Really, until someone comes up with a way to get Electricity
directly we are just using the power of the universe to boil water.
“Really, until someone comes up with a way to get Electricity
directly we are just using the power of the universe to boil water.”
Lockheed is working on this exact thing. Their fusion is not a donut but a barbell shaped magnetic bottle with the fusion happening in the bar part and each barbell end is a magnetic mirror reflecting back the hydrogen ions but allowing the much higher energy alpha He3/He4 ions to leave the system against a huge electrical gradient as they are slowed down they give up their kinetic energy as electrical.potential in the millions of electron volts then they make contact with the outer collector that is turned into very high voltage DC potential and with a circuit formed HVDC current. Lockheed intends to use proton H1+boron11 fusion to only have He3/He4 ions no high energy neutrons which make everything they touch radioactive even normal steels.
Personally I’m a fan of fusion fisson hybrids you don’t even need breakeven in the fusion part of the reactor core. The fission blanket can have up to a 100x energy multiplication factor at a Kef of .98 which us safely subcritical. melt down is not possible in a subcritical system. The other choice is go deep subcrit at a Kef of .6 or less and you then have a multiplier of ten or so enough to run the fusion part at a loss while breeding enormous amounts of PU239 enough to that a one gigawatt hybrid would fuel ten once through PWR or nearly twenty or the twice as efficient CANDU reactors. Effectively unlimited fissile material for a fleet of regular reactors. There is enough mined uranium sitting depleted in storage to fuel all of humanities energy needs for a thousand years with basic reprocessing and fusion hybrids or fast breed reactors they both breed huge amounts of Pu239 the perfect fission fuel other than Pu241 and NP237 which you also get in spades in a hybrid or fast breeder. In the fast spectrum every transuranium is fuel regardless of isotope number. Humans solved our long term resource issues when.we unlocked the binding curve of the atoms now it’s a marshmallow test for our species.