Reply To: Boron availability

[Maya]

rashidas wrote: Here is a link to a physicist’s website “Do the Math”. In this article he discusses the viability of fusion energy:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/01/nuclear-fusion/

Any comments?

This is the first published description I’ve seen so far that accurately lays out the key challenges of fusion power. Notice that not one single proposal in existence today deigns to address them. Contrary to the view of some, I think we rather should talk about these problems not as discouragement but because that is the only way we can solve the riddles. If you don’t know what the challenges are you can’t find the solution. I can summarize the key 4 issues with fusion power that must be addressed for a _commercially viable_ (at least hundreds of gigawatts) reactor to work:
1.) It must have a much more powerful means of “heating”. RF and other methods are woefully inadequate
2.) It must contain enormous pressures far beyond what any material science we have can contain (the author refers to temperature but the two are related)
3.) It must deal with the thermal management of neutron flux. The current fueling schemes will never work. Only Hydrogen and 11 Boron can be used in any foreseeable design and even that will require enormous thermal management (H-11B still produces flux in power levels of 1 to 10 giga watts in a 21 TW reactor).
4.) It must have a definitive mechanism for dampening out _all_ orbital instabilities in the plasma. Confinement time must be very, very large b/c the materials science cannot deal with it otherwise.
Part 2 has a clever, witchy exception that as far as I know no one has figured out yet.
If you have a Ph.D. in physics (any field) and will sign an NDA I’ll explain it … I hope.