As far as I know the closest thing to a fusion reactor in the world is the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor in Princeton, NJ. There’s probally a newer better one out there, if so let me know, but my question is how far are they (they being people with high IQs and an affinity for heating crap up to 2 million degrees) from making fusion based power generation a viable, cost effective alternative to dirty fission reactors? 10 years? 50? No way to know?
Also, is there any power generation technology more promising than fusion?
Ever since 1950, the standard estimate has been “about twenty years from now”. In other words, in 1950, they were predicting about 1970. In 1970, they were predicting about 1990. Now, they’re predicting 2022.
Clearly, it is difficult to predict the future development of a technology.
As to your second question, it depends on what you mean by “promising”. Once we do develop efficient fusion (which will certainly happen eventually, even if not in the promised 20 years), it’ll be far better than anything even on the drawing board right now. However, considering the uncertainty in the development of fusion, it’s reasonable to say that the plain ordinary coal technology we have right now is more promising.
I meant the cleanest, most efficient power generation possible. Does anything else compare to fusion? It seems to work for the stars all well and good, but is anyone toying with theoretical sources of power like dark matter, black holes, or other dimensions?
p.s. No need to lay the smack down, I know how little we know about these things, I was just wondering.
From what I can remember of a radio programme on this subject.
Although it is of course true that stars are hot because of fusion reactions going on within. Stars have a vast volume and are surrounded by a vaccum - it takes surprisingly little heat to keep them hot. In the case of the Sun, if I remember rightly, only about 1W of power is produced per cubic metre. A practical fussion reactor will need to produce something closer to 1,000,000 W per cubic metre! I guess that means that the fusion reator designer cannot look to the stars for inspiration, but needs to achieve something like the conditions inside an H-bomb - continuously.
I wish the reseachers luck. It is amazing that it can be done at all!
Dark matter, black holes or other dimensions are right out for now as nobody has actually ever even proved they exist (ok…black holes seem to be well entrenched) much less get their hands on these items.
Also realize that fusion is not necessarily the most efficient power source. Frankly, I would think huge amounts of energy produced by a fusion reactor would go unused. However, a fusion reactor has the advantage of actually having scads of energy to waste and a fuel supply that is vast, cheap and not likely to run out for a LONG time. It is this that is the real attraction of fusion energy…cheap, abundant fuel for the reactor and relatively little waste that is nasty (although I believe there is some).
The main problem today with fusion reactors (at least as I understand it) is that while we can get one to start we have to put more energy in to start the reaction than we can get back out. The fusion plasma is contained in a magnetic bottle as no earthly substance could withstand the heat generated by the reaction to contain it. This has the unfortunate side effect of making it difficult to keep adding fuel to the reactor and to get rid of waste products that inhibit the reaction. Eventuaklly the whole thing putters out and the end result is more energy was spent making it go than was generated by the reaction.
I got to tour the facility. What is amazing is that they have too much space. The NSTE takes up about 1/3 of the room that the Tokomak did, and the computer room is filled with old 60’s computer racks that have Apple G3s and Intel machines one them. The computers look very small on those shelves, giving the computer room a very “barren” look for such an active facility.
I can think of at least three methods involving black holes which would be more efficient than fusion. The Penrose process can be used to harness much of the rotational energy of a black hole, but the catch is that the hole has to be rotating initially, and once it stops rotating, it would take more energy than it’d be worth to start it rotating again. Hawking radiation could be used for near-perfect conversion of matter to energy, by feeding the hole at exactly the same rate that it’s radiating, but to get a significant amount of power out, you’d need a very small hole (smaller than we have any idea how to produce), and it’d be a balancing act to keep it fed at the right rate. At a somewhat lower efficiency than these (but still higher than fusion) is the quasar process, which can be used with any black hole. There, you drop matter into the hole and let it heat up and radiate from friction with other infalling matter.
All of these methods can be used with any sort of matter as fuel, including the waste products from fusion or other power systems. However, they also all require black holes, which, at our present level of technology, are rather hard to come by.
Fusion does indeed have radioactivity issues (a lot less than fission but still there). The first tip off that Ponds and Fleishman did not achieve cold fusion as advertised was, that they were still in perfect health–given their proximity to the reported power output they would have suffered a fair amount of radiation damage. I get the very strong impression that quite a few “proponents” of fusion reactors would recant if they knew about the radioactivity involved.