News: Compact Fusion Reactors?

[Christopher]

smells of advertising to get more investors.  still a necessary step before moving on to the real prize...

It is advertising to get more investors. Says so right in the 2nd paragraph

 

 

Sure for traditional sized power plants.  But removal of those moving parts is key to true miniaturization of the technology.

The question is if we are far enough and have enough need for that miniaturization.

There have been quite some progresses on the energy storage front. Hydrogen fuel cells are far enough for widespread use (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#Submarines). And the next big step might be Graphene Supercapacitors.

The cases where having a mobile fusion generator is that much better then having a mobile gasoline generator or really big Fuel Cells are few. When you need mobile power, you rarely need a lot of power.

 

It does appear that they plan to use a hybrid geometry that combines cusps with magnetic mirrors, but it would require superconducting magnets that can survive close proximity to the plasma, which to my understanding is impossible.

Impossible for now (is possible, but we have not looked into how to do them), or "defies current understanding of physics" impossible?

[Old Man]

The question is if we are far enough and have enough need for that miniaturization.

There have been quite some progresses on the energy storage front. Hydrogen fuel cells are far enough for widespread use (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_cell#Submarines). And the next big step might be Graphene Supercapacitors.

The cases where having a mobile fusion generator is that much better then having a mobile gasoline generator or really big Fuel Cells are few. When you need mobile power, you rarely need a lot of power.

Miniaturizing a fusion reactor is especially pointless when you realize how much radiation it would put out.

 

Impossible for now (is possible, but we have not looked into how to do them), or "defies current understanding of physics" impossible?

Impossible in a current-state-of-materials-science sense.

[Lawnmower Boy]

I still think that energy storage is kind of beside the point. We have this awesomely dense, easily moved, liquid energy storage system called "petroleum." The only problem is that we're using fossil petroleum instead of making new petroleum out of the atmosphere, which currenltyl has a dangerous (or so I've heard) surplus of the main feedstock.

 

Seriously. Let's set aside catalysed high temperature/pressure reactions in huge tanks with electrolysed hydrogen. There's a well established methof of making gas and diesel out of an atmospheric feed. (Cf. Anonymous Single Celled Organism, "I'm Totally Living Off Sunlight and Storing it For Later as Lipids, Dude!" [Science, 1,500,000,000 B.P.].) At this point, the only thing that's really standing in our way is that it's expensive/time-consuming/labour intensive/Oh, God, I Don't Want to Bother Moving This Through the Senate. 

 

To the extent that those problems can be dealt with, an awesome solution is that big tank that you feed with air at one end and get a POL drip out the other. Since this is a pretty energy intensive way of doing things, powering it off a cheap fusion reactor would ...

 

...You know what? Screw that. Yes, fusion would be a huge improvement. But we could be doing this tomorrow in the deserts of Arabia or the hydroelectric dams of the West. The problem isn't a shortage of energy. It's that thing I mentioned, where it just seems like too much work to start doing it, and maybe the deficit and/or taxes would go up, or Sephen Harper would be mad at us. 

[Hyper-Man]

The U.S. Navy estimates that 100 megawatts of electricity can produce 41,000 gallons of jet fuel per day and shipboard production from nuclear power would cost about $6 per gallon. While that was about twice the petroleum fuel cost in 2010, it is expected to be much less than the market price in less than five years if recent trends continue. Moreover, since the delivery of fuel to a carrier battle group costs about $8 per gallon, shipboard production is already much less expensive.^[24]

 

 

Why isn't the US Navy already behind this?

[pinecone]

Why isn't the US Navy already behind this?

Because "Politics" "The chair recognizes the Senator from Texas"  

[IndianaJoe3]

Why isn't the US Navy already behind this?

 

I thought they were.

[Christopher]

Why isn't the US Navy already behind this?

Afaik they are, but it is not as awesome as you seem to think it.

It is really just another way to convert electrical energy into chemical energy. And we know a dozen of those already.

There are clear advantages: most importantly no major reworking of the consuming machines and maintaining existing machines for long time, even if the oil supply is uncertain and we totally switch to fusion power everywhere else.

 

But still just a chemical energy storage, not a source. You still need to get that electricity from somewhere and incur all the usual storage & production losses.

[Hyper-Man]

You don't think eliminating the need for aircraft fuel resupply from another ship is worthwhile?!

[Tom Carman]

Afaik they are, but it is not as awesome as you seem to think it.

It is really just another way to convert electrical energy into chemical energy. And we know a dozen of those already.

There are clear advantages: most importantly no major reworking of the consuming machines and maintaining existing machines for long time, even if the oil supply is uncertain and we totally switch to fusion power everywhere else.

 

But still just a chemical energy storage, not a source. You still need to get that electricity from somewhere and incur all the usual storage & production losses.

Nuclear reactors. A big carrier already has what? 2-4 of them? And they are the ships that want that permanent supply of jet fuel.

[Zeropoint]

Two, Unless it's the Enterprise, which has eight.

[Hyper-Man]

The new Ford Class of carriers is being designed to only require 50% of it's total electrical output for normal operations.  It's a huge increase over the Nimitz Class capability. It allows deployment of electromagnetic launch and recovery systems as well as electrical based laser weapon systems.  Dedicating a portion of that excess power to jet fuel production during downtime makes sense - especially if the final cost to produce the fuel is cheaper AND safer than a ship-to-ship delivery.

[Christopher]

You don't think eliminating the need for aircraft fuel resupply from another ship is worthwhile?!

It is interesting from a military point of view no doubt. In particular from point of strategic supply.

 

But it is not as awesome a scientific progress as it might sound. It is really only prolonging the useabilty of existing vehicles way past the (cheap) avalibilty* of oil.

This might be used to clean up the oceans later. But only after we got a efficient enough power source.

 

*Wheter something is avalible also depends how cheap it is to produce. If we have 30 times the reserves but it costs us twice or five times as much to supply it, that is a pretty bad deal.

[Cancer]

Frankly, this could be little more than trying to accommodate in this ship class the power requirements anticipated for the electric railgun, or top-end laser weapon systems before any such weapon is developed enough to deploy. Considering the fifty-year operating span of the last Enterprise, this makes some sense. Using that power for other tasks (like fuel production) would be gravy.

[Old Man]

The Navy's pretty far along on that front. I read this week that they're investing in further development of capacitor and rapid-discharge battery tech specifically in anticipation of those weapon systems. One laser is already operationally deployed on a ship in the Gulf.

 

Meanwhile, reactor-equipped ships rarely use all the power available to them from those reactors, so adding this fuel distillation capability would hardly affect combat operations--just the space and weight for the gear, and for the fuel produced.

[WistfulD]

Unless there is a fundamental change in the way we transport energy or make power plants, solving problems of getting lots of energy where we want it, when we want it (both quickly and only when we want it), etc. will be at least as big a hurddle as getting fusion power working.

[Hyper-Man]

There is an active search for room temperature superconductors that would go a long way to solving that issue. 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room-temperature_superconductor

[WistfulD]

Well, that would reduce the size of conduits, and it would (potentially) allow for very fast acting capacitors that require a lot less energy to keep going. It probably won't change the fact that power plants are still big, usually turbine driven machines that don't just produce power when we instantaneously need the power, and in must send current somewhere when it is produced. Thus, I think your idea of using excess power production capacity to create chemical fuel will be a significant part of futurecraft design.

[pinecone]

Unless there is a fundamental change in the way we transport energy or make power plants, solving problems of getting lots of energy where we want it, when we want it (both quickly and only when we want it), etc. will be at least as big a hurddle as getting fusion power working.

 True, but that is why Compact Fusion is a awesome thing. If I can put a small plant in every small town, I can sell off all that copper from unneeded transmission lines, and make Billions!