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From: Jeroen Belleman <jeroen@nospam.please>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: New fusion power system test creates 300,000 degrees C plasma
Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2024 21:39:38 +0100
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On 11/29/24 20:52, john larkin wrote:
> On Fri, 29 Nov 2024 20:51:22 +0100, Jeroen Belleman
> <jeroen@nospam.please> wrote:
> 
>> On 11/29/24 16:27, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>> On a sunny day (Sat, 30 Nov 2024 01:15:15 +1100) it happened Bill Slowman
>>> <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in <vici9s$13umg$1@dont-email.me>:
>>>
>>>> On 30/11/2024 12:00 am, Jan Panteltje wrote:
>>>>> A nuclear fusion startup just reached a milestone
>>>>> in its bid to commercialize unlimited clean energy :
>>>>>     https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/29/climate/nuclear-fusion-openstar/index.html
>>>>>
>>>>> ITER inside out :-)
>>>>
>>>> You really can't read, can you. It's got its plasma to 300,000 degrees
>>>> K, and ITER have got theirs to 150,000,000 degrees K, about 500 times
>>>> hotter. It maybe some kind of milestone for OpenStar, but they've got
>>>> lot of milestones to go before they'll have a product that they can sell.
>>>>
>>>> And they are still trying to fuse hydrogen or deuterium, which produces
>>>> a lot of neutrons.
>>>>
>>>> https://hb11.energy/
>>>
>>> Looks a bit like that thing Larking was making stuff for, laser ignition
>>> Not much coming from that at all.
>>> Just playing stuff for kids/ training stuff for aspiring nuclear fishisicks..
>>> That was discussed here last year or so.
>>>
>>>> is trying to fuse hydrogen and boron, which doesn't produce neutrons -
>>>> if the machine ever works it will last a whole lot longer than hydrogen
>>>> fusion machines, which will be damaged by the stray neutrons they
>>>> produce, if they ever work.
>>>
>>> Would be nice to have small portable power sources, for in the home and cars etc etc.
>>
>>> Plutonium is dangerous, but the Viking spacecraft are still working after many decades.
>>> [...]
>>
>> It would be lovely to have 50kWTh or so of PU238 in the basement,
>> if it could be made cheaply enough. Power for a lifetime for the
>> whole house and then some.
> 
> That woud warm up the planet nicely. You can't turn it off.
> 

Pretty negligible, I think. Assuming about 3e9 homes on this earth,
it would add about 0.1% to the heat budget of the whole earth.
As a side effect, it would reduce CO2 emissions by a whole lot,
so the overall result may well be a drop in global average
temperature.

>>
>> 238Pu and its decay daughters are predominantly alpha emitters,
>> which is easy to contain. An important problem would be to make
>> it fool-proof: Not an easy task. I wouldn't want it in a car,
>> for example.
> 
> Sounds like the "universal solvent", hard to contain.

It's *easy* to contain. It's the fools that are a problem. We
have no shortage of those, unfortunately.

That is not to say it would solve all problems. Producing
enough 238Pu cheaply enough would be a problem. There would be
lots of red tape too. There would be hard-to-predict economic
effects. I think the technical problem of designing a compact
package producing 15kW or so of electricity and enough heat
for hot water and space heating would be comparatively minor.

Jeroen Belleman