Posted on 10/21/2019 7:34:43 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Assembly of the Plasma Liner Experiment (PLX) at Los Alamos National Laboratory is well underway with the installation of 18 of 36 plasma guns in an ambitious approach to achieving controlled nuclear fusion (Figure 1). The plasma guns are mounted on a spherical chamber, and fire supersonic jets of ionized gas inward to compress and heat a central gas target that serves as fusion fuel. In the meantime, experiments performed with the currently installed plasma guns are providing fundamental data to create simulations of colliding plasma jets, which are crucial for understanding and developing other controlled fusion schemes.
Most fusion experiments employ either magnetic confinement, which relies on powerful magnetic fields to contain a fusion plasma, or inertial confinement, which uses heat and compression to create the conditions for fusion.
The PLX machine combines aspects of both magnetic confinement fusion schemes (e.g. tokamaks) and inertial confinement machines like the National Ignition Facility (NIF). The hybrid approach, although less technologically mature than pure magnetic or inertial confinement concepts, may offer a cheaper and less complex fusion reactor development path. Like tokamaks, the fuel plasma is magnetized to help mitigate losses of particles and thermal energy. Like inertial confinement machines, a heavy imploding shell (the plasma liner) rapidly compresses and heats the fuel to achieve fusion conditions. Instead of NIF's array of high-power lasers driving a solid capsule, PLX relies on supersonic plasma jets fired from plasma guns.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Would that make a heckuva business card? "Yeah, I work at the National Ignition Facility..."
Please enlighten me regarding what I missed. Perhaps it's you that lacks a grasp of this technology.
Better yet, the National Ignition Facility Test Yard.
Hey, you forgot the sarcasm tag. But, if you have $10 I've perfected a carburetor that is guaranteed to make your diesel pickup get a 100 mpg while towing a 5th wheel trailer up the road to Pike's Peak.
“Maybe. But I don’t want to be within 100 miles of this particular gizmo when they fire it up”
History suggests that there is no danger. The problem with fusion energy generation is getting it going and keeping it going. I think only one group has even gotten close to generating as much energy as it takes to get the reaction going. In other words, fusion machines are still an energy suck, not an energy generator. And I think the longest reaction generated was in the billionths of seconds long. My info could be dated on these numbers. But a big explosion is almost impossible with these types of machines.
Exactly....
Some heat and neutron emission but that is about it.
There isn’t enough Hydrogen in the reaction for anything more than a quick flash limited to around 25 ft in diameter.
Still, my feeling is magnetic containment will never be successful as the atoms are too far apart to sustain a reaction.
Inertial Fusion might be the only way they can get Fusion to work.
Now how they get a constant reaction going with it....yet another major problem.
Kinda what I meant. Stop it? Nah. But get their hands on it? Sure.
Thx for the ping. I am less and less convinced that fusion approaches based on “high-energy physics” will work. It is more and more apparent that physics is missing something fundamental. The EXPERIMENTAL work done on SAFIRE (”electric universe” theory) is providing results that are thought to be completely impossible by the “standard model” THEORY.
Today’s physicists seem to have forgotten that physics is still an EXPERIMENTAL science and are too married to the pretty mathematics of their theories.
Reminds me of the Hollow earth theory from the 1950s and 60s.
Yeah! There’s a Florida man with a Corvette down there!
Thanks BenLurkin. In most FR science topics some nimrod will post some snark about how it's really just about getting gov't grant money. No one ever seems to put it in the fusion topics, and fusion is the biggest boondoggle there is. "The results indicate we're on the right track, and now have to spend six or seven more years building the bigger iteration". If they succeed, the global warming Luddites won't have anything to piss and moan about, until they fabricate and confabulate the next thing they'll piss and moan about.
As I recall the problem with fusion energy generation is that, with the present technology, it takes more energy to run the machine than it can generate via heat and steam turbines.
The fusion they can do. They just need better efficiency. The energy generated by the fusion process must be able to be fed back to the generator and leave something left over for the rest of us. That is, it needs to be self-sustaining and provide a usable and affordable output to the power grid.
And fusion is not fission. Fusion is what goes on in the sun. Fission is what goes on in atomic bombs. Big difference.
I thought they broke even a few years ago. (As much energy was generated as was fed into the process.) Also I thought the problem continues to be magnetic containment. They still can’t maintain the field properly to keep the reaction going.
My knowledge of this is very old.
So is mine. You are probably right about containment. But breaking even is a long ways away from being able to build a commercially viable system.
But I'm pulling for them. They will get there someday and life on this planet will improve. Airplanes will still need oil. So will automobiles unless there is an order of magnitude improvement in battery technology. So will plastic factories. But give it a decade or two and enough capital and it will move a lot of our energy needs to electric. It will be a slow process. It will need the big breakthrough in battery technology. But it will happen.
I give it 50 to 100 years.
Love to see it happen soon.
But OH NO’s . ..... the Global Warming crowd will deny us nuclear fusion too!
Viable nuclear fusion is our key to the stars. Its worth the present effort and much, much more. May the US Space Force be with us.
—
I agree with everything you just said.
Yes, the professional stupids will come up with a reason to say this is bad, but a solid 90% of the world will say F you. (I’m 99.999% sure of that.)
And yes, this is the key to the stars.
And yes, may the US Space Force be with us.
Fusion is like Democrats. Controlled confinement is perpetually just a few years away
Dr. John Slough appears in first position with Field Reversed Configuration plasmoids for magnetic confinement.
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