Nuclear Fusion Achives Milestone

[Seret]

For aircraft propulsion you wouldn't need to bother converting the heat from the reactor into electricity.

[Aghanim]

dpf is an interesting idea, and i think that it would produce the smallest fusion reactor possible to construct. the only problem is it seems to attract all the environmentalist nutjobs and make the whole concept appear to be bogus. but that may just be an attempt to get funding. from what ive seen its enough to make it worth keeping my eye on.

i personally think the he3 reactions are overrated. i dont think you can do direct conversion with it. going the thermodynamic route will work well here on earth just fine, and for naval applications. for space applications direct conversion is especially useful because of how hard it is to get rid of heat. you would need a brayton cycle with the reactor being the heat source, and huge, bulky radiators, and the coolant in the loop as the sink. its a lot of heavy hardware. i believe one of the problems we had with space fission reactors was the limits of the heat dissipation systems needed for power generation. direct conversion gets around that entirely. you get these helium ions being flung out of electron cloud and high velocities, it picks up an electron and gets decelerated by a negative grid, creating electricity in the process (or something like this, its a little over my head). theoretically were talking an efficiency of around 80-90%, and getting breakeven is all about efficiency.

You definitely could do direct conversion with helium 3 fuel. And no, direct conversion isn't only for space applications. Removing steam turbine and all of those complicated steam piping system could save money in building and maintenance. But still, if we want small table-top sized reactor, we need to use dense plasma focus

@Seret: Assuming that we doesn't use direct conversion, yes, dumping all waste heat into jet engines works.