Nuclear fusion needs a Wright Bros. moment for mass production.
>http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/mar/24/nuclear-fusion-needs-a-wright-brothers-moment-says-firm-closing-on-the-target
>David Kingham, the chief executive of Tokamak Energy, has announced his company’s target of producing its first electricity by 2025 and feeding power into the grid by 2030, as well as investment from the UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers.
Harnessing the nuclear energy which powers the sun has long been touted as the ultimate solution to the challenge of powering the world while halting climate change. But, as fusion sceptics often say, the reality has stubbornly remained a decade or two away for many years.
>“If we make exciting progress relatively quickly, with relatively modest funding then we’ll get to a Wright brothers’ moment in fusion and suddenly people will realise it is going to be possible,” said Kingham, whose company is a spin off from the UK’s national fusion lab at Culham near Oxford.
>Plasmas are well understood, meaning that containing the ultra-hot gas is the major obstacle. “It is essentially an engineering and technical challenge now,” said Kingham. Copper magnets and regular superconductors, which operate at near absolute zero, require too much energy. So Tokamak Energy is using high-temperature superconductors, though these still operate at -200C.
The plasma needed for fusion energy reaches an extraordinary temperature: 100mC, hotter than the core of the sun. But Tokamak Energy’s third prototype, currently under construction, aims to reach 15mC in the next 12 months and 100mC by the end of 2017.
It seems like scientists have been "closing on target" since the 80s. Is anyone else here old enough to remember the cold fusion hoax back in the early 90s? I guess we're just now coming out of the intellectual fog caused by that.
>>33417
Those are some bold claims.
>based off of JET, which produced 16MW for 1 second at a cost of 24MW
>their experimental tokamak can create a 20 second pulse but still doesn't produce more energy than it consumes
>still largely theoretical as stated on their website
>a reactor large enough to produce significant power would cost 100x more than the 15m they've raised so far
I hope it works out for them, but ITER and DEMO still look way more promising.
>>33467
The media constantly overstates scientific findings and advancements. Makes for more exciting stories that way. Scientists have been making progress on it forever; it just so happens progress is slow and incremental.
I wouldn't be surprised if somebody oversold it to get more funding, but for the most part they don't need to. The media does that on its own.
>>33333
test
>>33467
>cold fusion hoax
It wasn't a hoax exactly, but it seems it possibly wasn't what was initially claimed.
There is indeed something unprecedented going on, but whether or not it's low-energy fusion, is highly debated.
Electrochemists examining the reactions usually claim it is fusion, but physicists say that's patently impossible, there are no gamma rays detected and that other factors must account for the excess heat and tritium results.
Because it gained a reputation as a pathological science in the media, it goes by a lot of alternative names now, such as Lattice Enabled Nuclear Reactions or Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, but research is still being conducted.
About 40 western universities are still conducting occasional research, as is the US Navy, US Department of Energy and NASA.
It's major problem is it's unreproduciblity. They'll set up one device that hums along producing tons of excess heat. Then they set a second up in the exact same manner, and nothing. Usually only one device in twenty "works", which is not cool.
The second big problem is that there's no theory that describes the results properly.
Wikipedia has a fairly good description of what's been happening.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#Current_research
>>33918
I know what it is. It's not cold fusion.
It's quantum fusion. That's why the results of retesting are so inconsistent. It's right in the pocket for phenomena that are affected by experimenter intent.
I mean, I state all this as fact, for concision, but this is just a pet theory.
