robertsteinhaus

There is a practical form of inertial confinement fusion that could be built today that requires no additional engineering or physics breakthroughs and produces net energy. It is not necessary to wait ~50 years for commercial tokamaks or Laser Fusion power plants to become commercial reality. It may be worthwhile remembering that, at the dawn of the nuclear age in 1952, an inertial confinement fusion experiment that used nuclear fission to produce the conditions for nuclear fusion called Ivy Mike not only produced net energy (more energy out of the fusion experiment than the energy required to operate the fusion experiment) but achieved a fusion gain factor of Q>=100,000. Ivy Mike achieved net energy and Q>=100,000 using the D-D fusion reaction. Note: No other non-military pure fusion experiment in the world has achieved a fusion gain factor Q>1 at any time, even for milliseconds, in the last 60 years. Inertial Confinement Fusion reactors that use nuclear fission to reliably create the conditions for Deuterium-Deuterium (D-D) fusion can be built today. The nuclear waste produced from Deuterium-Deuterium fusion is ultimately just non-radioactive helium (D-D fusion also produces Tritium which is a fusion fuel that is relatively short half-life [12.32 years] and is moderately radioactive. A D-D fusion reactor can burn in place the Tritium it generates, producing additional energy via a D-T fusion reaction, and end up only producing non-radioactive helium, as its nuclear waste). This system is currently being evaluated for development and funding by the California Energy Commission (proposal CEC TN-72616). The current pure fusion CEC TN-72616 proposal is a lot like classic two stage thermonuclear weapon designs that enjoyed early success in military applications. To produce practical fusion technology that can have an impact in less than 10 years, it is important to try to stay close to ideas that have a track record and have shown their value. The current (CEC TN-72616) pure inertial confinement hybrid D-T/D-D fusion design uses a staged design target that allows a minimum amount of Tritium in a D-T capsule to ignite a much larger amount of pressurized deuterium cryo-liquid held in a long thin pressurized cylinder. The D-T initiator or "sparkplug" is tiny: only 170 microgram of D-T in a spherical fusion capsule which is ignited by the fusion driver. The D-T initiator in turn is used to initiate a detonation wave of in the long thin pressurized cylinder of cryogenic liquid Deuterium (D-D fusion). The majority of the energy produced by the hybrid staged small fusion device is from cheap, sustainable, deuterium D-D fusion. The two stage CEC TN-72616 minimizes both the amount of tritium that has to be produced and stored to make fusion targets and also makes possible a tunable yield – conveniently adjusted to best economic size just by changing the length of the pressurized cryo-deuterium cylinder. The current CEC TN-72616 concept should sustainably produce the tritium needed shot to shot by collecting unburned tritium left in the reactor cavity from the last fusion mini-explosion. Inexpensive operation should be obtainable without requiring Lithium to breed tritium: using instead the recovered unburned tritium remnants of D-D fusion available after each shot to provide the tritium needed for future shots as the fusion reactor operates. Staying pure fusion with no fission initiator should help reduce regulatory obstacles and allow this hybrid fusion concept to be potentially used even in the 13 states that now have laws against building new reactors until an NRC approved approach to waste handling and storage is identified. A hybrid fusion reactor based on TN-72616 technology ignites on average one 250 GJ yield fusion device every minute - this does not leave a lot of time to pump down the reactor cavity (cylinder 11 meters diameter x 50 meters long) and prep the system for the next fusion burst. ICF Fusion reactor (proposal TN-72616) – http://bit.ly/1fTRJWY TN-72616 pure fusion MSR hybrid reactor proposal is based on concepts first proposed by Professor Friedwardt Winterberg and Dr. Ralph Moir - “Inertial Confinement Fusion Using Only Deuterium†http://home.comcast.net/~aeropharoh/Winterberg_ICF_deuterium.pdf Dr. Ralph Moir “PACER Revisited†- http://www.ralphmoir.com/pacer/ Energy Longer than the earth has existed or the Sun will shine - http://goo.gl/XL534 Documents relating to PACER fusion - http://goo.gl/ZKGuQ