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72 comments on Will Nuclear Fusion Fill the Gap Left by Peak Oil?

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pondlife on July 23, 2007 - 8:12am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top

What a fascinating esoteric human folly - for something that nature does trivially with massive gravity.

Why cant these people research room temperature tea and coffee - and save us a zillion tokamaks worth of power........?

[Edited after a while..]

Apologies for not first thanking Nick for the excellent information.

Interesting to hear that even with a magic wand making fusion on earth feasible, there is a slow start to the scale up due to the need for tritium.....lets get the tidal lagoons and barrages built first, then build stars afterwards.

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Foger Rox on July 23, 2007 - 11:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

tritium seems to be the fav for Tokamaks, not IEC or polywell devices, many whose goal is to fuse P-B11, boron. This type of fusion creates extremely low numbers of neutrons. And there is a lot of boron.

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Bruce Scott on July 24, 2007 - 2:07pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

People pushing p + B11 tend not to notice the losses due to bremsstrahlung from all those electrons.

(basically, electrons "collide" with each other at distance via electric forces, the collisions are largely elastic, but at high temperatures and densities the radiation emitted when they all change their random directions of motion becomes significant)

("bremsstrahlung" is German for "braking radiation")

(when a charged particle is deflected due to electric forces, photons are emitted)

ciao,
Bruce

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Telumehtar on July 24, 2007 - 11:36am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top

The current statistics on the availability of Tritium are skewed to Earth Bound sources only.

Tritium is actually more plentiful on the moon, and in fact, there is speculation that the Race for a moon base has been given new life because of this fact.

Amongst space enthusiasts, it has been the guess that once a product/resource in space can be found at more abundance and for lower cost/lower risk than on earth, that we would then see a push for space colonies, refineries, mines, and other industrial activities which would require a human presence in space.

Tritium to fuel Fusion might be the very product that kicks this off.

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