The Future Is Now - 5 Ways Fusion Will Change The World

[John Markley]

The Future Is Now - 5 Ways Fusion Will Change The World

Harnessing the power of fusion is becoming less sci-fi and more reality every day - how would accomplishing this change our world?

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[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Heat the core to a temperature of 15 million degrees Kelvin

Instructions unclear; kitchen oven settings won't go that high. halppp.

OT: Nice and informative article, especially the bit about fusion reactors, I feel like that needs to be stamped on everyone's forehead everywhere, so fear mongering can stop getting in the way of science and energy needs.

 

[P-89 Scorpion]

5 ways? so why only 4 in the article.

 

[Zontar]

5 ways? so why only 4 in the article.

We got short changed it seems.

Though something I'm wondering is how much energy would it take to reach 10% the speed of light? Because at that speed a species could take over a galaxy before they evolve into another race.

 

[KaraFang]

hang on hang on.... I read David Weber.

He never says in the Honor Harrington series that the fusion cores cause a chain reaction etc... in most of his books its the magbottle FAILURE that's the issue, causing super dense, kept under pressure, million degree+ plasma to expand outwards.

now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that would vaporise pretty much everything around it, and could certainly cripple a vast portion of a ship it's in, if the ship is about six thousand meteres in length.

When a Mag bottle in a core in those books goes, the ships are often left as hulks, damaged by weapon fire, and huge gaping holes and twisted metal in the area of the core if the bottle goes/breaks the ships back (ie melting THROUGH it before the reaction stops).

Even if they eject the core, the expanding plasma cloud would melt INTO the hull, doing extreme damage.

Anyone else read Weber? I'm trying to think where he states a fusion core failure explodes and causes a chain reaction style explosion...

 

[Albino Boo]

hang on hang on.... I read David Weber.

He never says in the Honor Harrington series that the fusion cores cause a chain reaction etc... in most of his books its the magbottle FAILURE that's the issue, causing super dense, kept under pressure, million degree+ plasma to expand outwards.

now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that would vaporise pretty much everything around it, and could certainly cripple a vast portion of a ship it's in, if the ship is about six thousand meteres in length.

When a Mag bottle in a core in those books goes, the ships are often left as hulks, damaged by weapon fire, and huge gaping holes and twisted metal in the area of the core if the bottle goes/breaks the ships back (ie melting THROUGH it before the reaction stops).

Even if they eject the core, the expanding plasma cloud would melt INTO the hull, doing extreme damage.

Anyone else read Weber? I'm trying to think where he states a fusion core failure explodes and causes a chain reaction style explosion...

The actual volume of plasma required is very low. All the current fusion reactors have suffered containment failures but not once has the reactor vessel been holed

 

[John Markley]

5 ways? so why only 4 in the article.

Bit of a technical mishap not showing one of the pages properly, sorry! Will be fixed shortly

Edit: Done! Article is now fully armed and operational!

 

[John Markley]

hang on hang on.... I read David Weber.

He never says in the Honor Harrington series that the fusion cores cause a chain reaction etc... in most of his books its the magbottle FAILURE that's the issue, causing super dense, kept under pressure, million degree+ plasma to expand outwards.

now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that would vaporise pretty much everything around it, and could certainly cripple a vast portion of a ship it's in, if the ship is about six thousand meteres in length.

When a Mag bottle in a core in those books goes, the ships are often left as hulks, damaged by weapon fire, and huge gaping holes and twisted metal in the area of the core if the bottle goes/breaks the ships back (ie melting THROUGH it before the reaction stops).

Even if they eject the core, the expanding plasma cloud would melt INTO the hull, doing extreme damage.

Anyone else read Weber? I'm trying to think where he states a fusion core failure explodes and causes a chain reaction style explosion...

You may be correct about the destruction being caused by escaping plasma rather than a fusion reaction; it's been a while. Either way, though, a fusion reactor couldn't cause the sort of havoc Weber describes. To expand on what albino boo said: The energy release per gram of fuel from fusion is vast compared to other sources, so the amount of fuel you'd have actually in the reactor in a plasma state at any one time is pretty small. The reactors on an Honor Harrington universe ship of the wall are doubtless burning though hydrogen a lot faster than an experimental device on 21st century Earth, so I wouldn't want to be working in the power room when someone blows a hole in the thing, but it wouldn't be anything like the catastrophe Weber envisions.

(I poke fun, but I actually quite like Weber. I suspect this is just him taking his Age of Sail inspirations too far and transferring the idea of a magazine explosion into a context where it doesn't fit.)

Though something I'm wondering is how much energy would it take to reach 10% the speed of light? Because at that speed a species could take over a galaxy before they evolve into another race.

Depends on the amount of mass you're accelerating and how efficiently your propulsion uses energy, but the short answer is: a lot. There was a study in the 1970s by scientists at the British Interplanetary Society into the idea of unmanned ships that could make one-way trips to nearby stars, propelled by fusion engines running on deuterium/helium-3 reactions. The design they came up with could reach 12% of lightspeed after about four years of acceleration. At launch, it would mass 54,000 metric tons- of which 50,000 would be fuel! That would be enough to get the other 4,000 tons to Alpha Centauri or Barnard's Star in only a few decades. (Though not enough to STOP once they got there...)

 

[Zontar]

Depends on the amount of mass you're accelerating and how efficiently your propulsion uses energy, but the short answer is: a lot. There was a study in the 1970s by scientists at the British Interplanetary Society into the idea of unmanned ships that could make one-way trips to nearby stars, propelled by fusion engines running on deuterium/helium-3 reactions. The design they came up with could reach 12% of lightspeed after about four years of acceleration. At launch, it would mass 54,000 metric tons- of which 50,000 would be fuel! That would be enough to get the other 4,000 tons to Alpha Centauri or Barnard's Star in only a few decades. (Though not enough to STOP once they got there...)

JESUS, a 25:1 fuel to mass ratio for a one way trip with only enough gas to get moving and come to a stop? Please for the love of god tell me someone found an alternative, more efficient means of moving stuff in space then fusion. I'm not letting the dream of humanity escaping this system die because of pesky physics.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Depends on the amount of mass you're accelerating and how efficiently your propulsion uses energy, but the short answer is: a lot. There was a study in the 1970s by scientists at the British Interplanetary Society into the idea of unmanned ships that could make one-way trips to nearby stars, propelled by fusion engines running on deuterium/helium-3 reactions. The design they came up with could reach 12% of lightspeed after about four years of acceleration. At launch, it would mass 54,000 metric tons- of which 50,000 would be fuel! That would be enough to get the other 4,000 tons to Alpha Centauri or Barnard's Star in only a few decades. (Though not enough to STOP once they got there...)

JESUS, a 25:1 fuel to mass ratio for a one way trip with only enough gas to get moving and come to a stop? Please for the love of god tell me someone found an alternative, more efficient means of moving stuff in space then fusion. I'm not letting the dream of humanity escaping this system die because of pesky physics.

while it's questionable if humankind will reach the point where we are colonizing planets in other galaxies before we kill ourselves somehow, I don't doubt that we will figure out a method of getting there quicker/more efficiently, look how much science (our understanding of at least) and technology has advanced in the past 30 years alone, we'll get there...

Spoiler: meesa thinks...

although I could be entirely wrong!

 

[Albino Boo]

Depends on the amount of mass you're accelerating and how efficiently your propulsion uses energy, but the short answer is: a lot. There was a study in the 1970s by scientists at the British Interplanetary Society into the idea of unmanned ships that could make one-way trips to nearby stars, propelled by fusion engines running on deuterium/helium-3 reactions. The design they came up with could reach 12% of lightspeed after about four years of acceleration. At launch, it would mass 54,000 metric tons- of which 50,000 would be fuel! That would be enough to get the other 4,000 tons to Alpha Centauri or Barnard's Star in only a few decades. (Though not enough to STOP once they got there...)

JESUS, a 25:1 fuel to mass ratio for a one way trip with only enough gas to get moving and come to a stop? Please for the love of god tell me someone found an alternative, more efficient means of moving stuff in space then fusion. I'm not letting the dream of humanity escaping this system die because of pesky physics.

The problem is that you need reaction mass to shoot out the back to drive forward and that means having a huge amount of fuel to accelerate to the required velocity. Even if you used anti matter, with its 100% mass conversion to energy, to heat the plasma, you will still need the reaction mass to create the acceleration.

 

[Zontar]

The problem is that you need reaction mass to shoot out the back to drive forward and that means having a huge amount of fuel to accelerate to the required velocity. Even if you used anti matter, with its 100% mass conversion to energy, to heat the plasma, you will still need the reaction mass to create the acceleration.

But is the ratio more reasonable then 25:1 for the fuel/everything else mass ratio for a trip?

 

[Albino Boo]

The problem is that you need reaction mass to shoot out the back to drive forward and that means having a huge amount of fuel to accelerate to the required velocity. Even if you used anti matter, with its 100% mass conversion to energy, to heat the plasma, you will still need the reaction mass to create the acceleration.

But is the ratio more reasonable then 25:1 for the fuel/everything else mass ratio for a trip?

Basically no. Using antimatter would like using petrol instead of coal a in steam engine. Its a higher density energy source but you are still heating the same amount of water. The big difference would be that you could use ordinary hydrogen instead of He3 and H2, massively reducing costs.

<.< could you maybe send out fuel caches in advance in preparation along the route, so that as the craft went along, it would jettison previous tanks and pick up the other ones?

That way it wouldn't need to carry all the fuel it has at once, just enough to get it to the next fuel cache. Also you could compartmentalize the fuel tanks so that as they were used up they were ejected, reducing the mass you need to accelerate.

I think the engineering and navigational difficulty of finding something and docking at an appreciable percentage of the speed light would make that rather unlikely. What you could do is eject smaller probes at say 100 tons each which would require less reaction mass to slow down and explore the target system.

 

[Zontar]

The problem is that you need reaction mass to shoot out the back to drive forward and that means having a huge amount of fuel to accelerate to the required velocity. Even if you used anti matter, with its 100% mass conversion to energy, to heat the plasma, you will still need the reaction mass to create the acceleration.

But is the ratio more reasonable then 25:1 for the fuel/everything else mass ratio for a trip?

Basically no. Using antimatter would like using petrol instead of coal a in steam engine. Its a higher density energy source but you are still heating the same amount of water. The big difference would be that you could use ordinary hydrogen instead of He3 and H2, massively reducing costs.

So unless we find a way to create stable wormholes or some other means of bending the laws of physics the only means of getting to another system would be using a 25:1 ratio of fuel to everything else ratio for trips that will hate 10 times as long in years as the distance is in light years.

Well, I guess we can always develop stasis or use embryos as the backbone of colonization efforts with a too small for subsistence crew for the trip.

 

[Albino Boo]

So unless we find a way to create stable wormholes or some other means of bending the laws of physics the only means of getting to another system would be using a 25:1 ratio of fuel to everything else ratio for trips that will hate 10 times as long in years as the distance is in light years.

Well, I guess we can always develop stasis or use embryos as the backbone of colonization efforts with a too small for subsistence crew for the trip.

As long as you are using plasma based engines you end up with the same sort of fuel need. Especially seeing that a fair proportion of that 4000 ton mass would have to be devoted to armor. Hitting even something as small as grain of sand at that sort of speed will be a high energy impact.

What you could do is send machines to build things at high speed and humans at a lower speed so you need a smaller reaction mass and less armor. So when humans arrive the machines have already built a habitable base.

 

[P-89 Scorpion]

while it's questionable if humankind will reach the point where we are colonizing planets in other galaxies before we kill ourselves somehow, I don't doubt that we will figure out a method of getting there quicker/more efficiently, look how much science (our understanding of at least) and technology has advanced in the past 30 years alone, we'll get there...

Oh what technological progress is that?

Manned rocket-powered aircraft - North American X-15 - 7,258 km/h - 3 Oct 1967 - 48 years ago

Manned air-breathing craft - Lockheed SR-71A Blackbird - 3,530 km/h - 28 Jul 1976 - 39 years ago

Manned spacecraft - Apollo 10 - 39,896 km/h - 26 May 1969 - 46 years ago

Unmanned vehicle - Helios 2 probe - 252,792 km/h - 17 Apr 1976 - 39 years ago

The internet, computers and mobile phones are all over 30 years old as well.

 

[Zontar]

As long as you are using plasma based engines you end up with the same sort of fuel need. Especially seeing that a fair proportion of that 4000 ton mass would have to be devoted to armor. Hitting even something as small as grain of sand at that sort of speed will be a high energy impact.

What you could do is send machines to build things at high speed and humans at a lower speed so you need a smaller reaction mass and less armor. So when humans arrive the machines have already built a habitable base.

True but couldn't a more practical means of defending against small but fast travelling objects be to have a solar sail just ahead of any ship to turn small, fast travelling objects into plasma from the energy of hitting said sail, and have helium filled balloons around the ship create a magnetic field to deflect the plasma?

(on a side note, this is a pretty enjoyable topic to discuss)

 

[P-89 Scorpion]

I'm not sure I understand. Are you saying that the improvement on something isn't a technological progress? Yeah, the internet was invented a while ago, but it certainly isn't the same as it always was.

We don't connect to the internet at 56kbps with the modem going ERRREEEHERRR SHHHHHHH. Now people can get multiple mbps-gbps, also you don't have to be connected to anything to access the internet now.

<_< I mean, airplanes were invented in 1903, but I certainly wouldn't doubt our technological progress when it comes to advances in global travel.

1958 with the 707 which is as fast as any modern airliner since the original comment I was responding to is technological advances in travel speed.

Also 1903 (first manned flight in an air breathing vehicle) - 1976(fastest manned flight in an air breathing vehicle)
that's a 73 year timespan 40 years later no improvement and there are not even any planned attempts within the next decade or more.