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Yes, I know they have been saying nuclear fusion is just over the horizon for the last 50 years. But multiple reports have shown advances from different approaches that suggest significant progress is being made.
Also, the White House convened a summit on the U.S. maintaining leadership in fusion power:
Energy leaders are convening at the White House for a summit on the commercialization of clean fusion energy
Jeanne Jackson DeVoe, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
March 17, 2022, 8:22 a.m.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/03/ … ion-energy
Robert Clark
Last edited by RGClark (2022-03-17 16:12:42)
Old Space rule of acquisition (with a nod to Star Trek - the Next Generation):
“Anything worth doing is worth doing for a billion dollars.”
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For RGClark ... best wishes for success with this interesting new topic with fusion as a theme...
Hopefully it will gather contributions as we go forward ...
Index:
Calliban re Lawson Criteria: https://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.ph … 59#p229759
Post #10: Calliban: http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 09#p230109
Muons >> Muons as spark for ignition rather than as catalyst
For those who might be interested, here is a list of all the topics our members have created with fusion in the title:
Index» Search» Topics with posts containing 'fusion'
Pages: 1
Search resultsTopic Forum Replies Last post
Fusion power in the offing? by RGClark
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 0 Today 16:23:46 by RGClarkThe fusion age has begun. by Adaptation [ 1 2 3 4 5 ]
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 104 2022-03-12 16:35:58 by SpaceNutFusion 360 Autocad Digital Design software by tahanson43206
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 1 2022-01-30 09:31:51 by tahanson43206Hybrid nuclear fission fusion technologies by tahanson43206
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 12 2022-01-05 13:11:09 by tahanson43206Companion for Fission/Fusion as a power source for all human needs by tahanson43206
Life support systems 10 2022-01-02 16:37:02 by CallibanNASA funds Direct Drive Fusion Propulsion by Tom Kalbfus
Interplanetary transportation 3 2021-10-03 14:45:52 by tahanson43206Nuclear Fusion in Orbit or Deep Space High Vacuum by tahanson43206
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 3 2021-08-16 11:36:44 by tahanson43206Fission / Fusion as a power source for all human needs by Calliban
Life support systems 1 2021-06-18 13:23:28 by tahanson43206Fusion propulsion crowdfunding by Rusakov
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 9 2021-02-22 16:52:18 by tahanson43206A hot fusion reactor by Rusakov
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 2 2020-10-29 19:59:45 by tahanson43206Lattice Fusion by tahanson43206
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 2 2020-09-28 17:11:18 by tahanson43206Cold fusion for real? by louis
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 1 2018-06-08 07:18:34 by louisLENR/cold fusion looks real and Japan is leading the way by louis
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 12 2018-02-01 16:27:58 by VoidFusion Power, and Why I'm Skeptical of It by JoshNH4H [ 1 2 ]
Science, Technology, and Astronomy 36 2017-11-30 04:49:53 by elderflowerKinetic impact induced fusion by Antius
Interplanetary transportation 10 2016-10-27 11:50:45 by JoshNH4HCan we use Lockheed's 100 Megawatt Fusion reactor for a Mars Mission? by Tom Kalbfus
Human missions 5 2016-05-08 12:53:26 by Tom KalbfusLow Exhaust Velocity Fusion Rocket by JoshNH4H
Interplanetary transportation 9 2014-10-21 03:03:58 by SpaniardMore credible than Cold Fusion, and maybe a source of Nitrogen by Void
Terraformation 1 2013-03-02 08:35:53 by TerraformerCold fusion (LENR) is for real - NASA says so by louis [ 1 2 ]
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I don't believe they are anywhere near close in developing a practical machine for power generation. If it happens it will likely be several decades away.
I think we are already very close to meeting all our energy needs at a reasonable cost with wind, solar, hydro, tidal, sea current, wave, waste to energy, biofuels, geothermal, heat pumps and osmotic generation coupled with storage through lithium batteries, iron-air batteries, hydro and green hydrogen.
Yes, I know they have been saying nuclear fusion is just over the horizon for the last 50 years. But multiple reports have shown advances from different approaches that suggest significant progress is being made.
Also, the White House convened a summit on the U.S. maintaining leadership in fusion power:
Energy leaders are convening at the White House for a summit on the commercialization of clean fusion energy
Jeanne Jackson DeVoe, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
March 17, 2022, 8:22 a.m.
https://www.princeton.edu/news/2022/03/ … ion-energyRobert Clark
Let's Go to Mars...Google on: Fast Track to Mars blogspot.com
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This link discusses the latest breakthrough.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/10/europea … sults.html
A fusion energy production of 59MJ over 5 seconds. That is just shy of 12MW. That is mostly neutron energy deposited in the tokamak walls (about 10MW) and about 2MW deposited as thermal energy into the plasma by alpha heating. In contrast, about 700MW of electrical power are consumed to maintain both magnetic confinement and plasma heating.
https://news.newenergytimes.net/2021/10 … s-reactor/
If that 12MW power output can be captured as heat in the reactor walls and converted to electric power with 50% efficiency, this latest experiment would have generated about 1% as much electrical energy as it consumed.
One of the critical limitations in magnetic fusion is the achievable magnetic pressure provided by the confinement coils. The plasma is thermalised, meaning that the energy of individual particles follows a gaussian distribution. To contain the plasma reliably, the magnetic field pressure must exceed the thermal pressure of the plasma (which is a function of average temperature) by a factor of 20-100. This limits the achievable plasma pressure to 5-10 bar. The reaction rate within the plasma, scales with the square of plasma pressure. At the maximum practically achievable plasma pressure with state of the art superconducting magnets (~100T), the achievable power density of a tokamak is no more than a few MW per cubic metres. This is 1-2 orders of magnitude lower than a fission reactor and as we have seen, power generation is far too small to achieve breakeven.
One partial solution to this problem is to scale the whole system up. This naturally increases confinement time, possibly allowing a tokamak to reach breakeven in spite of the above limitations. But the resulting reactor will be huge and scaling up will do nothing to improve the power density of magnetic confinement fusion which remains extremely poor. Ultimately, a workable machine may be achievable. But an economically viable powerplant probably is not, unless a way can be found to substantially increase plasma pressure without introducing plasma instability problems.
Inertial confinement fusion faces an entirely different set of problems, which really deserve a topic of their own. In many ways, it does appear more promising than magnetic confinement, because the plasma density in an imploding pellet is several orders of magnitude greater. But driving compression using lasers is very inefficient. Ion beams are far more efficient, but the technology is relatively less mature. I believe that IC fusion could be a near term prospect. I will explain more in upcoming posts.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-03-18 05:49:06)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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This post is about fusion research in Canada...
The method under study is different from other fusion technologies reported by NewMars members.
I am skeptical of this report, and hope that additional reports will appear as NewMars members run across them.
The article was written in Spanish and translated to English. The statistics provided are ones that are unfamiliar (to me for sure) so I don't see a way to compare the results claimed to other work.
That said, here is the method reported: Magnetized Target Fusion (MTF),
Here is a URL to the report:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/c … ticle_link
Canada turns the tables on Trump: breaks all records in nuclear fusion, sparking unprecedented scientific optimism
Story by As Actualidad,Greg Heilman
Sustainable energy has become a global priority, as countries scramble to find alternatives to fossil fuels that won’t wreak havoc on the environment. And now, a Canadian company may have taken the biggest step yet toward a future powered by limitless clean energy.
General Fusion, a Vancouver-based firm, has set a historic record by achieving a fusion power output of 600 million neutrons per second. The achievement has been officially recognized by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which sees it as a major step toward stable, sustainable nuclear fusion energy.
I hope there is something to this. The article offers a link to a video.
The PI is given as Dr. Michel Laberge
And here is the link to the YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnaj4bNge2c&t=226s
The animation is well done.
The arguments presented seem (to me) to make sense.
The use of steam to drive the pistons is novel, and the use of steam to deliver power to the outside world is understandable.
Here's a bit more from the article:
The results have exceeded expectations:
Plasma density has skyrocketed—190 times higher than when experiments first began.
Particle confinement time has increased, improving plasma stability.
Magnetic field strength has grown 13-fold, allowing the plasma to remain confined under optimal conditions.
It appears that the experimenters have made progress but how this work compares to anything else is unclear.
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Here is a bit more about General Fusion...
General Fusion: Bringing Fusion Energy to Market - Fusion ...
General Fusion
https://generalfusion.comGeneral Fusion's technology solves engineering challenges facing commercial fusion practically and cost-effectively. Dr. Michel Laberge, founder and Chief ...
Careers · Leadership · About · Our Technology
General Fusion
Wikipediahttps://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › General_Fusion
For youGeneral Fusion is a Canadian company based in Richmond, British Columbia, which is developing a fusion power technology based on magnetized target fusion (MTF).
People also askWhere is General Fusion headquarters?
What fusion company did Bill Gates invest in?
Is General Fusion a public company?
Who is leading in fusion research?
Feedback
Now we have a time table (of sorts)...
What is the progress of General Fusion?
Today, General Fusion is accelerating its progress by building LM26. The fusion demonstration machine is on track to achieve transformative technical milestones in the next 24 months—1 keV in the first half of 2025, then 10 keV, and ultimately scientific breakeven equivalent (100 per cent Lawson criterion) by 2026.Nov 22, 2024
The link below points to a press release dated November of 2024, reporting in detail on the teaser we see in the original article.
https://generalfusion.com/post/general- … blication/
I remain skeptical, but am now at least tentatively persuaded that mechanical compression might make sense, as an alternative to magnetic compression.
I am reminded of the solution found for the atomic bomb.
The problem the scientists solved at Los Alamos was how to bring highly enriched Uranium/Plutonium together in a short time frame to achieve a critical mass. The method employed then and now is mechanical compression.
The Canadian scientist (Laberge) is the first I've read about to consider using mechanical compression to attempt to achieve fusion.
I'm coming away from this encounter with the impression that the approach appears to make enough sense so that investors are willing to throw some mad money at the company, to see if they can achieve success.
A detail in the report is that lithium is included in the process to make tritium, which is useful for fusion with deuterium.
The neutron density of 600 million neutrons per second probably relates (somehow) to the problem to be solved.
I hope we have at least one forum member (and possibly? more than one) who can analyze this report to see if any of it makes sense.
Things to look at closely include:
1) The idea of making the wall of the device a liquid - how is that possible
2) The idea of breeding tritium from lithium - that looks reasonable because it is familiar
3) The idea of generating steam directly from the wall of the reactor seems reasonable
4) The idea of using steam to drive pistons is 18th century solid
5) The idea of compression is familiar - that is what the folks at the Laser Lab at Berkeley are doing
What is making me skeptical is the difference between some puny sounding mechanical pistons and the Lawrence Livermore fusion facility.
I ** sure ** hope there is someone in the membership who can comment upon any of these points or others that I might have missed.
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As a follow up ....
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Gener … FQAw%3D%3D
If the link above works, it should show a Google Map of the Vancouver area, with General Fusion a short distance South of the city.
I am very familiar with the area because a company in Vancouver has been offering a webcam view of the area for many years.
There are many webcams showing the Vancouver area. This is the one I've been viewing: http://katkam.ca/
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Here's an additional follow up...
https://youtu.be/wnaj4bNge2c?t=167
If the link above works, it will start the General Fusion video at the point where the animation is showing the entire process at work.
I am wondering (a lot of things, actually) ...
1) What is that column in the center of the cylinder?
2) Is that plasma in the chamber between the cylinder and the liquid wall?
3) What is keeping that liquid wall in place?
4) What is in the piston tubes before compression?
5) What is the cylinder in the center made of?
6) Do neutrons penetrate the cylinder in the center?
Here's a YouTube video of a conference presentation by Dr. Laberge from October of 2024.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKHLPtnobSE
I haven't looked at it yet, other than to verify if is indeed about General Fusion and their current research.
Update after viewing Dr. Laberge's talk.... This is well done. The talk itself went smoothly, and the slides were helpful.
A feature of the talk is a review of the 20 years of experiment carried out to try to verify that mechanical compression makes sense.
Interestingly (compared to the fission bomb method used at Los Alamos) the early work used chemical explosives to perform compression experiments.
The company tried a variety of configurations of equipment, before arriving at the current design, which appears to be working.
I still don't know what the cylinder inside the chamber is for, but the slides made clear it has a function.
I also didn't learn anything about the liquid wall, so am looking forward to an explanation at some point.
One thing is clear! The investors have been pouring money into this venture! The equipment and personnel must have cost plenty.
However, Dr. Laberge makes the point that many billions of dollars are subsidizing the fossil fuel industry, so the cost of fusion research looks small in comparison.
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One thing that is clear for all of the proposed approaches to fusion power is that scale matters. The reason is simple. One of the inputs into the lawson criterion is average confinement time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion
Confinement time increases as the size of the system increases. Ions escape through surfaces. As scale increases, the ratio of surface area to volume decreases. And it takes more time for an ion to cross a larger confinement radius. This tells us that for any fusion system, technical viability improves as systems scale up. For inertial confinement systems, to meet the lawson criterion the following condition must be met:
Plasma density x compressed radius > 1 gram / cm2.
But there are obvious problems with achieving this in real life. Doubling the diameter of a pellet or magnetic confinement chamber, increases plasma volume by a factor of eight. That increase in size implies increased capital cost and there is a limit to what can practically be afforded. There are also limits to the size of a powerplant that can be accomodated within a national grid. A 10GWe fusion reactor would be a very difficult addition to most grid systems.
Maybe a solution to this problem is improved transmission. HVDC would allow a single unit to serve a larger geographic area.
Last edited by Calliban (2025-02-13 08:54:59)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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This article discusses muon catalysed inertial confinement fusion.
https://cds.cern.ch/record/1054754/files/p409.pdf
The article brings up a point that hadn't occured to me previously. Because the atomic radius of muonic hydrogen is 207x smaller than ordinary hydrogen, the ionisation energy of muonic atoms is about 7KeV. This means that MCF can proceed even in plasma.
One of the hurdles for MCF in an inertial confinement context, is the slowing down length of muons compared to the pellet radius, which is tiny. So the muons may not be used with perfect efficiency. There is discussion about reduced cycle time between fusion reactions in a highly compressed plasma. This increases the number of fusion events produced per muon - an important consideration, because muons are energetically expensive to produce.
One thing this article doesn't openly consider is the dynamics of an ICF scenario. At the plasma density achieved, we are not interested in whether muons can produce self-sustaining reaction conditions that are energetically favourable. The question is more whether they can result in enough heating within the centre of a compressed pellet to create detonation wave that burns through the pellet. In ICF, the muons would act as a spark plug that ignites the fuel, rather than a catalyst for steady-state conditions. So the performance requirement for muons in this scenario will be different to that considered in other MCF scenarios, where the muons are generating all of the fusion reactions. In ICF, they only need to catalyse enough reactions to heat fuel at the pellet centre to ignition conditions.
I think there are other options for hot spot ignition as well. We have discussed fusion-fission hybrid options, in which a small grain of enriched uranium at the centre of a pellet provides hot spot conditions as it is bombarded with neutrons and fission fragments stream out of it. Another option might be to place a small quantity of beryllium at the centre of the pellet. When Beryllium is bombarded with x-rays or neutrons with energy greater than 1.67MeV, it will break apart yielding 1 neutron and 2He nuclei. This will produce a lot of heating at the centre of the pellet, giving rise to a detonation wave.
Last edited by Calliban (2025-03-03 05:23:47)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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For Calliban re #8
Please take a look at the Canadian venture.
A similar sounding fusion effort is called Helion. I posted a report about Helion recently.
Pulses seem to be in the "air" right now... GW Johnson is working on an update of the Orion concept for asteroid mining.
As you probably know, the Orion concept becomes more practical the bigger the ship, because at some point fusion becomes practical, so fission can be saved for ignition.
A nice sized nickel/iron asteroid could provide the material for a decent sized Orion ship, and it could go after asteroids on an industrial scale.
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One thing that is clear for all of the proposed approaches to fusion power is that scale matters. The reason is simple. One of the inputs into the lawson criterion is average confinement time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterionConfinement time increases as the size of the system increases. Ions escape through surfaces. As scale increases, the ratio of surface area to volume decreases. And it takes more time for an ion to cross a larger confinement radius. This tells us that for any fusion system, technical viability improves as systems scale up. For inertial confinement systems, to meet the lawson criterion the following condition must be met:
Plasma density x compressed radius > 1 gram / cm2.
But there are obvious problems with achieving this in real life. Doubling the diameter of a pellet or magnetic confinement chamber, increases plasma volume by a factor of eight. That increase in size implies increased capital cost and there is a limit to what can practically be afforded. There are also limits to the size of a powerplant that can be accomodated within a national grid. A 10GWe fusion reactor would be a very difficult addition to most grid systems.
Maybe a solution to this problem is improved transmission. HVDC would allow a single unit to serve a larger geographic area.
An amusing approach to the Lawson criterion: Lorentz contraction. Many think of Lorentz contraction as relative, that is, things only appear to shrink as they go faster. This is the case in relativity theory as long as both are traveling inertially, i.e., without acceleration. However, if one is accelerated then the Lorentz contraction is absolute, i.e., both the at rest body and the accelerated body both agree that the accelerated one has shrunk.
Length Contraction is NOT an Illusion!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TxW6_E3uLuo
The situation is analogous to the twin paradox: if motion and time are relative why is it the moving twin ages more slowly? The difference is the moving twin in returning to the starting point was accelerated thus underwent actual time dilation: both he and the at rest twin agree the moving twin had his time slowed.
So whatever the factor needed for the Larsen criterion to reach sustained fusion, accelerate the target plasma at the required relativistic speed, like in atomic accelerators, so the Lorentz gamma factor equals that.
Amusingly, this might be testable in small university or even amateur labs since small accelerators such as Van de Graaff accelerators exist.
Bob Clark
Last edited by RGClark (2025-03-04 08:51:55)
Old Space rule of acquisition (with a nod to Star Trek - the Next Generation):
“Anything worth doing is worth doing for a billion dollars.”
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