Comment on France runs fusion reactor for record 22 minutes
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months agoThey weren’t trying to generate electricity in this experiment. They were trying to sustain a reaction. As you said in another comment, they are different problems.
Converting heat to electricity is a problem we already understand pretty well since we’ve been doing it basically the same way since the first power plant fired up. Sustaining a fusion reaction is a problem we’ve barely started figuring out.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I don’t think we do have a means of converting this heat energy into electrical energy right now. With nuclear we put radioactive rods into heavy water to create steam and drive turbines…
What’s the plan for these fusion reactors? You can’t dump them into water, nor can you dump water into them… I don’t believe we have a means of converting the energy currently.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The idea is to have water or molten salt cool the walls of the torus from outside, and those drive ordinary turbines like any other generator. The main issue is that particles fly out of the confined plasma donut and degrade the walls, whose dust flys into the plasma and reduces the fusion efficiency. They’re focusing on the hard part - dealing with the health of plasma sustainment and the durability of the confinement walls over time. Hot thing that stays hot can boil water or salt to drive regular turbines, that’s not the main engineering challenge.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Thank you for your understanding and explanation.
FauxLiving@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The walls get hot, you absorb the heat from the walls with a fluid. You use the fluid to heat water, you use the steam to drive a turbine, you use the turbine to turn a permanent magnet inside of a coil of wire. In addition, you can capture neutrons using a liquid metal (lithium) which heats the lithium, which heats the walls, which heats the water, which makes steam, which drives a turbine, which generates electricity.
If you poured water onto them they wouldn’t explode. 100 million degrees Celsius doesn’t mean much when the mass is so low compared to the mass of the water.
hamsterkill@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
Most fission plants transfer the heat away from the reactor before boiling water. The same can be done with fusion.
The main difference with fusion is you have to convert some of the released energy to heat first. Various elements have been proposed for this.