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Rough-Lavishness-401 OP t1_j24gvti wrote

Reply to comment by occipixel_lobe in Will Nuclear Fusion Dump Clean Energy? by Rough-Lavishness-401

Very insightful video and I wasn't aware of a lot of the things he said. But I also got some unanswered questions watching it.

Okay we are in the infant stages of nuclear fusion and this was one of many breakthroughs to come, but how long will the breakthroughs take? From what I've seen from other knowledgeable people on the matter they said what happened earlier this month was assumed to be 20 to 30 years down the road.

Also can we try this in a bigger scale (with improved energy efficiency ofc) and compensate the amount of energy we need to put in it?

Last thing, when he brought up renewables he did make an interesting point that if clean energy continues to fall in price as it should, nuclear fusion might prove to be unnecessary do to being more expansive, but at the end of the day that depends on how fast the price of renewables drops and how fast the technology on nuclear fusion speeds up.

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throwawayainteasy t1_j24j4da wrote

Fusion has been "just 20 years away" for the last 60 years.

I'd bet the century ends and there will still not be large scale fusion plants.

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That-Whereas3367 t1_j24mmp3 wrote

It's basically a scam to keep Dr Strangelove and his bomb making friends in work.

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Sodis42 t1_j24wawj wrote

There are different fusion reactor designs, that are currently investigated. For the Tokamak, where the plasma is confined by magnets in a donut shaped vessel, they are currently building a prototype in France called ITER. With the results of this, they want to build the first fusion reactor DEMO, that actually produces energy.

The headline from the current experiment was from a facility, where the plasma is confined by lasers. This technique was not on the original roadmap of fusion plants, so it's quite surprising, that they already got that far. Unfortunately, it scales really badly, because they use special containers with hydrogen inside as fuel and you can't really make those bigger. As far as I know, they already use state of the art lasers already, so that's another bottleneck there.

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Rough-Lavishness-401 OP t1_j24z8iz wrote

So what we should look out for in the future isn't the breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but reactors like the Tokamak as you mentioned?

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Sodis42 t1_j257uv5 wrote

At this point, the laser driven approach might be faster. It's not clear, if the tokamak design will be economically feasible, while for the laser-confined fusion plants, you "just" need more efficient lasers.

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platoface541 t1_j27ruxc wrote

A potentially limitless byproduct of fusion is hydrogen. Hydrogen could be very useful for future generations for water and space travel

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