https://www.construction-physics.com/p/will-we-ever-get-fusion-power
"Today all nuclear power reactors are driven by fission reactions, which
release energy by splitting atoms apart. But there’s another nuclear reaction
that’s potentially even more promising as an energy source: nuclear fusion.
Unlike fission, fusion releases energy by combining atoms together. Fusion is
what powers the sun and other stars, as well as the incredibly destructive
hydrogen bomb.
It’s not hard to understand the appeal of using nuclear fusion as a source of
energy. Unlike coal or gas, which rely on exhaustible sources of fuel extracted
from the earth, fusion fuel is effectively limitless. A fusion reactor could
theoretically be powered entirely by deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen with an
extra neutron), and there’s enough deuterium in seawater to power the entire
world at current rates of consumption for 26 billion years.
Fusion has many of the advantages of nuclear fission with many fewer drawbacks.
Like fission, fusion only requires tiny amounts of fuel: Fusion fuel has an
energy density (the amount of energy per unit mass) a million times higher than
fossil fuels, and four times higher than nuclear fission. Like fission, fusion
can produce carbon-free “baseload” electricity without the intermittency issues
of wind or solar. But the waste produced by fusion is far less radioactive than
fission, and the sort of “runaway” reactions that can result in a core meltdown
in a fission-based reactor can’t happen in fusion. Because of its potential to
provide effectively unlimited, clean energy, countries around the world have
spent billions of dollars in the pursuit of fusion power. Designs for fusion
reactors appeared as early as 1939, and were patented as early as 1946. The
U.S. government began funding fusion power research in 1951, and has continued
ever since.
But despite decades of research, fusion power today remains out of reach. In
the 1970s, physicists began to describe fusion as “a very reliable science…a
reactor was always just 20 years away.” While significant progress has been
made — modern fusion reactors burn far hotter, for far longer, and produce much
more power than early attempts — a net power producing reactor has still not
been built, much less one that can produce power economically. Due to the
difficulty of creating the extreme conditions fusion reactions require, and the
need to simultaneously solve scientific and engineering problems, advances in
fusion have been slow. Building a fusion reactor has been described as like the
Apollo Program, if NASA needed to work out Newton’s laws of motion as it was
building rockets.
But there’s a good chance a working fusion reactor is near. Dozens of private
companies are using decades of government-funded fusion research in their
attempts to build practical fusion reactors, and it's likely that at least one
of them will be successful. If one is, the challenge for fusion will be whether
it can compete on cost with other sources of low-carbon electricity."
Via
Fix the News:
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https://fixthenews.com/good-news-global-emotions-poverty-indonesia-bluefin-tuna/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
