Breakthrough in Nuclear Fusion? - Prof. Dennis Whyte

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maccam94 · 2021-12 · Strong recommendation

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has addressed all of those issues: 1. The higher field strength from the new HTS magnets eliminates turbulence. 2. The ARC reactor will use a FLiBe molten salt blanket to capture energy from neutrons and breed tritium to be used in the fusion reaction. 3. The ARC reactor is designed to have a swappable 2cm thick vacuum chamber, which is the component subjected to the most neutron radiation (everything else is shielded by the molten salt blanket). These chambers are expected to last a year, and while they are moderately radioactive waste, the amount of material is relatively small and they should become safe in the order of a decade. I highly recommend watching Dr. Whyte's talks on YouTube, he discusses the challenges, design, and performance in an approachable way. There's a timestamp index in the comments on this video: [VIDEO]

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runnerup · 2021-11 · Strong recommendation

> “People say nuclear is expensive in the West, but they forget to say it’s expensive because of interest rates,” Morin said. It's still a valid criticism if: - They could get those high interest rates from the return on other capital projects (nuclear less return than something else) - All externalities are included in costs We only have so much labor/material/energy available, and we do have to have some way of allocating them to the things with the most return. The big issue, obviously, is that tons and tons of negative externalities aren't priced in to most economic endeavors, that might make fission look a lot better. It might make it look a lot worse. Personally I'm hoping Elon/Mackenzie/Gates/Buffet/etc decide to throw a few dozen billion at fusion. I think its time truly is nigh. If you haven't watched this yet, it's definitely worth your time. Rather than being a super opinionated think-piece, it instead does a fantastic job walking the viewer through: - high level nuclear fusion engineering performance curves / the engineering design contraint space - the current state of nuclear fusion research (as of 5 years ago) and - breaks down why some new smaller reactors will likely begin construction soon and counter-intuitively, the most recently started ones may be completed before a fusion reactor that first broke ground 25 years ago and is still very much being actively built [VIDEO] Also worth noting that interesting things happen when you assume you can have "large" a

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cromwellian · 2020-12 · Strong recommendation

Watch Robert Whyte's presentation. [VIDEO] The basic problems have all been solved, the science has been solved too. Tokamaks have already made net fusion power. The only difference between JET, which already succeeded, and ARC, is using Magnets with 2.6x the field strength. The B^4 power scaling, gives you about 50x the power, so ARC will generate 500 MW of power whereas JET (remember, already proven engineering), generated 10MW. So without a doubt, this is just an engineering problem at this point. A prototype device that didn't have to be maintained, could be built exactly like any other Tokamak, just with REBCO magnets, and you'd have the required fusion power. To get the required electric power, and add in maintenance, you need to at the FliBe liquid blanket, replacable toroid sections, and a heat exchanger, but again, these are known engineering problems with known solutions, akin to knowing that landing a rocket is possible, but figuring out the grid fins, heat shield, landing legs, and guidance software. Fusion devices on a small scale have been proving the plasma physics since the 90s. We don't have fusion yet simply because of people being conservative and sticking with traditional "known to work" magnets, which is why ITER is a huge, hulking monstrosity. As Dr Whyte says, cost scales by R, R can be reduced by a factor of 10 from ITER simply by using different magnets, so ARC will produce the same power as ITER, but significantly smaller and cheaper. The basic paper

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