How to make fusion economic

It may be difficult to separate "theory" from "application," but let''s see if this helps facilitate the discussion.
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Tristan Beal
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How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

I have been studying ICT and Magnetic confinement designs for months now and it is my belief that magnetic confinement will never be competitive with ICF.

To make a fusion design economical it must do the following :

1. Generate the majoirty of its energy from D-D fusion, as tritium is extremely expensive
2. Be small
3. Generate a large energy output relative to its input.

Pulsed designs by definition can be smaller because there are limits to the size of continous fusion.
Pulsed designs use the walls of the device for containment rather than energetically expensive electromagnetics.
Pulsed designs with a tritium catalyst for D-D fusion are straightforward to design.

The only real problems with pulsed fusion are ignition and fast enough energy recovery.
Ignition could be done with a very small fission device if you had to, and energy recovery can be done with active energy recovery systems.
Last edited by Tristan Beal on Thu Jul 23, 2015 1:47 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Richard Hull
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Richard Hull »

All your points are well taken. Especially about small size. I think a number of folks are working on this one point. Bob Hirsch and I meet at his office in 1999 and he noted that if useful fusion can be done, it ought to be able to be shown as a proof of concept on a small room size scale. I think Lockheed and others are spouting off about test beds of this nature. Concepts, ideas and spouting off has thus far been just that though. NIF is making very big claims for their football stadium sized putt-putt boat concept of ICF. Of course all the giant monetary eggs are in ITER which keeps having its first test pushed ever deeper into tomorrowland.

Not pretty, as always, but then, we are used to that.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Tristan Beal
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

I have been discussing with Robert Stienhaus a design he has for a small pure fusion device which would have a large energy gain.

Size = reactor cavity 11m radius x 50 m length
Maybe 1/4 the price of coal if someone can make a working fusion driver.

Even if the driver had to be fission it would probably still be significantly cheaper than coal.

Also I realy wish people would stop acting as if we have never achieved fusion. We achieved fusion with net energy gain 60 years ago.

Tristan
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Richard Hull
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Richard Hull »

Gee...Too bad all the over unity fusion claims are for infinestimally, microscopic units of time before they blow out a lining or trash some component or other in the system.

The power companies won't like fusion until 200% over unity 24-7-365 run times. Fusion ain't no where near feeding the first single watt out of a wall outlet and will probably not be in the coming century without a luck donkey showing up on the scene.

As usual, lotsa' talk and no action. More fission and more coal will keep us going. Natural gas will help until it dries up. It is all about boiling water to get power. It has been and will continue to be so deep into the future.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Tristan Beal
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

Actually I disagree with you about the boiling water. If you look at MSR designs like terrestrial energy they predict they will be able to use molten salt in reactors within 10 years.

Once MSR shows the way molten salt coolants will then be able to be used in ICF designs. I therefore predict economic fusion by 2030.

Tristan
Tristan Beal
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

Also ICF designs that reach ignition have always produced over unity. Even detonating a hydrogen bomb in a cave full of water produces more energy than it uses.

Detonating a hydrogen bomb in a blast chambed lined with Flibe is predicted to recover an EROI of 20. About economic with current nuclear.

Creating a repeating hydrogen bomb cooled by molten salt would probably produce an EROI in excess of 50. So cheaper than coal.

Creating a pure fusion device cooled by molten salt would probably produce energy even cheaper than that.
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Richard Hull
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Richard Hull »

Good luck on funding for all those great ideas. ITER and the new glorious era of the Stellarator must fail dramatically first before anyone gives up on magnetic confinement, (where the real money is). This tenacious grip and fanaticism with magnetic confinement may not die until around 2030. If the world's future economic system is still in place in 2030 and can still release billions into your ideas then we will see what happens.

There will always be boundless enthusiasm for a fusion future....It is the perpetual carrot hung before the hopeful horse as its body is sapped to pull the cart filled with the money seekers.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
Tristan Beal
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

The maths was done on those ideas years ago:

Check out yottawatts.net and Ralphmoir.com

We could have economic fusion within 5 years if we were prepared to use a fission primary.
Probably 10 years without a fission primary.
Tristan Beal
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

Dear Richard Hull I have been rather abrasive on this website and I apologise.

I am convinced that Robert Stienhaus's Mini-Mike design is close to the optimum design for a fusion power plant though.

The idea is that you use D-T fusion as the sparkplug for D-D fusion in a similar way to Ivy Mike did 60 years ago. I am convinced after reading about ITER and NIF that getting economic energy out of D-T fusion is almost impossible.

Robert Steinhaus has a useful way of looking at fusion, he works from the designs we know have achieved gain(hydrogen bombs), and then trys to adapt them to become fusion power plants.

The problem with magnetic confinement D-D designs is that they have to be huge. ICF designs can be smaller.

Either way, I have yet to see any D-T design either MCF or ICF which is predicted to be economic. So the answer lies in acheiving D-D fusion reliably and this can be done with a D-T sparkplug.
Tristan Beal
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

I get a bit frustrated by your lucky donkey obsession on this website though. There is no luck involved just good engineering.

To acheive economical fusion we first have to acheive pure fusion gain. The easiest way to do that in my opinion is to follow as closely as possible how we acheived fission-fusion(hydrogen bombs).Through inertial confinement created by a dense source of energy. Using evidence from the Halite-Centurion experiments Robert Stienhaus predicts 100MJ from a light ion beam would be enough to detonate a D-T cryopellet.

Once ignition of a D-T pellet has been acheived the most economical way to use this explosion is not to try and turn into electric power but instead to focus it on a chamber of deuterium gas.

The 260gj of energy from the resulting D-D fusion can then be converted to electric power.
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Andrew Robinson
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Andrew Robinson »

Tristan,

This site welcomes discussion on a lot of the topics you have mentioned, but you really need to approach these discussions more appropriately. If you want anyone's serious consideration here, you need to do your research, apply the scientific method, and provide some foundation for your claims. It's easy to talk about how easy it is to build (for example) a car engine. It's just a block of metal with some pistons that move inside by the explosion of gasoline with energy = 100,000MJ WOW!!! It should be obvious that life and more specifically science and engineering are much more complex than these ambiguous statements about some devices function and design. People here on this site want to see your numbers. ALL you numbers. Show your work. Show your references. Show your references references. Show where others can reproduce your work if applicable. If you don't do the work to provide some foundation for your claims, no one will show any interest in posts here. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but I want to give you a chance by helping steer you in the right direction so you can benefit from this community properly.

I wish you the best of luck
Andrew
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Tristan Beal
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

I am not a fusion expert. I want to become a fusion expert but I am not one yet.

However I do think that I have a pretty good grasp on approximating EROI of different energy ideas. And its my opinion that a design such as Robert Steinhaus's mini mike has the highest EROI of any fusion design I have seen so far. And will therefore be the cheapest.

And ultimately the biggest problem with all the designs I have seen so far is that they have a low potential EROI. The higher the EROI of the design the more energy you have availible to solve technical problems.
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Andrew Robinson
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Andrew Robinson »

Clearly my advice has gone in one ear and out the other.

I wish you the best of luck.

Andrew
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Tristan Beal
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Tristan Beal »

Okay I am going to give this one more try. I am not a mathamatician or a physicist so I can't do the maths on the design but I am a scientist and i do understand enough to explain in detail the logic of the design.

The design goes back to basic princples and the first is how do we get gain from fusion? The most logical way of doing this is to look at the hydrogen bomb, the gain on a hydrogen bomb is huge. And if your looking at EROI (Energy return on investment) one particular fusion experiment has the highest of them all and thats Ivy Mike, the reason is because this experiment got most of its energy from D-D fusion the cheapest kind.

So how do we make electricity from Ivy Mike? Well the simplest way is to just denotonate it in a large pool of water and drive turbines with the steam. However this way is the least efficient way and won't get you electricity competitive with mains electricity. (It will generate net electricity though).

So how do we make this cheaper?

Three ways :
Replace the fission primary with an electrical fusion driver and recycle the tritium
Make the Design smaller
Improve Energy recovery.

All of these things ultimately lead you to the Mini Mike design Robert Steinhaus (LLNL) suggests.

Okay so what are technical problems with a Mike-MIke Design?

Heat
An active heat recovery system that turns the heat into electrical energy.

Pressure
The blasts occur in a vaccum surronded by walls thick enough to withstand them.

Ignition
This is the biggest problem but the efficiency of the design means you could afford to use a significantly more powerful laser than the ones at NIF if you had to.

Neutron bombardment
The D-T blast chamber has a berylium shell
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Re: How to make fusion economic

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Tristan,

You say you are a scientist but you do not have the math skills to look at this equations. You need to read deeper or do the calculations. There are many big problems with what you are quoting.

I will keep it totally simple with the Mike blast. Why did it only use a small fraction of its fusion fuel? Why did the fireball stop after just a few grams of fuel was converted to energy? There were huge pressures and temperatures during the detonation yet the fusion fire very quickly went out. The conditions for fusion exceed all but the most extreme conditions that can be produced by man and even then it is for nanoseconds of time.

Even the sun is a slow and lumbering giant with far worse efficiency than in the simplest of amateur fusors.

You can listen to the hype or you can put together a fusor and just see what it takes to make any fusion at all. You cannot even pulse a fusor to high currents because of limited conductance of the plasma. All that you are proposing is no easy path. Read more detailed works and not papers written for funding or worse yet from propaganda internet sites or the media.
Achiever's madness; when enough is still not enough. ---FS
We have to stop looking at the world through our physical eyes. The universe is NOT what we see. It is the quantum world that is real. The rest is just an electron illusion. ---FS
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Dennis P Brown
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Re: How to make fusion economic

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You forget something far, far more important than the science: money! When you say we need lasers more powerful than NIF you are 100% correct. A Krypton Fluorine or Argon electron beam laser could do it (power and efficiency wise) if built in the NIF power range. So, why not just build it? Cost - NIF cost close to half a billion dollars (and has half its original proposed beam lines.) How do you think congress will pour yet far more money into a rat hole that has produced nothing but empty promises is beyond me. Fusion does not need any scientist or anyone saying this is now it can be done; so many have been there, done that, and still, no fusion energy to speak of - what a real fusion program really needs is either a multi-billionaire willing to waste all his money on a single, small proto-type ignition system using direct drive system using lasers (and the physics of ignition by direct drive is still unproven, anyway) or someone who can at least "ignite" the US public opinion in order to create public support (read a new tax on fuel) for a massive many tens of billions of dollars multi-system approach to achieve ignition (not a power plant, mind you.)

As for your ideas, they are not realistic - saying improve efficiency isn't an idea without providing a method. Provide an "electrical fusion driver? Huh? Make the design smaller (????) No idea at all what that means in any practical sense of the word.

Do you have the slightest idea how powerful a real nuclear detonation really is and how dirty? No way those problems can be solved to produce economic power generation.
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Werner Engel
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by Werner Engel »

I'm sorry - but I have to support all others who try to convince you to start learning about fusion before you bring up such ideas. It took me months of learning before I decided to add some content to this forum!
Adding valuable comments to such a complex matter is extremely hard. As long as you are not understanding the real challenges regarding:
• Lawson criterion
• Cross Section, plasma density, ignition criteria, engineering-Q
• Kinetic and fluid description of plasma
• Classical transport in plasma
• MHD equilibrium, stability and waves
• Heating of plasma
• Plasma diagnostic
• Plasma wall interaction
• Physical-, chemical- and nuclear properties needed for materials in fusion reactors
• Building the right vacuum and particle density for fusion
.. you should definitely start to gain more knowledge!
In my daily business I see a lot of people like you with some new knowledge in a new area. And unfortunately some of them can convince others that their idea is the “right idea”. That might be quite dangerous.
My suggestion:
Start by working yourself 1-2 years through plasma physics 101 (viewtopic.php?f=21&t=9393) – work at least a few months at the NIF, another few months at a tokamak and during this time build your own fusor. This might bring you into the position to really compare these techniques.

Also wish you good luck!
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Re: How to make fusion economic

Post by prestonbarrows »

We just need to make an indestructible box which we can detonate the nukes inside...
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