14 hours ago, birdguy said:

My grandfather would have said, "How on Earth would you make thousands of little bits on a silicon chip the size of a dime and store the Encyclopedia Britannic on less than half of it?  I have no idea."

Noel

 

Indeed Noel, I would be the first to tell you that technology, given enough time, can achieve remarkable things. But what we are talking about here is the notion that inertial conferment fusion can achieve a working, cost-effective, viable reactor in 10 to 20 years, ahead of the other fusion approaches.

I would be skeptical of this belief. There are a number of different fusion technologies. Laser conferment is one of them. I see the other technologies as more viable in the time frames specified. Another example, in addition to the challenges I mentioned in my last response, is that laser confinement fusions mini diamond shells have to be filled with tritium, and tritium is highly expensive, not to mention in short supply.

So you would have to find a way to manufacture untold thousands of these mini diamond shell microengineering marvels, fill them with highly expensive and in short supply tritium, invent new laser technology that could energize incredibly fast, fast enough to zap the little pellet's many times per second, design those lasers so that the target was blasted by the lasers perfectly symmetrically (slight off and you lose loads of energy) and then develop some means to extract the energy.

I'm not saying its impossible, just that the other approaches to fusion are ahead in these respects and don't have as many disadvantages. 

 

1 hour ago, martin-w said:

 

Indeed Noel, I would be the first to tell you that technology, given enough time, can achieve remarkable things. But what we are talking about here is the notion that inertial conferment fusion can achieve a working, cost-effective, viable reactor in 10 to 20 years, ahead of the other fusion approaches.

I would be skeptical of this belief. There are a number of different fusion technologies. Laser conferment is one of them. I see the other technologies as more viable in the time frames specified. Another example, in addition to the challenges I mentioned in my last response, is that laser confinement fusions mini diamond shells have to be filled with tritium, and tritium is highly expensive, not to mention in short supply.

So you would have to find a way to manufacture untold thousands of these mini diamond shell microengineering marvels, fill them with highly expensive and in short supply tritium, invent new laser technology that could energize incredibly fast, fast enough to zap the little pellet's many times per second, design those lasers so that the target was blasted by the lasers perfectly symmetrically (slight off and you lose loads of energy) and then develop some means to extract the energy.

I'm not saying its impossible, just that the other approaches to fusion are ahead in these respects and don't have as many disadvantages. 

 

General Fusion hasn't demonstrated that their spherical arrangement works yet. And fundamentally, both spherical setups face the same problem: Focusing a lot of energy on a small target. Reminds me of how the atomic bomb was developed. They used conventional explosives to compress nuclear matter and also struggled to make that spherical. As is obvious, they figured it out.

1 hour ago, qqwertzde said:

General Fusion hasn't demonstrated that their spherical arrangement works yet. And fundamentally, both spherical setups face the same problem: Focusing a lot of energy on a small target. Reminds me of how the atomic bomb was developed. They used conventional explosives to compress nuclear matter and also struggled to make that spherical. As is obvious, they figured it out.

 

True. Given the issues I mentioned with laser confinement fusion though, I'm not confident it's the most likely contender to be provide a working cost-effective reactor.

We shall see. 

I recall a few years back, Skunk Works working on a fusion reactor. It was said to be small scale, small enough to fit on the back of a truck. Not heard anything about it lately. 

This is a novel and very interesting approach.

 

 

Interesting, but it's still too large to fit in my attack shuttle! It must be no larger than a steamer trunk (foot locker)...

Ah well, maybe some day.