
500MW from half a gram of hydrogen: The hunt for fusion power heats up - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/123837-500mw-from-half-a-gram-of-hydrogen-the-hunt-for-fusion-power-heats-up
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GiraffeNecktie
I'm not sure why we're still pursuing the incrediblly difficult and expensive
route of fusion when thorium is simple, safe, inexpensive and incredibly
abundant.

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torstesu
I completely agree, especially since Norway has large reserves of the stuff.
One challenge though, is that uranium is also abundantly available and still
much cheaper to mine than thorium. Another challenge is that it is not the
fuel which drives the cost, as in conventional power plants; it is the capital
cost concerned with building the reactors themselves. Therefore, a thorium-
fueled reactor has to be considerably cheaper to build than a uranium-fueled
reactor and it is easy to pose the question if this will ever be true. There
has to be some serious subsidizing to incentivize commercial development,
adaption and investment.

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drucken
1\. Thorium is a natural by-product, in fact it is in the waste slurry, from
rare earth mineral mining.

2\. Tiny amounts are required relative to uranium for electricity production.
We have already mined in the West more than we will need for a hundred years,
if we had production Molten Salt Reactors today.

3\. It is far more electrically efficient than uranium.

So, there is no comparison purely based on which is the better fuel for
fission. Thorium wins by multiple factors if not magnitude across many
aspects, including fission waste prodcuts.

However, that said, the trust cost of fission is, as you mentioned, the
upfront cost of the nuclear reactors. Since this quasi-government industry has
seen little innovation in practice for 70+ years, conventional nuclear power
plants have remained enormous capital sinks and risky endeavours.

There is now some serious research going into MSRs (including thorium) and
other nuclear tech. But it is mainly being led by China, excluding
sidetracking efforts like the Travelling Wave Reactors of Bill Gates et. al,
who _need_ as much energy as they can get.

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tocomment
Fusion idea that I've always had. Why can't we scale up a something like a car
engine's piston and cylinder to be 1000's of times bigger and explode hydrogen
bombs in it to move the piston up and down?

I know it sounds kind of absurd to think about but it seems like it would work
to me. Can anyone explain why it wouldn't work? Is it just a cost issue?

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tocomment
Funny this was down voted on the same day we have this article on the front
page: Bill Gates: We need crazy energy entrepreneurs

Perhaps we're part of the problem? We should discuss radical energy ideas,
teach others what wouldn't work, and how to change them, not poo poo them.

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huxley
Only for some definitions of crazy. Bill Gates isn't using pyramid power to
cure malaria, is he?

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aqme28
This article talks about tokamaks like they're the only magnetic confinement
technology out there. Things like stellarators and dipoles have been gaining a
lot of ground lately and could one day overtake tokamaks as the standard
magnetic confinement tech.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levitated_dipole>

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ntoshev
They probably mean MW/h ...

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DanWaterworth
I thought that, but I now think it means in a single run, using just half a
gram of hydrogen, the peak output power is 500MW, it would be helpful if it
also mentioned how much usable energy was generated too.

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mrsebastian
I don't think anyone knows how much 'usable' energy ITER will generate (plus,
ITER won't be a power plant -- the heat produced will actually be thrown away
-- so I guess we won't ever know.)

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zerostar07
Looks like those sun gamma rays haven't been following their diet.

