Stellarator class fusion reactor

[Elthy]

The performance of CPUs inst measured by the clockrate. Also the increase didnt come from faster core speed (it stil rose quite a bit) but from massive parallelisation. Also if you want processing power you dont buy a CPU, but a GPU, those are way, way more powerfull when it comes to parallel workloads.

[prophet_01]

Some of the key technologies involved (like magnets and cooling) weren't ready 60 or even 30 years ago. Wendelstein 7-X was pretty much at the practical limits when it was designed. And even today the precision of the magnets for example is very impressive. And even with that it's 'just' a testbed to collect data. Comercial reactors are a whole other cup of tea.

I can't rly say I'm surprised that nobody yet designed a practical reactor, considering the lacking data on sustained reactions and with components that are designed close to the limits just to fit the requirements of a testing facility (which is already amazing).

[KerikBalm]

And you can't have those reactions happening without other neutron-generating fusion reactions taking place right beside them. Even in p-B11 fusion, if I understands the stuff correctly, you get significant neutrons produced by Bremsstrahlung.

Bremsstrahlung has nothing to do with neutrons... Bremsstrahlung "is electromagnetic radiation produced by the deceleration of a charged particle when deflected by another charged particle, typically an electron by an atomic nucleus. The moving particle loses kinetic energy, which is converted into a photon, thus satisfying the law of conservation of energy."

Brehmsstrahlung has nothing to do with neutrons, because neutrons have no charge. The radiation it creates is high energy photons.... X ray production can lead to harmful radiation levels, but it does not lead to any radioactivity... whereas a neutron flux will lead to neutron activation of the interior of the design... turning the interior of the reactor into radioactive isotopes (ie, something like turning normal carbon into C14 carbon, normal phosphorus into P32)

If you fuse one proton with one boron, and create helium particles, there is no neutron produced, it is truly aneutronic.

However... if you have a mixture of Boron and protons at high temperature and pressure, and start fusing them....

You start to create alpha particles...

You now have a mixture of B, H, and He nuclei

You will then start to have two reactions taking place:

B^11+H^1 → 3 He^4 + 8.7 MeV (I think there is a C^12 intermediate... but C12 is stable, so I don't understand why it splits to 3x He^4)

and

B^11 + He^4 → N^14 + n + 157 KeV

Then if you don't use pure H1, and you've got a bit of deuterium, you'll get this:

B^11 + H^2 → C^12 + n + 13.7 MeV

Supposedly, a small fraction of the time, instead of:

B^11+H^1 → 3 He^4 + 8.7 MeV

You get:

B^11+H^1 → C^11 + n − 2.8 MeV

But these neutrons are less energetic and not as dangerous

[PB666]

The performance of CPUs inst measured by the clockrate. Also the increase didnt come from faster core speed (it stil rose quite a bit) but from massive parallelisation. Also if you want processing power you dont buy a CPU, but a GPU, those are way, way more powerfull when it comes to parallel workloads.

yeah but in the mid 90s that was a choice, to hardwire 256 processors on a single process board (fast). the linking technology currently used IIRc is basically a very fast T1 connection between servers. Of the shelf now you can buy servers with 12 cores, and you just start linking them together via local area routers. We had 10gb/s routers at the time but in a private chat with our IT no way would an end user be allowed that kind of access, not without special approval (something about interinstitutional shared backbone capacity). Essentially if you had the equipment to rail god awful numbers of servers and could store it on 1000s of drive downloads at 1Gb/s or less, then you could at somepoint flip the switch and do 4 core @ 500mhz at how ever many servers you have, not much point in doing that. I should add that you could also unclock lock many intel cpus on the mobo, and provide you had megacooling you could probably boost the rate to 750 or 1 gigahertz. The problem was intel was slow and conservative about bringing new chips to market until AMD starting shoving forward chips that could run at any clockrate that would not burn them .

[PB666]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lyqt6u5_sHA