Reply To: turn heat into electricity

[Maya]

zapkitty wrote:

Pretty much irrelevant since ITER and its costs are in no way a design paradigm for a commercial fusion reactor… even a tokamak 🙂

I think that mostly sums up your overall response, so I’ll just respond to that.

Actually, what I said was that for various reasons the limits you envision do not apply to many fusion concepts and I listed some of them and briefly described one of them 🙂

Perhaps you should read through what you called “IP proposals” again… each one has their own way of dealing with what you seem to have come to believe must be an insurmountable problem.

We can discuss the details of their various solutions if you’d like.

Right, but my point is that the issue is more fundamental than you seem to realize. In other words, it doesn’t matter what proposal you’re talking about if you don’t know how to calculate and contain pressure.

I don’t think I said the problems are insurmountable. In fact, I was clear to point out that I do not think they are insurmountable. My point is that too many people are ignoring the challenges and it sets the stage for, at best, costly error.

And as for each IP proposal, that is easy. If someone can show me the reaction rate and power density they expect to achieve, and hence the fuel and product density, with their proposal – lets start there – then I’d ask what is going to contain the pressure such a particle density requires. It’s just that easy. It isn’t as though I haven’t asked that question many times. I’ve never gotten an answer to that … not even one that actually addresses that question in the first place. And its a first principles, obvious question, so you can’t say “it doesn’t matter”.

And that was the gist of the author’s article, he just didn’t state it this explicitly.