Re: New fusion power system test creates 300,000 degrees C plasma

On 11/29/24 20:52, john larkin wrote:

On Fri, 29 Nov 2024 20:51:22 +0100, Jeroen Belleman
<jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
 

On 11/29/24 16:27, Jan Panteltje wrote:

On a sunny day (Sat, 30 Nov 2024 01:15:15 +1100) it happened Bill Slowman
<bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in <vici9s$13umg$1@dont-email.me>:
>

On 30/11/2024 12:00 am, Jan Panteltje wrote:

A nuclear fusion startup just reached a milestone
in its bid to commercialize unlimited clean energy :
    https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/29/climate/nuclear-fusion-openstar/index.html
>
ITER inside out :-)

>
You really can't read, can you. It's got its plasma to 300,000 degrees
K, and ITER have got theirs to 150,000,000 degrees K, about 500 times
hotter. It maybe some kind of milestone for OpenStar, but they've got
lot of milestones to go before they'll have a product that they can sell.
>
And they are still trying to fuse hydrogen or deuterium, which produces
a lot of neutrons.
>
https://hb11.energy/

>
Looks a bit like that thing Larking was making stuff for, laser ignition
Not much coming from that at all.
Just playing stuff for kids/ training stuff for aspiring nuclear fishisicks..
That was discussed here last year or so.
>

is trying to fuse hydrogen and boron, which doesn't produce neutrons -
if the machine ever works it will last a whole lot longer than hydrogen
fusion machines, which will be damaged by the stray neutrons they
produce, if they ever work.

>
Would be nice to have small portable power sources, for in the home and cars etc etc.

>

Plutonium is dangerous, but the Viking spacecraft are still working after many decades.
[...]

>
It would be lovely to have 50kWTh or so of PU238 in the basement,
if it could be made cheaply enough. Power for a lifetime for the
whole house and then some.

 That woud warm up the planet nicely. You can't turn it off.
 

Pretty negligible, I think. Assuming about 3e9 homes on this earth,
it would add about 0.1% to the heat budget of the whole earth.
As a side effect, it would reduce CO2 emissions by a whole lot,
so the overall result may well be a drop in global average
temperature.

>
238Pu and its decay daughters are predominantly alpha emitters,
which is easy to contain. An important problem would be to make
it fool-proof: Not an easy task. I wouldn't want it in a car,
for example.

 Sounds like the "universal solvent", hard to contain.

It's *easy* to contain. It's the fools that are a problem. We
have no shortage of those, unfortunately.
That is not to say it would solve all problems. Producing
enough 238Pu cheaply enough would be a problem. There would be
lots of red tape too. There would be hard-to-predict economic
effects. I think the technical problem of designing a compact
package producing 15kW or so of electricity and enough heat
for hot water and space heating would be comparatively minor.
Jeroen Belleman