Anyone else feel like we might genuinely, for-real be close to fusion?

>weapon proliferation
>fusion
What the fuck

>what is an h-bomb

My chemistry teacher in HS (really too smart for his station). Had made plans for a nuclear fusion reactor. I signed a NDA and he showed me a little bit about it (dont remember since that was years ago).

Basically the plans are there, but the means aren't

You realize an h-bomb requires fission to induce the fusion?

ITER literally just announced that they have to move their goals by 10 years and that they need $ 4 billions more...so no I don't feel that

Also Lockheed Martin is a scam, I have talked to people in the field who got to look at Lockheed project.

yes, and it doesn't have a lot to do with the fusion research that is going on right now, but i assume that's what was talking about

Fusion was recognized as an energy-releasing reaction by the early 1920s and first demonstrated in a lab in the early 1930s, nearly a century ago. There are desktop fusion reactors the size of your thumbnail (pyroelectric fusion), and kids build electrostatic fusors for science fair projects.

Net-power fusion was demonstrated with a thermonuclear detonation in the early 1950s, over half a century ago. That first one involved a big, clunky liquid deuterium tank, but thanks to lithium deuteride, thermonuclear devices have been miniaturized so you could carry them in a duffle bag, and practical devices that can devastate a city can be moved with a hand-truck.

Controlled net-power fission reactors predate the atomic bomb, and were in fact used to produce material for the Trinity test. They weren't used to actually generate electricity, but they generated heat, and making power generators was trivial. The practical challenge with fission power has been to prevent release of radioisotopes.

Fission isn't initiated or sustained by an input of energy, but by a favored reaction between fissile nuclei and free neutrons. While fusion is exothermic, the nuclei repel each other, and this repulsion must be overcome by the momentum of the nuclei flying toward each other at relativistic speed, however, the probability of fusion in any given collision is low. As such, net-power fusion is a matter of scale.

Fusion produces an abundance of high-energy, easily-multiplied neutrons. Neutrons straightforwardly convert cheap, common uranium 238 to precious, deadly plutonium 239, the key material for nuclear weapon production.

fact: If anyone had any practical means of achieving profitable fusion power they would get plenty of private funding, nor would it cost endless billions to develop it either.

>ITER literally just announced that they have to move their goals by 10 years and that they need $ 4 billions more
Well fuck. I read the OP and was about to reply with "no shit, we have ITER in construction which is planned to be operational within a few years", but this changes everything.

>practical devices that can devastate a city can be moved with a hand-truck

At this point it's just better to push hard on solar, and get back to fusion when we have better materials/know how to solve its problems.

I understand the concern but Iran built few meager centrifuges and the so called West was all over it, with Netanyahu drawing that infamous bomb pic.
What makes you think a fuckhuge installation like fusion plant enriching uranium isn't going to be noticed and closely monitored?

The point isn't that there's no way to deal with weapon proliferation threats, but simply that fusion power is a greater weapon proliferation risk than fission power.

So if you're imagining that fusion power could be the solution to the world's power generation problems, and it could be dramatically cheaper than fission power, you're dreaming. Fusion power will need to be centralized, monitored, guarded, and kept entirely out of unstable and otherwise untrustworthy countries.

This means that it can have little to no practical advantage over fission power.

An additional difficulty posed by fusion technology is that there may be no rare materials needed.

To bootstrap a fission program requires large quantities of uranium, which is mainly available from a few good deposits in the world.

Deuterium, on the other hand, is easily extracted in the quantities needed for fusion from ordinary water, any water at all, while lithium is a common material in batteries.

There is a plasma. Held in place by supercool ed magnets. No practical way to get the heat out effectively and efficiently enough to generate power.
Dichotomy. Paradox. Problem. So no. No fusion power generation in your lifetime. Meme meme meme.

>a great leap toward the self annihilation of the human race?
Literally how?

>Will it be our salvation, or a great leap toward the self annihilation of the human race?
Our salvation. Curtains for oil producing Arabs.

>Literally how?
They will be going out, and will want to go out with a bang.

>No practical way to get the heat out effectively and efficiently enough to generate power.
That's really not the problem. First of all, the plasma is giving off tremendous EM radiation, which isn't significantly affected by the containment field. Significant amounts of energy in everything from gamma rays to infrared. It's extremely hot, and of course like any hot thing it radiates heat and light. So your vacuum chamber wall is going to need cooling, which can easily be used to generate power.

Secondly, most (14 MeV) of the energy is going to come out in the form of the kinetic energy of neutrons, which also aren't significantly affected by the containment field. You're going to need to shield the coils from these, so they're going to deposit that kinetic energy in the multiplier/moderator/shield material.

Thirdly, you're going to be breeding tritium from lithium, to close your fuel cycle. The neutrons are going to need to be multiplied (this is endothermic for lead or beryllium, extremely exothermic for uranium or thorium, which are also the best multipliers, but these latter choices would make it a fusion/fission hybrid with waste disposal problems) and then absorbed by lithium-6, causing it to split into tritium and helium-4, a very strongly exothermic reaction (almost 5 MeV), more than the energy of the alpha particle (3.5 MeV) which remains in confinement to contribute heat to the fuel. Due to the necessary neutron multiplication, there will be more than one of these absorption reactions per fusion reaction.

So, each fusion reaction is going to deposit 3.5 MeV in the fuel plasma (which is copiously radiating energy to the chamber wall), and 19+ MeV somewhere outside of it.

probably, but it's not going to make much of a difference

Here's the thing: nuclear fusion is still nuclear power. This means that you can be 100% certain that every nuclear fusion plant built will be 100% custom built using proprietary parts. They also require NRC (or equivalent) licenses to operate.

Or in other words, even if it is made potentially profitable red tape in both the government and industry will bog it down. The 7th largest economy in the world, California, has three nuclear fission plants totally idle because the state can't compel itself to pay for relicensing fees. Germany is giving up on nuclear altogether and will dismantle all of their plants over the next 20 years.

anyone can make their own nuclear fusor, in fact your parents probably still have one in their home (in the form of CRT TVs)

>lean hard on solar

which would mean that by the time fusion came around, everyone would just stick with solar because it's cheaper than nuclear power

>No singularityfags post

Singularity guy is loosing his touch.

most licensing issues are with fuel and it's containment/use/disposal.

we already have fusion bombs you imbicile

harnessing fusion for energy is a different matter

I've wondered about this. How DO they get power from fusion reactors? Wouldn't the reaction event only last for a split second? That's a lot of energy to absorb all at once.

>Anyone else feel like we might genuinely, for-real be close to fusion?

nobody believes it user
lockheedmartin.com/us/products/compact-fusion.html

do you want to fuck him? You say this things in various threads

Fuck off to

Odds are it was bullshit

What the fuck is ITER's problem? They've been working on this thing since 1985 and now they're saying that they're not going to *start* fusion until 2027. How is it even possible to take 42 years to build a reactor? Other fusors like the Wendelstein 7x have been proposed and finished in the time that ITER has wasted. Why can't they just build the damn thing?

>Wendelstein 7x

I haven't heard anything about this since some german lady pressed the on button

Anybody have an update?

>which would mean that by the time fusion came around, everyone would just stick with solar because it's cheaper than nuclear power

kill yourself

>implying fusion reactors are like bombs

>Why can't they just build the damn thing?
Because it is orders of magnitude bigger than any fusion machine ever built, and the first one which is actually designed to produce a yield of fucking 10.

> How is it even possible to take 42 years to build a reactor?
Construction started in 2013 and will be finished by 2020, that's 7 years by very complex calculations.