Plenty of people have already explained why 99% of the ventures are plain scams.
Small nuclear fission reactors are much more practical and already exist. In the extremely unlikely scenario that such a small reactor actually blows up (pretty much impossible by design) it’s an explosion smaller than some traditional bombs and way smaller than Hiroshima. But the only realistic risk is efficient supply chain of fuel and disposal of nuclear waste- again there are risks here but they are outweighed by not polluting the atmosphere with co2. We should use a lot more nuclear energy now, until renewables are more reliable.
Renewables also use lots of rare earth metals and generally are resource intensive to build and most components have a pretty short lifespan so for now nuclear is the greener way to produce power.
Lots of interesting fusion startups. This group is using a gun type design that reminds of the Fat Man atomic bomb [0]. Except here it's a fusion target hit by high speed slug causing is to rapidly compression and undergo fusion. The key things is that unlike the NIF they have a clear path to power extraction. In production they are planning to use a chamber with circular sheets of falling liquid lithium to capture the fusion neutrons then transfer the heat [1]. Breeding some tritium along the way.<p>0 - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun-type_fission_weapon</a><p>1 - <a href="https://firstlightfusion.com/technology/power-plan" rel="nofollow">https://firstlightfusion.com/technology/power-plan</a>
I've asked before but didn't get an answer. If we can achieve stable fusion, what are the plans for getting the power out?<p>The guy in the article said you just do the same thing as coal or any other plant - generate steam. But we're talking about millions of degrees vs a couple thousand. Does it really scale that simply?
One thing I don’t understand about fusion is the mechanics of gain factors. If we can achieve a fusion reactor with a very small gain factor of say 1.01, is that sufficient to kick off an energy revolution, or do we need something more extreme like 10x or 100x?<p>I suppose it boils down to what the “saturation threshold” of nuclear reactors is, where you can’t pump more energy in without breaking the thing.<p>In any case, what are the benchmarks that engineers are shooting for?
"There are three boxes we need to tick, in order to overcome this repulsion I mentioned before and get the nuclei very close. And this is not an easy feat. We need high temperature (think a hundred million degrees), high density (have a lot of these nuclei in a very small space), and keep the nuclei in that small space long enough for them to “react”. "<p>High temperatures are usually used because the nuclei must have a lot of force to counter that of the liked charged partner. The most obvious way to do this is with heating the plasma because individual particles, when they collide head on, can have the combined momentum to plow their way together.<p>But Philo T Farnsworth found a clever way to get them close with electrostatic forces. If it weren't for those darned wires.<p>With millions of degrees that plasma viciously expands. An even more incredible contraction force must be used to keep this together long enough for "interesting results". This is done with inertial confinement like the Hbomb or emulations of it. Magnetic confinement merely slows the expansion, but it must at some point touch the walls.<p>Actually, heat is not wanted. You only need to get the nuclei close enough that they quantum tunnel to each other to relieve their own stress in their environment. 2 Dueterons spread farther than helium3 does. Think of it like phase changes in condensed matter. Except we don't care at all about electrons, simply move them somewhere that the fuel ions wish to congregate at. Fortunately this can be a single point, as charges are concentrated on pointy things, as Faraday found in his experiments. The other side is full of the fuel ions. They don't have to be hot but warming them a little in an environment that is under 770 giga-pascals of pressure might be enough to moderate a nuclear combination process. It isn't hard to create two chambers in a crystal and make them undergo reductions or oxidations to free ions or electrons (tragically this happens with lithium ion batteries all the time). If they are surrounded in an environment that is very hard, very good dielectric strength, ions or electrons can be freed with no where to go. This is known as a meta-stable state and many crystal patterns exhibit this. The best dielectric known is diamond and it's also the hardest and has a ton of other helpful properties. If diamond couldn't do this, then nothing can. A mad genius with money and time would not have to go further than it to rule it out completely.<p>Say my fancy idea doesn't work, if colliding macro projectiles is something useful to the author have they tried something like levitating pyrolytic carbon and propelling it with laser ablation? It could be done in a loop if part of the magnet can de-energize fast enough to allow the tiny block of carbon to escape.<p>The plan they have seems very Wile E. Coyote to me but fun and cool. I hope they succeed.