[Dragon]

Note, those 18 billion are development costs. We spend those once and then, build tokamaks a lot cheaper. 2 billion in this case seems to be the cost of one installation. After building 9 of them (I'm not sure about the output of heavy ion plant, but it'll almost certainly be smaller than that of a hydrogen fusion plant), we'll come out even, and 9 plants would be far from enough for the entire world.

[HAZARDLEADER]

Indeed.

Hazardleader: No, the United States are not the entire world.

I know, I was extremely pissed at the time of the post and I accedentaly vented on the HLP.  Sorry guys my bad...   

[Nuke]

Note, those 18 billion are development costs. We spend those once and then, build tokamaks a lot cheaper. 2 billion in this case seems to be the cost of one installation. After building 9 of them (I'm not sure about the output of heavy ion plant, but it'll almost certainly be smaller than that of a hydrogen fusion plant), we'll come out even, and 9 plants would be far from enough for the entire world.

yes but those hydrogen fusion plants have yet to prove energy positive. heavy ion on the other hand is, and can work now.

[Herra Tohtori]

yes but those hydrogen fusion plants have yet to prove energy positive. heavy ion on the other hand is, and can work now.

Nukes are also energy positive.

[Nuke]

indeed they are, now lets melt those ice caps nature is too slow!

[Dragon]

Note, those 18 billion are development costs. We spend those once and then, build tokamaks a lot cheaper. 2 billion in this case seems to be the cost of one installation. After building 9 of them (I'm not sure about the output of heavy ion plant, but it'll almost certainly be smaller than that of a hydrogen fusion plant), we'll come out even, and 9 plants would be far from enough for the entire world.

yes but those hydrogen fusion plants have yet to prove energy positive. heavy ion on the other hand is, and can work now.

Still, I'd expect the cost of developing and building, say, 20 tokamaks be  less than building 20 heavy ion plants. Also, keep in mind that "energy positive" means just that. For all I know, it could produce 100W gross power, versus ITER's projected 450MW. Not to mention the cost of fuel, which is negligible in hydrogen plants, unlike in heavy ion plants ("heavy ions" usually refer to lead or other heavy metals, which don't come cheap).

[Nuke]

tokamaks are a dead end for fusion research.

[headdie]

dead end or not ITER is going down the route of using tokamaks so unless another project to build commercial level output fusion plant using a different method is going to produce results before ITER does then the ITER design will be the blueprint for the first generation fusion plants

[Dragon]

Not so much ITER (it doesn't actually produce electricity), as DEMO, a planned demonstration of a commercial reactor design. ITER with it's 500MW net output (which gets radiated) is a purely scientific proof of concept, and also a testbed for new technologies. Maybe at one point, they'll rig it to power itself (it requires 50MW to function, so I guess it could be a decent way to cut the electric bill somewhat), but that's it. DEMO will produce about 3GW of power and it will be actual electricity. Of course, it depends on the success of ITER, and on technologies tested in it (and as such, it shouldn't be much more expensive than ITER).

[Nuke]

that is assuming iter is successful. we could have a heavy ion plant up and running before we even know if demo would work or not. im sure we will have some kind of fusion eventually. but we need powah nao!

[Dragon]

I'd like to see a reference to this design, as well as possible specifications. Unless there's a catch to make it viable (you can't get too much energy from fusing heavy elements), I don't see this being economical. Not to mention you keep ignoring the fact it'd have the same problem as nuclear plants: limited, mined fuel and radioactive waste. It's likely that it'd only be a little different in functionality from a normal nuke plant, while being much larger and more expensive. And there might be other problems. Remember SSTO technology we had in 60s? It sounds good until you take a look at the numbers.

[Herra Tohtori]

I'd like to see a reference to this design, as well as possible specifications. Unless there's a catch to make it viable (you can't get too much energy from fusing heavy elements), I don't see this being economical. Not to mention you keep ignoring the fact it'd have the same problem as nuclear plants: limited, mined fuel and radioactive waste. It's likely that it'd only be a little different in functionality from a normal nuke plant, while being much larger and more expensive. And there might be other problems. Remember SSTO technology we had in 60s? It sounds good until you take a look at the numbers.

If the information I've seen is reliable, the only "catch" is that it would require a massive particle accelerator to be viable, and the sheer scale of the facility would be gargantuan. It would also use large amounts of fuel, which rises some doubts about whether we could process the fusion fuel fast enough.

If it could be made to work, however, its primary value would be that it would be a massive source of heat that could be used to synthesize hydrocarbon fuels for industrial and automotive purposes; and before you start talking about carbon, it would ideally take carbon dioxide from air, condense it, and crack it to carbon and oxygen with heat; then the free carbon would be processed into hydrocarbons. So, this would essentially provide a carbon-neutral way to keep our vehicles awesome.

[Nuke]

I'd like to see a reference to this design, as well as possible specifications. Unless there's a catch to make it viable (you can't get too much energy from fusing heavy elements), I don't see this being economical. Not to mention you keep ignoring the fact it'd have the same problem as nuclear plants: limited, mined fuel and radioactive waste. It's likely that it'd only be a little different in functionality from a normal nuke plant, while being much larger and more expensive. And there might be other problems. Remember SSTO technology we had in 60s? It sounds good until you take a look at the numbers.

or untill the british sho us how its done[/skylon fanboi]

as for the design it was brought up on the forum awhile back, will do some search fu to try to find it.

http://www.hard-light.net/forums/index.php?topic=76712.msg1523470#msg1523470

[Dragon]

Ah, now I know where's the catch. The thing would have to work on a very large (read: worldwide, or at least continent wide) to be viable. This could perhaps work in the US, which spans an entire continent, but isn't the most flexible technology available. I haven't watched the vid (no time), but I'd gladly read a research paper on it if you find one (I may also look, for it, but later).

[Nuke]

i find videos like that to be more entertaining to me than 99.99999% of whats on tv. its something you can kind of listen to while doing something else.

its big, but more on the scale of lhc, not something that will span the entire us, but take up some space in some under-populated state. so yea id call it city-sized. granted the accelerator portion of the reactor would be an underground installation, and you could have farmland or whatever on top of it and no one would know the difference. you still need the reactor site and factory complexes to support it.

look on the bright side though, its clean, cheap, produces fuel for cars, is mostly underground and most importantly we have the technology to make it work now. and just cause we have a working fusion power plant does not mean we need to stop fusion research there. it just means we have power while we screw around with improving fusion technology. heavy ion fusion is still big and clunky, but it would shut up all those who think that fusion is a dead end.

[Dragon]

I didn't mean it'd literally span the entire US (that'd be silly), but rather that multiple installations of this kind would have to be build, all this coordinated and linked on a nationwide scale. Then it could pay for itself. Alternatively, one enormous complex of installations could produce power for the entire country, but only the biggest superpowers (US, China and Russia, maybe EU if it came into some sort of agreement) would have both budget and the need for this. It only makes sense in US, since Russia doesn't have money for this, China doesn't have the tech (and US won't sell it to them) and EU is unlikely to come into agreement over such critical, strategic thing such as an international power plant. China could try, in theory, but knowing their worksmanship, the entire thing would go up in flames, prejudicing the people against yet another amazing invention.

Smaller plants, on the other hand, could be logistically easier to build and maintain, and could be built on a national basis. That's why DEMO better chances of becoming the future of power generation than a heavy ion plant.

[Nuke]

i figure assuming the eu can stay together they would have a shared power grid of some sorts. not quite sure how that would work. also i wouldn't underestimate the chinese, they can do pretty awesome things when they want to. i very much doubt that their domestic goods are as bad as their exports.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

Just had to drop in and say fissile materials are NOT a limited resource in the traditional sense of the word. Uranium is not the only substance that can be used for nuclear fuel, and we have been able to build reactors that produce more fuel than they consume for decades.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor

Nuclear power is the future of large-scale power generation. I have nothing against renewable energy sources like solar power, but most of them are not viable for the kind of scale we'd need to replace fossil fuels, and the delusional hippies who actually think they are are fooling themselves.

The problem with all this future power technology is that we need a new power source NOW. Waiting until we actually start running out of easily harvest-able reserves of fossil fuels is probably a bad time to start looking elsewhere. We already possess the technology to build nuclear reactors that are many times safer and much more efficient than pretty much any reactor already operation right now, considering the goddamn moron tree-huggers have stymied construction of new plants in the past few decades.

[Nuke]

they are a finite resource on earth. not to say as limited as fossile fuel is. but enough so that we would have to break out of the gravity well to survive in the long term. in near term scales we have plenty of nuclear fuel, and were always developing technology that can burn the waste products of previous generation reactors.

i hope that when fusion starts to pick up we dont have the kind of hippie backlash that we had in the 70s that has stifled nuclear technology for four decades.

[TwentyPercentCooler]

they are a finite resource on earth. not to say as limited as fossile fuel is. but enough so that we would have to break out of the gravity well to survive in the long term.

Natural uranium, yes. But we don't need it. Thorium is a much smarter alternative, especially if certain tin pot dictatorships actually want to be allowed to build nuclear reactors anytime in the next century. It's naturally more abundant than uranium.

Breeder reactors produce more fissile material than they consume. With careful engineering, we would need no fuel from outside sources to keep generating power (on top of what would be required to initiate the cycle, of course).