Inside the Dynomak: A Fusion Technology Cheaper Than Coal

The important word in the article is &quot;experiment&quot;: As of now, most of the cost estimates and even the viability of this new type of fusion reactor are based on calculations only. It&#x27;s of course great that new types of reactors get researched, it&#x27;s just a pity that the press always seems to overreact and sell these experiments as production-ready systems to the world. This is probably the main cause for the public skepticism towards fusion energy: Too often early prototypes have been sold as working reactors.<p>BTW, there have been numerous proposed improvements over the Tokamak reactor type over the years, such as the &quot;Stellarator&quot; (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Stellarator</a>), most of them have proven too complex to be of practical use though.

From an outsider&#x27;s perspective, it kind of seems like fusion research is picking up recently, especially in terms of the diversity of approaches by relatively credible teams. Before it seemed like the credible effort was the tokamak and everything else was the domain of crackpots. If so, this seems like a good thing to me, even if most of these approaches might be doomed to failure. Should have been happening years ago.<p>I&#x27;m curious if that&#x27;s just some kind of perception filter thing, though, or if not what&#x27;s causing it.

One reason that allowed us to quickly develop fission power is that the physics is mostly linear meaning building a 1GW plant wasn&#x27;t so much more difficult once you mastered the small experimental reactors.<p>Now I worked on nuclear plants and not on fusion research but I heard that the main issue with fusion power is the non-linearity that comes along when scaling up small experiments. Things like not being really able to predict plasma behavior at industrial scale even if it works fine in the lab. Could anyone with a better understanding of the physics expand on this ?

Dr. Bussard gave a very interesting talk on his design for &quot;inertial electrostatic confinement&quot; fusion reactor: <a href="http://youtu.be/rk6z1vP4Eo8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;rk6z1vP4Eo8</a>

I&#x27;m a bit skeptical about the claim &quot;it doesn&#x27;t produce dangerous, long-term toxic waste.&quot; I&#x27;m no expert but I&#x27;ve read that fusion reactors will be producing massive amounts of neutron radiation (like the neutron bomb, AKA the &quot;real estate bomb,&quot; heh!) which ends up absorbed by the cladding of the reactor chamber and converts it to partly radioactive isotopes.<p>A consequence is that the reaction chamber walls lose their physical integrity, i.e. become brittle, so leaving them in place is not an option. Thus, when operating a fusion reactor, you&#x27;re constantly forced to replace crunchy, fusion-baked, radioactive reactor wall debris with newly built wall plates.<p>I admit to having no idea about which isotopes would be produced and what their half-life would be. If anyone can shed some light or correct me, I&#x27;d be indebted.

The article lists several other fusion approaches that are also in development. Does anyone have a real sense of the likelihood of any of these actually working? I&#x27;m optimistic, but also naïve about the engineering challenges.

Do i understand this right that with the HIT-SI3 they have already built a working dynomak that can generate a surplus of energy, albeit at a small scale, and the challenge is to make a bigger one that still works?

Like the Lockheed announcement, the goal seems to raise more funds to create more advanced prototype, so obviously the perspective sounds optimistic.

&quot;The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn’t exist&quot;<p>I&#x27;d bet on thermal solar, that is proven to work. Also smart energy management with wind and solar are all proven to work. Electric cars have big batteries which are proven to work as energy storage.

So, from what I understand, they are blowing a charged smoke-ring of plasma and then coupling it inductively as one half of a motor, so they can keep it sustained, and the more electric you feed in, the hotter and tighter and faster it goes. I want one.

&gt; The primary argument against fusion power has been that despite decades of work, it still doesn’t exist.<p>I thought it did exist but wasn&#x27;t efficient (i.e., energy in &gt; energy out)?

There seems to be a flurry of &quot;fusion&#x2F;energy breakthrough&quot; press items recently. On the one hand it&#x27;s extremely exciting, but on the other, I wonder if there&#x27;s a more sinister motive behind all the press. Cui Bono?