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. Apparently I could have said it more clearly. The issue isn’t the particular _way_ you _do_ the fusion, its more fundamental than that. In order to get a power density sufficient to operate a power generation facility you need a minimum amount of fuel in a given volume. Whether it be a tokamak, ICF or whatever. The Coulomb barrier guarantees that in order to get _that many_ reactions in, say, one cubic meter of space, you have to compress that fuel somehow. The forces required to compress that fuel that much are either:
1.) too great to achieve with any known materials science in higher power outputs
2.) too great to make it economically viable in lower power outputs

Even in megawatt class reactors it will take every ounce of cleverness and mass from the periodic table to construct a metallic device that strong. And this first principle observation doesn’t have to depend on what anyone in an ivory tower tells us. We all (or most of us) know how to calculate Coulomb barrier forces, right?
Fm12 = κm q1 q2 * (v1 X (v2 X r12)) / r2
Now, take the reaction rates we all also know about and calculate how many reactions you need in a given, plausible volume, to get the power density you’d need, for, say, a 100 MW reactor. Now, look at F. Its millions of kg*s. The tiny devices being proposed work fine for tiny amounts of fusion and you might well get fusion reactions out of them. But they can’t scale. It’s not my opinion, bad references or whatever. It’s just math.

That’s why these schemes look good in IP proposals: it can be demonstrated as a way to generate fusion reactions but if the observer isn’t particularly mathematically literate they will miss the elephant in the living room.