter, is about the same as the human body, 50-100 watts or whatever.
Humans output around 100 watts abut are somewhat less than a meter cubed (we'd weigh about a ton at that size). Human power density is more like 1000-1500W/m^3, so we have about 10x the power density of the sun.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This is 1 million times more than what is required to produce a usable form of energy (electricity) through a very reliable methodology to perform the conversion heat -> mechanical energy -> electrical energy (water + heat -> steam which moves a turbine -> generator coupled to the turbine creating electricity). It also seems hot enough to be useful for other purposes like running a huge amount of heating systems.
So, I think that we are already pretty covered on the temperature front, what about focusing on other (tiny) aspects like making the heat generation last for a bit longer (perhaps it is just me, but holding it for just a few seconds or even hours seems still quite far away from what is required to reach the intended goals) or doing something on the actual usage front like actually generating a form of energy that people could use (again perhaps it is just me, but 100 million degrees sounds a bit too much for any direct application I can imagine).
On the other hand, you might continue focusing on this or similar competitions because everyone/everything needs a purpose and this might be a realistic one for you. Being the absolute best at something is certainly very difficult and usually attracts people who want to watch/pay you, to even feel inspired to become like you. Who am I to judge anyone's life aspirations? If you don't damage anyone (should getting money from naive rich suckers be considered damaging someone or an acceptable, even desirable, outcome from the tremendously unfair, self-perpetuating wealth distribution?) and you are happy, I personally have no problem with any life approach. Some people run faster than anyone else, others have the longest nails, you have the hottest temperature. Good for you!
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Sigh.
It's to do with the bonds between the parts of the nucleus, and the conversion of mass to energy.
If you take a bunch of 1 proton (Hydrogen) atoms which have
one or two extra neutrons (Deuterium, Triterium) and smash them together you will form an atom with more protons (Helium) and no neutrons, and get a bunch of "spare" neutrons which are either a) obliterated or b) ejected.
E=mc^2. A neutron worth of mass converted to energy is an awful lot.
In fission, you do something different. You take U235, fire another neutron at it, and it splits into two lighter elements, a bunch more neutrons get ejected (which keep the chain reaction going) and some of those get obliterated by the forces involved.
E=mc^2 again.
It's not about "you changed two things between two identical states and got free energy by doing so". It's "you used two different way of smashing things together, which results in one of the neutrons involved being obliterated and changed from mass to energy, and give you a bunch of waste products that you can't just recombine to get what you started with because some of it is now energy.
Fusion is also harder because you have MUCH tinier things that you need to smash together, and they don't want to do it naturally, whereas with fission the U235 becomes U236 quite easily, which is inherently unstable and will explode of its own accord very quickly anyway.
It's about "binding energy" of the start and end products. The binding energy (literally the energy used in the bonds that hold the thing together) of what you get out HAS TO BE LESS than the binding energy of what you put in. That's true for both fission of big atoms and fusion of tiny ones, but almost nothing in-between.
Which is why it's REALLY HARD to make the things in the middle which only really occur in stars because they have so much energy being given out that they can end up literally forging elements that wouldn't exist in any smaller reaction, just by chance.
Honestly, guys... a two second Google.
Shit, I had a curry last night at the Taj Mahal Tandoori that was at least that hot, and it was only a medium. I bet an Fscking Indian Hot would be at least 300 million degrees.
Humans... are somewhat less than a meter cubed
This confirms why Oklahoma always felt like The Twilight Zone: most of 'em aren't human.
Hmmm... Temperature is heat. It's a measurement of the average velocity of your statistical ensemble. Your are looking for heat capacity. A single particle at very high temperatures simply doesn't have enough heat capacity to do substantial heat transfer.
Even better, the GP's values are wrong. The sun has a power density of around (3.846E26 Watts / 1.4E27 m^3) = 0.27W/m^3. Humans are thus nearly 10,000x more energetic than the sun per cubic metre
> The Chinese research team said they were able to achieve the record temperature through the use of various new techniques in heating and controlling the plasma, but could only maintain the state for around 10 seconds. The latest breakthrough provided experimental evidence that reaching the 100 million degrees Celsius mark is possible
100 million degrees is a record for plasma, perhaps. If it proved that reaching 100mK was possible, it's only in the tokomak design, because the Z Pulsed Power Facility achieved 1 billion K in 2006!
They keep running into problems. I've read a few papers, and they would hit problems such as the metals used weren't strong enough to withstand the magnetic fields they were generating. That was fixed. Then the plasma rings would start to twist, buckle, warp and pinch into singularities. Stellerators fixed that problem by putting some torsion into the plasma rings. Tokamaks fixed that problem by adding extra magnetic field randomness or something to break up the standing waves. That fixed that problem. Then the neutron bombardment started poking holes in the metal structure, which weakens it over time. Maybe that has been fixed, but it keeps going round and round.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Projects like ITER exist primarily as a bypass of NPT restrictions. They were never about producing electric power or seriously advancing technology to eventually enable that outcome. It's an expensive tax payer funded scam.
Because the people who dispense multibillion dollar research grants are more easily scammed than some random Internet AC.
My point is not that I would expect a fusion experiment to instantly produce viable energy output... if they haven't gotten it to self-sustaining levels yet, that's to be expected. I would, however, think that would still be the entire initial goal, and I would have expected that right out of the starting gate they'd be siphoning off as much power as they could into keeping the reaction going until they were able to get enough to keep the reaction going, and anything over and above that, if and when they get there, would be useful generated power. If they weren't generating enough power yet to do so, again.... that's okay. It's still progress, and the amount of time they are able to sustain it would still be a measure of how long they were able to keep feeding it enough power over and above what it generated to keep going, and a real measurement of how close they are actually getting to having a sustained fusion reaction.
If, however, they weren't ever intending on trying to do that right away, then I honestly don't see what the point of talking about "maintaining" a reaction was in the first place, if they didn't actually have anything in place to even *try* to maintain it?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Generally when people are talking about the Sun's power density, they are talking about the region where fusion actually occurs, in the core, not the entire visible sphere, which is the number you are using. That would be a bit like talking about the energy density in a tokamak by averaging the power output over the volume of the entire tokamak structure rather than just the actual fuel confined in the magnetic field.
The Solar core is 19% of the Solar radius, and thus the energy density in the core, where fuel is burned, is 150 times higher - 40 W/m^3.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
The reason for the change was uniformity. There were two definitions o words like billion and trillion for decades. This was causing confusion, so we settled on just one of the definitions, and that is now being used by everybody.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It isn't going "round and round" it is going forward, step by step. Each issue that is solved is one less issue. There have been at least 226 tokamaks built to date, and each one advances knowledge about some aspect of design and operation. That is how extremely complex systems are developed. There is a lot of work to be done to build and operate the first true break-even tokamak -- about 20 years and $20 billion worth.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Also you are rating the human metabolic rate about a factor of 3 too high, is is about 1000 W/m^3, so the ratio of heat output per unit volume is 25 times higher for humans. But the density of the solar core is 160 g/cm^3, so the energy output per unit mass in the Sun is 6 times higher than in humans.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
They're trying several methods. Laser fusion is one, the Chinese reactor is another.
"Laser fusion" is dead. The actual general technology is properly known as inertial confinement fusion (ICF) and lasers are only one possible method of providing the driving energy.
The original ICF idea of direct drive laser fusion is completely dead - it does not work. All ICF schemes now use indirect drive, using an external energy pulse to create thermal X-rays inside a little metal capsule (hohlraum) which then drives the implosion. You don't necessarily need lasers to provide that energy pulse, particle beams promise to be much more efficient and cost effective. Unfortunately even approach this has turned out to be more difficult than expected, the National Ignition Facility at LLNL was supposed to be a factor of 3 above break-even, but came in a factor of 3 below, even when extremely elaborate hohlraums (costs $10,000 each) were used.
Once it became clear that indirect drive was necessary, it made the whole ICF project questionable. The original idea was that you only needed to make cheap little bubbles of frozen fuel. Once it turned out that each explosion required a high-precision manufactured multi-part unit, the cost effectiveness of the idea collapsed. Each explosion can cost no more than about a penny, and you need to set off hundreds of them each second. No one has any idea how this could be done, even if the driver problem is completely solved.
There aren't any ICF projects comparable to the current magnetic confinement fusion work going on any more. No one has any plans for a workable ICF demo plant.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
So what you are saying is sustainable fusion energy is about 20 years away? Wait...I feel like I've heard that before...
Do not argue with an idiot. He will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
Fusion reactors are still generating neutrons.. activation is still a problem. There must be at least some radioactive crap that can leak out and make the evening news.
There is some but it's far less of a problem than with fission reactors. The half lives of the waste products are short and there isn't much high level waste to begin with. In the event of problems the reactor shuts down almost immediately and there is no residual heat to cause the sorts of problems we see with fission reactor failures. Additionally fusion reactors do not contribute to weapons proliferation either. Basically fusion power is pretty much the holy grail of power generation if we can figure out how to do it. It's got huge upside, minimal dangers, essentially zero emissions or problems with carbon footprint, the fuel is not renewable but is so plentiful it doesn't matter, etc.
I'm sure some idiot news organizations will go all chicken little the first time a fusion reactor has a problem but the reality is that it's close to the safest power source we know of if we can make it work.
It's a great achievement, not doubts, however the problem with fusion is to control plasma long enough to have sustained reaction, thus getting netto energy surplus.
At the moment the biggest problem is that plasma leaks through magnetic confinement dropping temperature and shutting down fusion, and short bursts of fusion require more energy for heating plasma than one gets back.
The ITER (international tokamak project) aims at breaking even, there are also other approaches, for which major players are:
- stellarator (W7-X), a very promising way undergoing tests in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- laser fusion, most notably National Ignition Facility in US (some time ago they had a breakthrough with their laser): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- compact fusion, some specialists say it's a viable method, however so far no-one has achieved fusion this way (AFAIK): https://www.lockheedmartin.com... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are also other ways, but they're unlikely to have positive energy balance (aka produce more than require).
Personally I am looking forward for the German stellarator (which seems the most promising) and this compact fusion if shown to work (is small, kind of portable but it requires HE3, which might be produced by other, bigger fusion reactors to complement each other). However, at the moment, people should pursue all viable ways.
But that's going to undergo fusion. It won't escape the magnetic bottle. You only have to worry about what's on the outside, where the neutrons are a problem.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Correct. Temperature != Heat Capacity. Thanks for the improvement.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Caveat: I'm an armchair bystander, not a physicist, so the following is just my layman's view.
As a researcher hoping to contribute to a larger project (ITER) you have to choose your focus, this is to min/max your contribution (read: published papers) according to your research budget. This group chose to go for the high temperature numbers, understandably, because it makes for a great press release and helps to secure budget for the next experiment. Their principal engineering contribution seems to be a pioneering use of superconducting magnets.
Ten seconds is actually a decently long time to maintain a plasma, it seems they have in mind to increase that by two orders of magnitude by improving this equipment, but that is still plenty of time to read out a whole lot of data. The last thing they want to do is burn up a lot of expensive hardware on an early test run by running it until it melts. Doesn't make for such a great press release, it eats up the budget and lays waste to the timeline.
You're hardly going to get good technical information from a press release, but there is plenty of good non-paywalled info on EAST out there on the net. From a quick look, I don't know how much heat they are generating from fusion at this point, but since they don't say much about it, I presume it is essentially all from external sources, and improving the external energy injection mechanisms is a major goal of their project. Ignition is not a goal of their project, it is not even a goal of ITER.
See, isn't this a whole lot more interesting than jumping onto the internet and swearing a lot while advertising your ignorance? You could have googled it first, just like I did.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Sustainable in the economic sense is a lot more than 20 years away, OP said "break even". And even then, the excess heat is probably not being captured, but just leaked away. It is thought that an economical generating system would soon follow a demonstration of sustainable break even operation but for now, nobody knows how big, expensive, complex or reliable that might be, so any attempt to put a specific timeframe to it is just a wild guess. But progress marches on, this is really not science fiction any more, just a whole lot of brutally hard work ahead. How long did it take humanity to get from the first campfire to a steam generator? A hundred thousand years? Getting from the steam generator to a fusion generator is moving comparatively much faster.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
>100 million degrees is a record for plasma, perhaps. If it proved that reaching 100mK was possible, it's only in the tokomak design, because the Z Pulsed Power Facility achieved 1 billion K in 2006!
No, not "100mK" :)
The SI prefix "m" = milli = one thousandth, like:
We're in the process of trying to re-create conditions we think exist in the sun
No we aren't. The sun has the benefit of being much larger than any reactor we could build on earth so it can operate at a much lower temperature. Some details here.
There really is not a lot of overlap between the way the Sun goes about things and the way a tokomak does, other than that both are fusion. The reactions are very different. Out sun fuses four hydrogens to make one helium while tokomaks typically use a deuterium-tritium reaction suitable for conditions that can be created on earth.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Whoops, tokamak not tokomak.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I think this is a case where tone doesn't read well on the internet.
My usage of expletives was not meant to suggest anger, but simply complete and utter shock that it would even be a thing to try.
It was more of a "What the fuck?" expression than one that was meant to suggest I was in any way outraged or that I actually thought I knew better than the people who were doing this.
It sincerely (and still) makes absolutely no sense to me to be trying this sort of thing without also trying right from the beginning to also get as much power as you can get from the reaction to feed back and try sustain it until at least you get to a self-sustaining system, after which of course, once you've got there, you can start drawing useful power.
Anything else isn't being "maintained" in the first place... it's just putting a whole lot of energy into making a brilliant fusion reaction that is going entirely to waste.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It sincerely (and still) makes absolutely no sense to me to be trying this sort of thing
We get that it makes no sense to you, no need to keep repeating. Maybe try to get some perspective here. It would help if you educated yourself a bit more about the difference between engineering and research.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
What?
Deuterium is extracted from seawater and tritium makes the hands on your analog watch glow. Plus they sell it on Amazon. Can't be all that dangerous.
Haven't looked into this in a long time, but that could be false. The sun is big, really BIG. It is also made of fuel (hydrogen). It very well could be not producing more power than it absorbs. We do know that suns do not last forever. Eventually they run out of reaction and die. It is just that because it is so big, contains so much fuel, and I suppose is probably pretty efficient, it just takes a very long time (billions of years). However all of that is a matter of scale. As a thought experiment how many of those tomak reactors would fit into the volume of the sun, or even probably more applicable the amount of plasma that it uses... I'm gonna go with "a lot", where that is a pretty significant understatement. It's just that we don't have the capability to create something as large as the sun, nor access to that amount of fuel, and even if we did it wouldn't be a very practical application. The idea is something like the sun, but a billion times smaller (or more who knows with the scales we're talking about), that is efficient enough to use a reasonable amount of fuel over a reasonable amount of time for practical usage.
Toppings may be unexpected....
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment