My electric chainsaw, hedge trimmer and weedwhacker are all perfectly feasible. They are cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, cheaper to maintain, much quieter and far less polluting.
You have that backwards. The only fusion generators that come closer to creating enough power to balance the power needed to produce fusion are very large. There has been a breakthrough in super conducting material and the physical limitations of containing the radiation fusion produces. Making the reactor smaller is the key to overcoming some of the problems but right now it is only a graduate students paper and not materially being funded.
I imagine once ignited it could economically power by . . . . . Like I have thought of as a kid in the fifties FUSION ENERGY, just around the corner Pie In The Sky When You Die it's a lie Si?
I answered a post that was claiming the human caused fusion wasn't possible - that fusion only exists in stars. You ignored that I merely pointed out that there are human constructed fusion reactors on Earth.
I have not ONCE objected to you backing this idea. I just pointed to one problem that you have NOT been able to say anything about. But, I'm fine with that, too. If you want start a go fund me for thermite power, you can easily find out how to do that.
Fusion isn't energy. It is the combination of atomic structures by using energy. It requires lots and lots of energy. There isn't enough energy on our planet to produce a meaningful amount of fusion. Our best bet is to make better use of sunlight that arrives for free from a star with enough energy to do the fusion.
I think the point about fusion energy is that starting a fusion reactor requires major energy. But, once started it is stupendously exothermic. Let's remember that a fusion bomb, an H-bomb is something like 1000 times more powerful than a fission bomb. In fact, an H-bomb uses a fission bomb just to get the fusion started. Russia dropped the Tsar Bomba in 1961. It was a fusion bomb that emitted 10 times more energy than ALL the non-nuclear weapons used in WWII combined. It was more than 1500 times more powerful that the combined fission bombs dropped on Japan.
Fusion is what happens when atoms fuse to form some other element in the table of elements. For example, our Sun gets the vast majority of its energy from fusing two hydrogen atoms to form a helium atom + a whole bunch of energy. So, right now our sun is a gigantic fusion bomb going off, consuming hydrogen at an enormous rate. But, it has a lot of hydrogen, so we will be OK for some small number of billions of years. The fusing of hydrogen is how H-bombs got their name.
More fusion energy promises. https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/fusion-power-magnetic-field-ignition-study-195200137.html Fusion power is 'approaching' reality thanks to a magnetic field breakthroughFusion power may be a more realistic prospect than you think . . . Reminds me of my science magazines in the late 50's Moi
As someone trained in the operation of nuclear reactors I'm seeing a lot of misinformation and misunderstanding of what is going on with fission vs. fusion and how each works etc. ALL power plants generate electricity in the exact same way. It is the way that all electricity has been generated since the first electrical generator has been built and based on the simple (and well known) scientific principle. Move a electrical conductor in a magnetic field and an electrical current is generated in the conductor. The general method is to build a rotating object wrapped in electrically conducive wire and rotate within a magnetic field and you get electrical current. The question is how do you rotate that object. Wind turbines use wind, hydro turbines use water and (the vast majority) are used by generating super heated steam and using that to turn the turbine. In a nuclear power plant fission produces a ton of heat, use that heat to generate steam and you get electricity. The difference between fission and fusion is that fission involves the use of radioactive isotopes. Bombard those isotopes with neutrons and it becomes unstable and splits into to two new atoms and a bunch of neutrons. Those neutrons hit other atoms causing them to become unstable and so forth and so forth. The heat comes from the famous equation of E=MC^2. The two new atoms have a mass slightly less than the original atom. That lost mass is turned into energy (heat). In a fission reactor you have to control the reaction so that one atom splitting, on average, causes one other atom to split. This is called a critical state where the amount of energy generated is neither increasing nor decreasing. Fusion creates energy by combining two lighter atoms and making a heavier atom. This heavier atom has a mass slightly less than the combined mass of the original two atoms. The lost mass is turned into heat. The reason the sun generates energy by fusion is that the energy released tends to push things apart but the mass of the sun is so great that gravity overcomes that and forces the matter together. On earth we do not have access to the mass needed to keep a fusion reaction going so we have to use another method to push the matter together. That method is using very powerful magnets and lasers. These require huge amounts of energy to operate thus, until recently, the amount of energy needed to maintain the fusion reaction is greater than the energy generated by the reaction. As our technology increases we are finding more and more energy efficient ways to power these magnets and lasers. Thus making fusion a possibility.
fusion is just impracticable, we have made small fission reactors already, using thorium Liquid Thorium solves the need for a huge containment vessel. it is the high pressure water in out current very old design nuclear tech as well as the Solid NATURE of the fuel within our current (old) tech which create most issues contrary to claims there are fusion reactors at present, there are none, china as we speak is about to bring a thorium reactor online soon, the need for smaller localized power plants is envisioned by build LT reactors with no more complexity than a jet plane there exist some issues dealing with the corosive nature of compnents, but those are engineering issues not waiting for a breakthrough tech
I think you mean that there are no fusion reactors that could be considered commercial at this time. There are at least 20 fusion reactors in existence. https://www.ief.org/news/how-close-are-we-to-unlocking-the-limitless-energy-of-nuclear-fusion
The forces working against fusion power generation are economic. Fusion will always be more expensive that other forms of power generation. Most experts believe the technological barriers can be overcome but not the economic ones. You can read one person's opinions at https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
Yes, it is discouraging. Even if you argue with some of the guy's points, I don't really see how the total of such argument would lower the price of fusion energy enough. This is one reason I point to the fission plants being built in England as something that anyone interested in nuclear energy should read about. They've figured out how to make the banks happy enough, the NIMBYs happy enough, etc. But, the electricity that will be produced there will still be far more expensive than anything we're buying today.
Gravity is what we call the warping of space. If you imagine a rubber sheet stretched out in a frame. Put a marble on that sheet and there will be an indentation in that sheet. Anything that travels near that indentation will move towards the marble in the middle of that indentation. In space this happens in three dimensions, not just two but the principle is the same. Any object with mass causes a curvature in space-time which affects the motion of objects near that mass. The greater the mass, the greater the curvature, the greater the effect on motion. Any change in motion is called acceleration. If an object starts on the mass then to escape the gravity of that mass the objects acceleration away from it must be greater than the acceleration towards it caused by the curvature of space.
I think the idea you support here is now obsolete. Most cosmologists now view the nature of gravity as waves, not a warp of space. There is a facility called LIGO designed specifically to measure gravitational waves. Cosmologists view temporal issues as warps of space, not the attractive force of masses. But of course, most of this is more mystery than settled science.
Gravitational waves can be detected from cataclysmic events. But, that doesn't refute or replace the behavior of gravity described above. Mass distorts spacetime, like the rubber sheet and ball analogy attempts to describe.
There two competing theories for describing the universe. General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Relativity explains really well things on a large scale and QM describes really well things on a very small scale. GRT is where "mass warping spacetime" comes from and QM is where gravitons come from. Both do very well in describing gravity in their respective domain. Both, however, are just that...descriptions. Resolving and combining the two theories is, right now, the Holy Grail of physics.
I think that humanity will definitely solve this problem. In philosophy, there is the concept of a qualitative leap. This is when knowledge slowly accumulating in a linear graph at a certain moment makes a breakthrough that takes research to a new level. There is a story that the great physicist Max Planck was told in his youth: why are you taking on such an unpromising branch of science? Everything is already open in physics! ))
\Witnessed any "fusion energy" Consider the lists of looses should fusion power happen Defend Truthiness!.
