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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 All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Wednesday February 19 2020, @03:02PM

    by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us (6553) on Wednesday February 19 2020, @03:02PM (#959866) Journal

    No. The point of it was to continue interest in research and development and it did so by implying that there are operational designs which are [almost] ready to produce power commercially. There are not. And I bracketed "almost" because they specified a time frame of "near future."

    My point isn't to say it will never happen, or that it cannot happen. Nor is it to dissuade anyone from reading the article - it is cool stuff. My point is that the article is being very disingenuous by implying that it "might" be ready in the "near future" for commercial application. Even I, a great lover and user of weasel words, could see their hook amounts to a falsehood without stating any lie.

    That is what I meant by "operative," as in, "efficacious for the proposed commercial purpose," clearly stated as power generation. Otherwise it's pure science, which is nevertheless pretty cool and almost always worthwhile but nevertheless very hard to pay the bills with.

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