Inching Toward a Fusion Energy Future | A handful of startups are racing to usher in an era of near-limitless fusion energy, but big questions remain.

Comments

• threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  One reason it’s so hard to make predictions about the fusion age is that we’re still not sure what the best fusion device will even look like. A tokamak, the doughnut-shaped machine Commonwealth is building? A giant laser, like Livermore Lab’s? Or one of the many other shapes and concepts that other start-ups are working on?

  At this point, aren’t we pretty sure that laser confinement won’t easily scale to continuous operations? All the fusion startups I can think of are using some form of magnetic confinement.

  source

  • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Mmm… I wouldn’t say that it’s difficult to scale. Getting fusion to happen is hard, but repeatedly is simply an engineering problem (still hard, but less so).

    source

    • threelonmusketeers@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I just have a hard time imagining how one would convert a reactor like the NIF have (where tiny gold pellets of deuterium are loaded and blasted one at a time) into something which could power a city.

      A tokamak like the JET or ITER (which can operate continuously) seems easier to adapt into a power plant.

      source

      • -> View More Comments