

China's investment in fusion power - meric
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/energy-smart/chinas-bid-for-manmade-sun-20110504-1e7h4.html

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ender7
Fusion really is the answer to the world's energy crisis, for all the reasons
laid out in the article (can't melt down, ease of procuring fuel, no
pollution, relatively small generation of nuclear waste). It's a shame that it
doesn't have better funding.

In addition to the tokamak work being done in the EU at CERN, the US has been
funding fusion research for years at the NIF. The US system does not use a
tokamak (magnetic confinement of a donut of plasma), but instead involves
crushing balls of hydrogen with lasers. The US and the EU are currently in
competition to see who can get to "ignition" first. The NIF is hoping for it
to happen in the next 2-3 years.

This sounds great and all, but there's at least 10-20 years of work still yet
to be done before we can start building commercial fusion power plants.
Ignition will be a wonderful "HEY, IT WOOORRRKSSSSS" moment, but there are a
lot of big unanswered engineering questions looming ahead, such as "what
material do we build the ignition chamber out of that can withstand
temperatures high enough to melt salt as well as survive constant neutron
bombardment?" Hopefully ignition, when it happens, will motivate major
countries to open their wallets and let pour the funding. We'll see. An
appreciable percentage of the US's plasma physicists may retire once the US
gets ignition. They have been working on this problem for quite literally
their entire careers.

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berntb
You might want to Google e.g. Polywell, General Fusion and Tri Alpha.

None of the small alternatives are probably that likely to succeed, but if one
of those horses reaches their target, it will change the world.

(You could probably make a good argument that the chance of one of the small
fusion projects to work is higher than the chance of tokamaks ever to be cost
competitive with fission.)

~~~
DennisP
Also focus fusion, Helion, magnetized target fusion, and levitated dipole.

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dreww
Unfortunately, there's almost no actual information about China's fusion
research in the linked article. There is a lot of information, almost
rambling, about the future of their fission plans after Fukushima, most of
which has been covered more cogently elsewhere.

