[Bobboau]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2emKoMgZ03U

what do our resident physicist think about this?

BTW, it took me a while to figure out that the basic process involves using heavy ion beams to smash deuterium fuel pellets. heavy ions are not the fuel.

[Klaustrophobia]

hour long youtube video, EEEEK.  later.

[Mika]

hour long youtube video, EEEEK.  later.

Indeed. This is bordering TL;DW

I lack the education in nuclear technology to make calls of this working or not. Possibility of synthesizing fuel at the same plant makes it intriguing though.

My thoughts:
The skeptic in me says that does the reactor vessel actually provide that much power, and can it possibly withstand the hit? He is saying that the fusion takes place in a vacuum, so the heating of the reactor walls is not as pronounced and that any energy that could be transferred is transferred by radiation, or that's how I understood it. But for me this means that the energy transportation from the reactor to the heat exchanger shouldn't be as effective, yet he claims a decade of improvement in the power production. So is the containment vessel hotter than the normal containment vessel, I don't know. This thing never became very apparent from his presentation.

I wouldn't like to be anywhere close to it if that vacuum was breached.

[Nuke]

i dont think you want to be anywhere near the reactor. youd need the ability to manufacture deutrium fuel canisters to feed a constantly moving line of reactions, youd also need to manufacture the lithium sphere thingie that he mentions, and feed them into the reactor in the same way. theres not a doubt in my mind we could do it, but it would call for huge factory complexes right in the complex. one assembally line would need to be a cyclical loop, with the product needing to be super cooled during much of the process, while the other one would need to be open ended, oricessing heavy water, seperating deutrium, freezing it, and canistering it, and finally fusing it. and where he calls for 10 reaction chambers, that would mean rolling 10 of each off the line every second. its an epic task, but i cant really see any reason it wont work. dtill, i think the best way to do fusion, is by nuking things.

[Luis Dias]

If you liked HIF talk, probably you'd like to listen to this talk too:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhL5VO2NStU&feature=player_profilepage

They are now building the next bussard's reactor, to see if it works or not, within the us gov.

Bussard is dead now, btw. (And yeah this is the same Bussard that "invented" the ramjet, etc.)

[Thaeris]

Be more careful with your "ramjet" citation, as there's lots of "ramjets" out there, most of which are actual air-breathing jets.

Bussard's Ramjet

[redalbatross]

Be more careful with your "ramjet" citation, as there's lots of "ramjets" out there, most of which are actual air-breathing jets.

Bussard's Ramjet

Yeah, Bussard's "ramjet" only resembles an actual ramjet insofar as the engine simply collects and compresses the medium it travels through until an energetic response occurs, but for all intents and purposes, a Bussard Ramjet is essentially a nuclear fusion drive. The problem is that fusing pure hydrogen sucks as a reaction and the magnetic field needed to collect the hydrogen itself would require power. Massive, massive amounts of power.

More on-topic, I might watch that video when I have an hour. Fusion of any kind is just an enormous pain in the ass from a logistical standpoint.