Quote:
Originally Posted by redpoint5
Those are 2 areas that I expect within my lifetime there will be great advances; that automation will drastically reduce prices [to the point of being almost free] of nearly everything and improve efficiency, and that [fusion] electricity will be so plentiful and cheap that we can expend more of it to efficiently manage our natural resources.
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So I guess I wouldn't be fair if I didn't also label this ridiculous.
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Fusion. The energy source of the future. And always will be.
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"The most serious difficulty concerns the very high energy neutrons released in the deuterium-tritium (D-T) reaction. These uncharged nuclear particles damage the reactor structure and make it radioactive. A chain of undesirable effects ensures that any reactor employing D-T fusion will be a large, complex, expensive, and unreliable source of power."
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"But the scientific goal turns out to be an engineering albatross. From the engineering point of view, we should have started from the answer and worked backward."
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"Producing net power from fusion is a valid scientific goal, but generating electricity commercially is an engineering problem. The requirement is to develop a power source significantly better than those that exist today,
and D-T fusion cannot provide that solution. Even if the fusion program produces a reactor, no one will want it."
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"Fusion will almost certainly have a lower power density than fission and
therefore will require a larger plant to produce the same output. Suppose a fusion plant had to be ten times as big and therefore likely ten
times as costly — as a present-day fission plant to produce the same amount of power. Given the already intolerable costs of building fission plants, that would hardly be economically feasible."
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"Temperatures within the fusion reactor will range from the highest produced on earth (within the plasma) to practically the lowest possible (within the magnets). The entire structure will be bombarded with neutrons that induce radiation and cause serious damage to materials. Problems associated with the inflammable lithium must be managed. Advanced materials will have to endure tremendous stress from temperature extremes and damaging neutrons. The magnetic fields will exert forces equivalent to those seen only in very high pressure chemical reactors and specialized laboratory equipment. All in all, the engineering will be extremely complex."
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http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/...eview_1983.pdf