So...practical fusion is solved, now?

Could you quote the part of the article that supports the question in the thread title? Not seeing it myself. Answer appears to remain "no".
 
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Beerina said:
Really?
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What do you mean by "solved"? Hell, what do you mean by "fusion"?

That sounds snide, but what I mean is that getting fusion to happen has been solved a long time ago. We're well past that stage. We can reliably make fusion occur. So in that sense, it's "solved".

What's hard to do now is to get it to produce more usable energy than it consumes. Which means we can't use it for power generation. And the ability to use it for power generation is what some people mean by "solved".

This latest project doesn't solve fusion in the latter sense. It might help us get there, but it isn't there itself.
 
Dave Rogers said:
Or rather, to get it to do that slowly enough that we can use that energy for other things than blowing stuff up.

Dave
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For present discussions, I think we can categorize thermonuclear explosions as not usable energy. It's a rather... niche application.
 
I was recently rereading a magazine from 1985, in which someone wrote a letter to the magazine stating "there's a researcher who says that he will have a working fusion motor that will go in a pickup in 5 years, and one for a car in 8."

I must have missed the fusion powered trucks in 1990 and fusion powered cars in 1993.
 
The article reads like the reporter was confused about whether the system is a reactor or a military weapon. "Ooh, cool, an array of 36 plasma cannons... now we just have to figure out how to get the enemy to stand in the center of the sphere!" (The time-honored "Free Bird Seed" sign might do the trick.)
 
Ziggurat said:
For present discussions, I think we can categorize thermonuclear explosions as not usable energy. It's a rather... niche application.
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Well, we have this patent classification:


G21J

NUCLEAR EXPLOSIVES; APPLICATIONS THEREOF


And since "usefulness" is a requirement for patentabilty, I'd say you're wrong about that!
 
Horatius said:
Well, we have this patent classification:


G21J

NUCLEAR EXPLOSIVES; APPLICATIONS THEREOF


And since "usefulness" is a requirement for patentabilty, I'd say you're wrong about that!
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"For present discussions," said Ziggurat.

Once again, "technically correct" means "I understand what you mean, but being trivially correct is more important to me than having a conversation."
 
RecoveringYuppy said:
Could you quote the part of the article that supports the question in the thread title? Not seeing it myself. Answer appears to remain "no".
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Some gaseous cramming (whatever that means) triggers fusion releasing enormous amounts of energy. UK investing £220m to build a power plant prototype, (i.e. it's more than just a "Death Star Death Blossom", to use two diffrent sci-fi movie memes.)
 
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There are several prototypes being build everywhere. Weldenstein in Germany, these Los Alamos guys and inertial confinement in Britain. Don't forget laser NIF guys in US, even though they mostly gave up on fusion. ITER is still on the map too. Who will be the first, if anyone, is unclear though. What's nice is they are all trying very different approaches.

There is saying, since 80s. Fusion is the energy of the future. And it always will be.
 
Dr.Sid said:
There are several prototypes being build everywhere. Weldenstein in Germany, these Los Alamos guys and inertial confinement in Britain. Don't forget laser NIF guys in US, even though they mostly gave up on fusion. ITER is still on the map too. Who will be the first, if anyone, is unclear though. What's nice is they are all trying very different approaches.

There is saying, since 80s. Fusion is the energy of the future. And it always will be.
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Skunk works, too. Compact Fusion Lockheed Martin.

Lots of technological progress, but I think we are still decades away from using it to feed electricity into the grid. We may never get there, it might just be too complicated and expensive.
 
Dave Rogers said:
Or rather, to get it to do that slowly enough that we can use that energy for other things than blowing stuff up.
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That's really not a problem. Curiosity's fusion reactor hasn't even blown up once: https://mars.nasa.gov/msl/spacecraft/instruments/dan/

The problem is the gap between "fuse some deuterium and tritium to make a few neutrons" and "produce enough fusion reactions that you can get more power out than you put in".
 
Horatius said:
Well, we have this patent classification:


G21J

NUCLEAR EXPLOSIVES; APPLICATIONS THEREOF


And since "usefulness" is a requirement for patentabilty, I'd say you're wrong about that!
Click to expand...

That's a really big niche they can make, but it's still a niche application.
 
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