Clean Fusion Power Could Be Feasible by 2017

[GonzoGamer]

So how long until big oil buys this out and then buries it to never be seen again?

They may not need to. Lockheed is mostly in the pockets of Republicans. They may just be developing this so they can own it & bury it.

 

[Airon]

Neat.

Thanks for the headsup.

It's much more promising to have many small 100 MW units spread all over, than to have a few really large units. I do hope they make the required progress in the predicted time frame. We can always use more upsides to our future.

 

[Ironside]

Even if they kicked out a working fusion reactor today, we'd still be using petroleum products. Not like we can power cars or make plastics with a fusion reactor.

Well you don't actually need oil to create plastics - they can be made with vegetables and whatnot, but yeh we dont really have an alternate method of personal transportation atm. The problem of Hydrogen powered cars is that Hydrogen is very difficult to extract and so would currently make it a poor choice of fuel.

So wait: do they actually have fusion working? I would assume not, otherwise it would be all over the news, and if they don't then this announcement means nothing!

Well technically we can already do Hydrogen fusion - its just a matter of harnessing it and making it useful. The amount of power used in the Toroid thing in southern France just to contain the fusion reactions is rather high as is the power needed to maintain the reaction itself and so may not make the net output power very good. If the project in the article can make improve upon this it should be very interesting (I would personally be putting a lot of money into thorium reactors though)

So how long until big oil buys this out and then buries it to never be seen again?

Why would they do that? Most of the big oil companies have diversified into renewables and whatnot these days since they know oil wont last forever - they might buy the fusion tech, but they would be using it to make billions of dollars of revenue rather than burying it. Besides most of these fusion projects are carried out by governments - such as the EU one in southern France and I believe the giant laser one in the States is as well, so big oil wouldnt really have an option to buy it out.

 

[omega 616]

It's shit like this that makes me want to be born now and not 89.

I would give up seeing the turn of the millennium, all those 1/1/11, 2/2/22 dates and any other "very few people will ever experience" moments, just so I can have an extra 23 years of future tech. Imagine dieing today, what future stuff are you going to miss? Not to mention future games.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well you talk all sorts of pretty but you need to put a working concept where your mouth is, tokamak reactors weren't put built by idiots, if your ultimate design works so much better then that is what would be built this very moment.

But hey I would love to be proven wrong and see an actual truck mounted city grade power supply.

 

[swimon]

I have a very optimistic outlook on technology in general but I'm rather skeptical of this. Fusion have a history of being perpetually "just around the corner" while promising the world. Even his projections for ITER is somewhat overly rosy (matching global demands by 2080).

I mean if this works it would be amazing, it could very well mean an end to extreme poverty, but I remain unconvinced.

Life is merely an orderly decay of energy states, and survival requires the continual discovery of new energy to pump into the system. He who controls the sources of energy controls the means of survival

 

[Rblade]

within 5 years is science talk for, we can kind of see it happen, at some point, you know, eventually, assuming several people have more genius breakthroughs.

colour me skeptical.

but if it is true, IF. Holy shit interstellar space travel batman

p.s. o and everyone thinking oil companies would go out of business, let us not forget plastic, medicine and all the other meriads of refinates that come from oil refinement. The stuff will still be black gold just less likely to run out.

 

[tkioz]

So how long until big oil buys this out and then buries it to never be seen again?

These conspiracy theories fail because of the same reason people suggest them... MONEY... Oil might have buy the rights to the designs... but they aren't going to sit on it because it would make them MORE money then selling oil does... they aren't moustache twirlers, they are greedy bastards, which is exactly why they would build them... MONEY

 

[Chimpzy_v1legacy]

as I'm sure there are logistics to making it commercially viable

Unfortunately, this is probably the one and only requirement for fusion power to become widespread. Necessity be damned.

 

[Aeshi]

Would that be the same way we were all meant to have jet-packs and flying cars by now?

 

[Daveman]

Nah, that's a way too optimistic date in my opinion, not that I'm the full blown scientist here. We only had sustainable fusion generation a couple of years ago, expecting that much of a leap is a lot. That said, I think maybe if we double the amount of time, i.e. by 2021, we might be a bit more on the money for getting something like this up and running. In the mean time, lets make the transition from burning hyrdrocarbons over to fuel cells and batteries and work on really cranking those efficiencies up. (Lol, spellcheck says "did you mean inefficiencies?")

 

[infohippie]

I am a bit dubious in that this design is going to do deuterium/tritium fusion. That particular reaction releases 80% of its energy as fast moving neutrons, which interact with the shielding and other equipment to produce radioactive isotopes. Any D/T fusion reactor is going to produce large amounts of low-level radioactive waste in the form of transmuted elements from all the surrounding structure and shielding, as well as losing most of the reaction energy to accelerating these neutrons rather than generating heat that can be captured and used to drive generators. I would be interested to see whether their design could overcome the higher Coulomb barrier of deuterium/helium3 fusion, which releases almost no neutrons at all.

 

[Da Orky Man]

I am a bit dubious in that this design is going to do deuterium/tritium fusion. That particular reaction releases 80% of its energy as fast moving neutrons, which interact with the shielding and other equipment to produce radioactive isotopes. Any D/T fusion reactor is going to produce large amounts of low-level radioactive waste in the form of transmuted elements from all the surrounding structure and shielding, as well as losing most of the reaction energy to accelerating these neutrons rather than generating heat that can be captured and used to drive generators. I would be interested to see whether their design could overcome the higher Coulomb barrier of deuterium/helium3 fusion, which releases almost no neutrons at all.

I believe a Dueterium-Tritium reactor usually has an inbuilt lithium jacket. Tritium is incredibly rare, but can be gotten by bombarding lithium with high-energy neutrons. Kills two stones with one bird.
I think I once saw another design that used a rather clever layering design in the reactor walls that could produce heat from neutron bombardment.

 

[MorganL4]

So how long until big oil buys this out and then buries it to never be seen again?

depends on if they actually think it will work

Even if they kicked out a working fusion reactor today, we'd still be using petroleum products. Not like we can power cars or make plastics with a fusion reactor.

Well electric cars are becoming more common every day........ They are still insanely outnumbered, to be sure.... But we CAN power cars with electricity which is what this would generate. (assuming it works)


If this works, I would be ecstatic!!!

 

[Peaco]

Of course, no military project ever comes in under budget, but the F-35's total pricetag is almost two trillion(!) dollars and growing.

The actual cost of the F-35 project development up to this point is around $11 billion, not trillions of dollars. That figure (being and estimated $1.5 trillion) is the projected cost to purchase, equip, and maintain all ~2,400 F-35's the U.S. plans to acquire, aggregated over the fighter's 50-year lifespan.

 

[Pikey Mikey]

In 2010 America was meant to have cold fusion. That went well. *More text*

As soon as I read that, the quote "Thank God for cold fusion" from Star Craft (1) popped into my head.