Was waiting on someone to post this and see opinions. Is this a game changer. One interviewer said it could be commercially available in 10 years.
How are they containing the reaction? What scale of facility would be required to achieve commercial viability? Have they calculated the energy cost to secure the supply of hydrogen gas needed to feed the reaction into the calculation. It is going to take a lot of electricity to separate enough H from H2O, to provide a constant supply of H for the H to He reaction.
All valid questions. At what point does a sustained, controlled, reproducible reaction take place?
We get this story every few years. They just want funding.
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" Hi, I got this great product that may be ready in ten years, if you just give me a few billion…"
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So how does this fit in?
Even more because it has to be tritium and not just hydrogen.
At least the way this experiment works.
Fusion is transmuting matter into energy. There is less matter, and more thermal energy at the end.
Energy is conserved because mass and energy are equivalent. There is a HUGE amount of “energy” available because the relation between mass and “energy” is a factor of the speed of light. Tiny loss of mass, MASSIVE release of energy.
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All good questions. The bottom line at this time is that the concept has now been proven. And from what I am hearing it will take decades to develop a system that can produce power at high quantities. But a Physicist that I heard today said that it will be decades and not a century to get there. And regarding the cost, the reaction proved that for every unit expended to get the reaction the output was 1 followed by seventeen zeros. That is 1 in: 100,000,000,000,000,000 out.
Which will make it very difficult, if not impossible, to safely contain a sustained reaction.
The Scientist’s that I have heard talking about this really do consider that this will be a viable power source.
None of them seemed concerned about containment or scaling at this time. Consider what we achieved in technology in 100 years from 1900.
It doesn’t have to be a continuous reaction. It can be intermittent like this test was. This was done with two lasers as opposed to having to contain a continuous high temp plasma Tokamac or stellarator style. Tritium is a problem especially if we keep shutting down the worlds nuclear plants because that is where we get most of it.
I hope it’s not basically a cobalt bomb…
I am not aware of any significant cobalt produced in the reaction. That’s way higher on the fusion chain then hydrogen and helium and various heavy isotopes of the same.
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