Home-Brewed Fusion General Fusion’s proof-of-concept device in the company’s austere headquarters, in Burnaby, British Columbia John B. Carnett
Home-Brewed Fusion General Fusion’s proof-of-concept device in the company’s austere headquarters, in Burnaby, British Columbia John B. Carnett
We’ve been disappointed in these things before. But I still suspect that something like this may be possible.
Even the founder of Amazon can have the wool pulled over his eyes. But he seems to be a pretty sharp guy. And unlike the inventor of Facebook, he actually offers people something extremely useful, rather than merely fashionable, as I have found over the years.
“....this technique essentially uses a magnetic field and plasma to break lithium down into helium and tritium,”.....
Which is Fission.
So then, how much energy is required to start this fission reaction, what additional “undesireable” byproducts are produced, how much energy is produced from the fusion reaction and what’s the delta between the fission and th fusion reaction?
Hmmmm.
Does
not
compute.......
And the liquid lead heat transfer system...I don't know if even that's possible to do without pumping in enormous amounts of energy into processing the lead to make it pure enough to be functional in this system.
Maybe I'm completely off base here, but just seems like this is a whole lot of money right down the drain. I do hope, however, that the data that results from the experiments and exploration of the technology eventually gets released.
All that is missing is a couple of flux capacitors and they will be home free.
Nothing but a fraud.
The nuclear reaction is that Lithium-6 absorbs a neutron and splits into He-4 (a/k/a helium) and H-3 (a/k/a, hydrogen-3 or tritium). Tritium then fuses with H-2 (a/k/a deuterium), making He-4 and a very high energy neutron (14.1 MeV).
Here’s one problem - The Lithium-6 absorbs thermal (low energy neutrons) so you have to slow down those 14.1 MeV neutrons. We know how to do this, but you’re not doing it in the plasma.
Here’s the showstopper - you need one neutron to be absorbed by the lithium, and the deuterium - tritium reaction only produces one neutron. So, unless you can have every neutron produced by the deuterium - tritium reaction be absorbed by lithium, you are going to run out of the tritium produced by the lithium. And you cannot rig a system so that every neutron will be absorbed by lithium. Some of the neutrons will leak out of the system and be lost while some will be absorbed by structural materials.
Let us assume that somehow every neutron produced from the deuterium - tritium reaction gets absorbed by lithium-6. We still need to process the lithium to extract every single tritium atom. No one is that good of a chemical engineer.
I can come up with schemes to multiply the neutrons (slow them down and run them through a nearly-critical uranium lattice, for instance). You get a lot of energy, but you also produce highly-radioactive fission products.
And, of course, those high-energy neutrons will be absorbed in structure materials, causing them to become radioactive.
Back when I was in grad school in the 1970s, my advisor, whose PhD thesis was, at that time, the second most cited paper in fusion reactor (tokamak) blankets, which face the same problems I describe above. He argued that one had to have 20-20 vision to see a practical fusion device, by which he meant we might see one by the year 2020. So here we are 35 years later, and, while I no longer pay much attention to fusion, we really are not much closer to a practical machine than we were in 1975.
Bezos can kiss his investment good-bye.
Lithium is really not that cheap or plentiful. There are numerous people worried about how we’re going to build EVs and equip them with lithium batteries.
I knew Jeff Bezos back in high school, he was a science genius. In fact, I thought he would end up being a physicist. This guy knows what he is doing.
He probably wants to forget about this investment.
