I presume you mean hot fusion? Do you happen to have a cite?
This boondoggle has been going on for well over half a century in the US and has squandered billions of dollars with no end in sight. Last I heard a working device will be up and running within twenty five years (Just give us all the research funds we need).
Even if hot fusion ever gives off more energy output over input, it’s not as if there won’t be a lot of radioactivite material produced from such a process.
I don’t think so. Fusing two deuterium nuclei yields a helium-4 nucleus. It’s not radioactive.
Probably not a huge amount, but some contamination would be produced indirectly according to this: -
In any event, a viable hot fusion reactor remains a generation away (where it will probably remain).
The estimates are about 10 years away, France is trying it with the support of a load of others.
Personally I reckon that it is worth a punt.
The promise of success has always been way off in the future.
Wikipedia has a good history of research in this field and gives a good mix of optimist and pessimist views.
For two generations government bureaucrats from both the US and Europe have already thrown many billions of dollars and euros into this perpetually flushing toilet known as hot fusion research.
The section on the Economics of hot fusion might be of interest.
Personally. I’d like governments to stop throwing good money after bad and get out of funding the hot fusion boondoggle altogether.
I don’t believe this particular technology is worth a punt.
Tidal power generation on any large scale would have dramatic environmental impacts in delicate littoral environments. It’s suitable for a limited number of sites (particularly those with deep, narrow channel bays, like San Francisco Bay), but the design and maintenance of such equipment is a substantial engineering challenge. Father Neptune does not treat equipment gently in his domain.
Regarding thermonuclear fusion: the most credible estimates place workable, electrical energy producing controlled thermofusion at >20 years away. Of course, the most credible estimates have placed it at around 20 years for the last 50-odd years, so one questions how credible current estimates are. There are several fundamental problems with energy-producing controlled fusion; besides the actual controlling the plasma and maintaining steadconfinement which is the focus of much current, big-money research, there is the issue of neutron radiation and hazards therefrom (and anyone ignorantly mouthing off about aneutronic Helium-3 fusion based on a Popular Science article they read at the barber shop gets put in the corner with a dunce cap for twenty), dealing with waste heat pollution, and the whole problem of turning a plasma at tens (or in the case of higher atomic weight reactions, hundreds or thousands) of million Kelvin into electrical power; you’re not going to do this with a steam cycle boiler the way you do with fission or fossil fuel plants. This requires extracting energy by inductance using magentoplasmadynamic generation at potentials and wattage throughputs that make the most powerful energy transmission systems we have today look like Leyden jars in comparison.
This doesn’t mean that such research is totally a boondoggle–if and when it pays off, it’ll offer unimaginable energy resources, and even while it doesn’t it still allows us to press further into the area of high energy plasmas, which impacts a number of different venues of both pure research science and eventual applied engineering–but it does mean that the problem is vastly more complicated than a single “Eureka!” moment will resolve. And don’t believe anybody who gives you an exact figure on when fusion will be viable, especially a lowball figure. (Ten years isn’t even remotely possible without some major unforseen breakthroughs.) I still hold out hope that someone will find a way to make muon-catalyzed fusion viable, but that’s pretty remote, since the overwhelming consensus and the Standard Model say that the energy required to make muons will always be more than what could conceivably be extracted from resultant reactions.
As for Jordan, if any nation in the Middle East could responsibly handle and develop nuclear technology, it is Jordan. Color me lacking in outrage about this.
Stranger
I envisage using tidal power in much the same way as a conventional hydro electric dam works, however pumping water up into a higher dam so one has a constant and controllable source of power.
That type of technology is extremely crude and simple, it just relies on a lot of concrete.
Things like nodding dogs and submerged lateral blades strike me as over complicated, expensive and prone to technical problems.
Provided one chose the right areas, these dams should be pretty safe, even if one broke, it would just set off a minor tsunami.
Neptune can be pretty rough, but with Dutch rather than NOLA style civil engineering, the only vulnerable things that would take a beating would be the turbines, which would be routinely switched out anyway.
I agree with you about Jordan.
You are going to have a hard sell of this to any area with a substantial environmental protection presence. And legitimately so; pollution damage in littoral areas is a major concern, with population and health of many species of fish, marine mammals, molluscs, and other invertebrates on a sharp decline.
Stranger
I can’t see how this would affect pollution, but I can envisage a potential problem with minced fish.
Mind you, I expect wind generators mince birds …
Of course, Jordan doesn’t really have the option of using tidal power, being landlocked except at Aqaba.
Tidal generators would be (mostly) free of chemical pollution, true (we’ll assume that the leeching of lubricants and oxidation of metals is negligable on the scale of things) but they’ll have dramatic effects on the local ecosystem. Creatures which live in littoral (near-shore) areas are dependent on the energy of tidal action to bring in food, remove waste, stir and oxydize the water, et cetera, and building enough tidal energy generation systems to satisfy a significant amount of demand is going to seriously impact the conditions here, not to mention the footprint it’ll take up in what are surprisingly delicate environments. A “minor tsunami” from a failed dam could destroy thousands of years of coral reef growth, or displace critical sessile animals for dozens of square kilometers.
Tidal energy is “free” in the sense that [thread=400309]we get it from the Earth’s rotation[/thread] (and it has plenty of momentum to spare) but the mechanism by which we get it can have serious detrimental impacts. It’s like the difference between getting drunk off of high grade vodka (leaving you with no residual hangover) versus cheap Canadian whisky (with your head throbbing for days to come). For the most part, extracting tidal energy in littoral regions is going to have highly damaging impacts on the local environment. Mid-ocean tidal energy generation is going to be far less destructive, but then you have the logistical problem of transmitting the energy somewhere. In any case, as has already been pointed out, Jordan’s access to shoreline is seriously limited, and while they’ve got plenty of sunshine, solar power has yet to be established as an economically competitive large scale source of energy (though it’s been getting incrementally better). It’s quite reasonable for Jordan–a growing, relatively moderate nation with very limited natural resources–to want to invest and develop independent energy sources, and to look for the most economically viable way of doing so.
Stranger