Don't count on nuclear fusion any time soon

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Please have a look at this article which describes the difficulties in getting a controlled fusion reaction to yield as much energy as the energy needed to initiate it.

http://www.nytimes.c...tml?ref=science

Yoda says, do not your breath hold until controlled fusion get we else blue turn you will.

ruveyn

link isnt working,

also are they talking about pulsed or sustained fusion.

very different procceses and difficulties.

Try http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/24/us/24 ... ef=science

It matters not. No one has yet gotten as much energy out as they have put in.

Fusion has been thirty years in the future since 1960. A hundred years from now it will still be thirty years in the future.

ruveyn

as was (pseudo)photosynthetic solar cells yet they had a recent breaktrough and are now a very real technology.

there have been localized positive net energy in even sustained fusion, the trouble there is resonant turbulens in the plasma.
teh z-pinch have gotten ignition but they have difficulties getting a reading in the multi million volt atmosphere of the test chamber
and it seems they have an idea of what is wrong at the NIF.

however to my knowledge no power has ever been captured from fusion yet.

most technology with no merit whatsoever will be based on faulty theories, fusion is not, it is plagued by being vastly more complex than what originally thought, so instead of saying they move nowhere i think it would be more fair to say previous (and maybe contemporary) researchers underestimated the challenge.

Last edited by Oodain on 27 Jun 2011, 12:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Something similar to the Z machine could do it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine

Much simpler and better that the other propositions so far.

Really, fusion is the future, if not there is no future...

What a pile of money has been spent playing Startrek.

Consider the same spent on solar, and what it would be producing per day, for twenty years.

We will NEVER have net positive fusion reactors until we can create artificial gravity. Until we do, the amount of energy to sustain the reaction will always be more than you get from it. Also, once we can create gravity, just put a bunch of it on one side of a flywheel. Instant perpetual motion. No need for fusion.

Not true. We do have fusion power -- it is called the sun. It manifests itself as the wind and thermal differences at different depths of the ocean. Also sun powered microwave stations in orbit can beam down power to the ground rather safely.

More practically by using thorium reactors we can have a thousand years of fission power without the nasty radioactive residuals.

And there is always geothermal power. There is enough heat Down There to last us a billion years, not that our species will last that long.

ruveyn