I hope it works.
meanwhile - we have plenty of Thorium that we know works.

juliar wrote on Aug 30^th, 2019 at 11:48am:



Juliar - you need to have faith that engineers and
scientists can solve the problems of Thorium reactors.

Fusion is another matter altogether.
You're talking of a sub-miniature star on earth.
The technical problems are orders of magnitude greater.

Bobby. wrote on Aug 30^th, 2019 at 1:26pm:


the only man made fusion generator proven to work only works for a micro second and unleashes devastating forces and radiation

Using a magnetic field to hold the ultra-hot plasma fusion core which will be at 150 million degrees Celsius, about 10 times hotter than the center of the sun.


What could possibly go wrong?

Captain Nemo wrote on Aug 30^th, 2019 at 9:37pm:


How much actual plasma will be in the magnetic bottle at any one time? e =mc² remember.

Now getting away from the irrelevant and back to the TOPIC.


Researchers Just Demonstrated Nuclear Fusion in a Device Small Enough to Keep at Home
MIKE MCRAE17 APR 2019



When it comes to the kinds of technology needed to contain a sun, there are currently just two horses in the race. Neither is what you'd call 'petite'. 

An earlier form of fusion technology that barely made it out of the starting blocks has just overcome a serious hurdle. It's got a long way to catch up, but given its potential cost and versatility, a table-sized fusion device like this is worth watching out for.

While many have long given up on an early form of plasma confinement called the Z-pinch as a feasible way to generate power, researchers at the University of Washington in the US have continued to look for a way to overcome its shortcomings.

Fusion power relies on clouds of charged particles you can squeeze the literal daylights out of - it's the reaction that powers that big ball of hot gas we call the Sun.

But containing a buzzing mix of superhot ions is extremely challenging - in the lab, scientists use intense magnetic fields for this task. Tokamaks like China's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak reactor swirl their insanely hot plasma in such a way that they generate their own internal magnetic fields, helping contain the flow.

This approach gets the plasma cooking enough for it to release a critical amount of energy. But what it gains in generating heat it loses in long-term stability.

Stellerators like Germany's Wendelstein 7-X, on the other hand, rely more heavily on banks of externally applied magnetic fields. While this makes for better control over the plasma, it also makes it harder to reach the temperatures needed for fusion to occur.


Both are making serious headway in our march towards fusion power. But those doughnuts holding the plasma are at least a few metres (a dozen feet) across, surrounded by complex banks of delicate electronics, making it unlikely we'll see them shrink to a home or mobile version any time soon.

In the early days of fusion research, a somewhat simpler method for squeezing a jet of plasma was to 'pinch' it through a magnetic field.

A relatively small device known as a zeta or 'Z'-pinch uses the specific orientation of a plasma's internal magnetic field to apply what's known as the Lorentz force to the flow of particles, effectively forcing its particles together through a bottleneck.

In some sense, the device isn't unlike a miniature version of its tokamak big brother. As such, it also suffers from similar stability issues that can cause its plasma to jump from the magnetic tracks and crash into the sides of its container.

In fact, iterations of the Z-pinch led to the chunky tokamak technology that superseded it. Given this major limitation, the Z-pinch has all but become a relic of history.


Hope remains that by going back to the roots of fusion, researchers might find a way to generate power without the need for complicated banks of surrounding machinery and magnets.



To prevent the distortions in the plasma that cause it to escape the confines of its magnetic cage, the team manages the flow of the particles by applying a bit of fluid dynamics.

Introducing what is known as sheared axial flow to a short column of plasma has previously been studied as a potential way to improve stability in a Z-pinch, to rather limited effect.

Not to be deterred, physicists relied on computer simulations to show the concept was possible.

Using a mix of 20 percent deuterium and 80 percent hydrogen, the team managed to hold stable a 50 centimetre (1.6 foot) long column of plasma enough to achieve fusion, evidenced by a signature generation of neutrons being emitted.

We're only talking 5 microseconds worth of neutrons here, so don't clear space in your basement for your Z-Pinch 3000 Home Fusion Box quite yet. But the stability was 5,000 times longer than you'd expect without such a method being used, showing the principle is ripe for further study.

Generating clean, abundant fusion energy is still a dream we're all holding onto. A new approach to a less complex form of plasma technology could help remove at least some of the obstacles, if not prove to be a cheaper, more compact source of clean power in its own right.

The race towards the horizon of limitless energy production is only just warming up, folks. And it really can't come soon enough.

This research was published in Physical Review Letters.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-breakthrough-revives-an-old-idea-for-nuclear-fusi...

juliar wrote on Sep 24^th, 2019 at 7:43am:


I take it you do not understand the implications of e = mc²

Don’t worry, most here are equally as ignorant as you, don’t feel lonely.

Quote:



That's why we need to build 1000s of giant Thorium power stations
as quickly as possible to avoid a global catastrophe.

juliar wrote on Sep 24^th, 2019 at 4:10pm:




Wow thanks for posting that I hadn't read about fusion since the last time I read about it in my physics textbook.

Now how about some real heavy stuff ?


Nuclear fusion
PHYSICS WRITTEN BY: Robert W. Conn



Nuclear fusion, process by which nuclear reactions between light elements form heavier elements (up to iron). In cases where the interacting nuclei belong to elements with low atomic numbers (e.g., hydrogen [atomic number 1] or its isotopes deuterium and tritium), substantial amounts of energy are released.

The vast energy potential of nuclear fusion was first exploited in thermonuclear weapons, or hydrogen bombs, which were developed in the decade immediately following World War II. For a detailed history of this development, see nuclear weapon.

Meanwhile, the potential peaceful applications of nuclear fusion, especially in view of the essentially limitless supply of fusion fuel on Earth, have encouraged an immense effort to harness this process for the production of power. For more detailed information on this effort, see fusion reactor.

This article focuses on the physics of the fusion reaction and on the principles of achieving sustained energy-producing fusion reactions.

The Fusion Reaction
Fusion reactions constitute the fundamental energy source of stars, including the Sun. The evolution of stars can be viewed as a passage through various stages as thermonuclear reactions and nucleosynthesis cause compositional changes over long time spans.

Hydrogen (H) “burning” initiates the fusion energy source of stars and leads to the formation of helium (He). Generation of fusion energy for practical use also relies on fusion reactions between the lightest elements that burn to form helium.

In fact, the heavy isotopes of hydrogen—deuterium (D) and tritium (T)—react more efficiently with each other, and, when they do undergo fusion, they yield more energy per reaction than do two hydrogen nuclei. (The hydrogen nucleus consists of a single proton. The deuterium nucleus has one proton and one neutron, while tritium has one proton and two neutrons.)

Fusion reactions between light elements, like fission reactions that split heavy elements, release energy because of a key feature of nuclear matter called the binding energy, which can be released through fusion or fission.

The binding energy of the nucleus is a measure of the efficiency with which its constituent nucleons are bound together. Take, for example, an element with Z protons and N neutrons in its nucleus.

The element’s atomic weight A is Z + N, and its atomic number is Z. The binding energy B is the energy associated with the mass difference between the Z protons and N neutrons considered separately and the nucleons bound together (Z + N) in a nucleus of mass M. The formula is

B = (Zmp + Nmn − M)c2,

where mp and mn are the proton and neutron masses and c is the speed of light.

It has been determined experimentally that the binding energy per nucleon is a maximum of about 1.4 10−12 joule at an atomic mass number of approximately 60—that is, approximately the atomic mass number of iron. Accordingly, the fusion of elements lighter than iron or the splitting of heavier ones generally leads to a net release of energy.

Read on here to learn the complexities of Nuclear Fusion.

https://www.britannica.com/science/nuclear-fusion#ref259117

BH, is that microwave cooking radiation ?

Yes Bobby everyone knows that.

But it was basically a prototype in the lab and was abandoned to make bombs with plutonium from nuclear reactors.

Now enormous development has gone into nuclear reactors so they are almost a package deal now being used for submarines and aircraft carriers and France has most successfully employed them.

See the catch is that there is not enough financial incentive as yet to undertake the enormous amount of costly research and development work required to bring thorium reactors up to commercial readiness. And thorium reactors are not without their operational problems.

India has been trying for nearly a century to build one without any real success and similarly the Netherlands has had a go at it.

But India and the Netherlands are technically primitive compared to the USA and until the USA decides to develop a practical commercial thorium reactor then they won't exist.

And if the nuclear fusion reactor being built right now is a success then nobody will bother with thorium.

Only time will tell.

Bobby. wrote on Oct 1^st, 2019 at 4:42am:


like hydrogen all of sockos recommendations are always 20 years away LOL

The totally loony demented crazy Greeny Scunge slides in to display her legendary ignorance.

Bobby seems to be despairing as the disappointing truth about Thorium that was beaten by uranium leaks out.

This time next century no doubt India will be still trying to get theirs going in the lab.


But hope springs eternal as there is a company in Canada that is trying to make a thorium machine.

http://www.thoriumpowercanada.com/technology/





Let’s produce a GWye!
(1 GWye = roughly the electricity for one million people, living by western standards, for one year)

Let us suppose it is our mission to produce electricity for a run-of-the-mill city with about 1 million inhabitants living by Western standards. This city will need about thousand megawatts of electricity, year round, in short 1GWye.

In the visual, I compare four ways to accomplish this, along with the input and output of each of the options.

For those who wonder: yes, I redrew the original scheme of Kirk Sorensen. I copied his info on the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor and conventional nuclear, the Light Water Reactor.

I added two options though: coal and the IMSR. Coal is what all nuclear options should be compared to. IMSR is LeBlanc’s Integral Molten Salt Reactor, which I think is Sorensen’s main competition in new nuclear.

Read on here

http://www.daretothink.org/numbers-not-adjectives/lets-produce-a-gwye/

Wonder how the Canadian Company will go ?

Their blurb sounds good but how many of their thorium reactors have been installed ?  Are there any actually working ?  Will it all just fizzle thru lack of interest ?

juliar wrote on Oct 1^st, 2019 at 12:34pm:



It may require the US Govt. to kick-start it all -
private companies have been piss farting around for 50 years.
We'd never have Uranium reactors if it wasn't for the Manhattan project.

juliar wrote on Oct 1^st, 2019 at 7:30pm:



The experimental reactor in 1968 was only 1 megawatt.
A power station needs to be a Gigawatt -
which is 1000 times the size.

juliar wrote on Oct 1^st, 2019 at 7:30pm:


So you have  no idea, congrats

juliar wrote on Oct 1^st, 2019 at 9:41pm:



Indeed, so is my qualification from the Radiation Safety body in this country.

BH you are a magnificent cooking supremo.

And it is good that you are so aware of the hazard of microwave radiation when you are looking thru the glass door at your cooking masterpiece.