Sectorgame

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYHCDbf-SlY&feature=fvhl

Sounds interesting

This is supposed to be new?
I thought tokamak fusion reactors have been around for a while but can only about break even in power generation?

(and UGH those comments on youtube...)

Droid803 wrote:This is supposed to be new?
I thought tokamak fusion reactors have been around for a while but can only about break even in power generation?

(and UGH those comments on youtube...)

QFT, the whole post.

This is pretty old news, pretty sure that is from a segment of a special of the Science Channel called "Can we make a star on Earth" which is several years old.

And, yes, generally the people posting comments on youtube are idiots but this video takes the cake for stupidest, most uninformed comments ever.

"ZOMG DOOD WE ALL GONNA DAI!"

I default to minimized on the comments, it's less painful that way...

I cannot for the life of me get this video to play properly. Odd.

Droid803 wrote:This is supposed to be new?
I thought tokamak fusion reactors have been around for a while but can only about break even in power generation?

That's because very little work has been done on the tokamak design in the over a decade since.

The larger tokamak reactors become, the more (relatively) efficient they are. Size matters. The JET in Oxford needs more energy than it could generate, the ITER will be - IIRC - slightly above break-even. It's only the next generation of even bigger fusion reactors that will be economically viable for power generation.
And that's still gonna take a while...

I'm still holding out for unobtanium.

FSF wrote:The larger tokamak reactors become, the more (relatively) efficient they are. Size matters. The JET in Oxford needs more energy than it could generate, the ITER will be - IIRC - slightly above break-even. It's only the next generation of even bigger fusion reactors that will be economically viable for power generation.
And that's still gonna take a while...

Even though it hold tremendous promise, you're right, it will take a while. In the meantime there's Generation III+ fission for all!


Although I seriously hope that we can get a better method than just boiling water to turn all that heat (from fission or fusion) into electricity. That method was so 19th century.......

People have suggested other methods. Liquid sodium for heat exchange was assumed for some time to power the Russian Alfa-class submarines. But when you come down to it, it's basically a heat source. Steam turbines are the best, safest, most reliable, most effective method of harnessing a heat source we currently have.

For future systems capable of generating plasma (fusion or gas core fission), I was thinking more along the lines of something like this.

Exactly how efficient are steam turbines?

IIRC theoretically they can never be more than 50% due to needing a heat sink.

In practice it's much less than that.

I heard with an nuclear plant in service today the average efficiency is about 40%.


So in otherwords not very.

40% is actually pretty darn good as far as the whole spectrum of efficiency goes.