Comments on: Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water

By: RWJ

RWJ — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 21:43:03 +0000

Electric power with an efficiency of more than 90% is possible if using aneutronic reactor, without radioactive material(tritium).

By: Why fusion won’t provide power

Why fusion won’t provide power — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:58:26 +0000

[...] fusion power is rarely mentioned and not on the research agenda. When I discussed it earlier, in “Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water”, I hadn’t seen this (quietly damning) report, which I think is worth [...]

By: Mark Bahner

Mark Bahner — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:02:12 +0000

Hi,

I agree that fusion is the “ultimate” energy source. But have you considered liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTRs)?

Mark

By: Slim Fusion | alt.energy review

Slim Fusion | alt.energy review — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 16:58:59 +0000

[...] Fusion Power: A New Way to Boil Water (metamodern.com) [...]

By: Eric Drexler

Eric Drexler — Tue, 05 May 2009 02:14:50 +0000

See the next post, “Nanotechnology and Nuclear Reactions”.

By: The Chad

The Chad — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:20:51 +0000

As a more direct way to generate energy, couldn’t one design a ‘nuclear combustion engine’? Similar to a car engine, maybe one atom gets fed into the combustion chamber at a time? All sorts of technical limitations, of course, but in theory wouldn’t that work pretty well?

By: Eric Drexler

Eric Drexler — Sun, 03 May 2009 21:38:19 +0000

@ Al -- Speaking of bombs, there was a 1970s proposal for controlled fusion (PACER) that had well-understood physics and guaranteed a large energy gain: it would have worked by scaling up the means for controlling the energy output, rather than by scaling down the energy source. The idea was to generate heat (and boil water) by detonating a series of more-or-less conventional thermonuclear explosive devices in a very large,very strong underground chamber. It didn’t become very popular.

By: Al

Al — Sun, 03 May 2009 20:46:34 +0000

I do recall there being some MCF designs where you could draw power directly from the reactions themselves—something about the plasma generating its own current or something like that. But obviously I don’t recall exactly how it would work, and if nobody is pursuing it, it can’t be that easy.

The problem with fusion is that it has always been the “next best thing” since the early 1950s, but it has utterly failed to live up to expectations. (It is, for a variety of very important technical reasons, very, very hard. So far we have managed to make it work well only with an atomic bomb as its starter, and the other place it seems to work well is inside the Sun. Both are pretty extreme environments!) Until it is demonstrated that one can actually get more energy out of it than it takes to start the reaction, it isn’t going to feature into any our *current* energy needs. We don’t currently have 20-40 years to figure out how to do it; we need energy solutions that can be implemented in the next 5-10 years. If I were the Obama administration, I’d fund some research into fusion, but it simply could not be part of a short-term (next few decades) energy policy.