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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday February 18 2020, @02:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the playing-with-atoms dept.

Nuclear Fusion Power Without Regular Tokamaks Or Stellarators:

When it comes to nuclear fusion, the most well-known reactor type today is no doubt the tokamak, due to its relatively straight-forward concept of plasma containment. That's not to say that there aren't other ways to accomplish nuclear fusion in a way that could conceivably be used in a commercial power plant in the near future.

As we covered previously, another fairly well-known type of fusion reactor is the stellarator, which much like the tokamak, has been around since the 1950s. There are other reactor types from that era, like the Z-pinch, but they seem to have all fallen into obscurity. That is not to say that research on Z-pinch reactors has ceased, or that other reactor concepts — some involving massive lasers — haven't been investigated or even built since then.

In this article we'll take a look at a range of nuclear fusion reactor types that definitely deserve a bit more time in the limelight.

[...] Inertial Confinement Fusion

[...] Magnetic Confinement Fusion

[...] All the Other Designs


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  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday February 18 2020, @07:06PM

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Tuesday February 18 2020, @07:06PM (#959623) Journal

    Operational Tokamaks definitely already exist. [iter.org]

    They're just not net energy positive. So the original sentence is accurate.

    Or, to fix your fix:

    When it comes to theoretical nuclear fusion power generation...

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