First Light says it's hit nuclear fusion breakthrough with no fancy lasers, magnets British outfit First Light Fusion claims it has achieved nuclear fusion with an approach that could provide cheap, clean power. Rather than rely on expensive lasers, complicated optical gear, and magnetic fields, as some fusion reactor designs do, First Light's equipment instead shoots a tungsten projectile out of a gas- …
yeah well that claim was never really substantiated in any significant enough quantity.
But it would be my PERSONAL favorite if they were to "bunch" the H-2 and/or H-3 using something similar to a travelling wave tube at an energy level that had a high microscopic cross section for fusion, slamming into a hard targetr (maybe even carbon) or another "bunch" (from multiple angles even).
Travelling wave tubes work by 'bunching' electrons. With a sufficient field and electric potential, you could theoretically atom smash the fusion reaction. Whether this is power efficient or not is less important than to consider doing this as opposed to a tungsten projectile containing fusion material.
Anyway, 'nuff I guess. I lack the funds and resources to test my theory. Maybe someone else will see this and give it a "shot".
Oh, and a beta emitter is only dangerous to skin and eyes. Paper can shield it. The gammas it also emits might be problematic, though. Just do not breathe it in or it will affect lungs, etc..
+1 for Beta radiation not being that big a deal to shield. Also a 12 year 1/2 life is nothing compared to the 24,000 year 1/2 life of plutonium.
I'm not sure how they justify saying this method is that much simpler than lasers, but if they get there first that makes it better in one way. It does sound easier than trying to generate the catalyst (negative mu mesons IIRC).
Also a 12 year 1/2 life is nothing compared to the 24,000 year 1/2 life of plutonium.
No, but that does mean that the product is significantly *more* radioactive... half lives measured in tens of thousands of years require relatively low rates of emission compared with short half lives.
Stuff with a half life measured in seconds or minutes is difficult to distribute, but highly radioactive. Stuff with a very long half live is easy to distribute but not very radioactive. 12 years is easy to distribute, but still short enough to be pretty active.
Or El Reg goodies for sale. ISTR the El Reg shop, Cash'n'Carrion, used to sell Tritium based light thingies. And here's the Health & Safety article they produced relating to the sale of Radioactive Tritium-based goodies.
and plutonium is not the problem in nuclear waste. Usuallty it's Cesium, Rubidium, and precursor gasses like Krypton and Xenon, as well as Iodine (which is biologically dangerous when radioactive). But the worst radioactivity problem is Iron when exposed to a neutron flux (rusty water passing through the core) creating Cobalt 60 which accumulates all over the piping in areas of low or unstable flow (the radioactive material is technically known as CRUD, and the places it accumultes, CRUD TRAPS). With a fusion reactor you can expect this to be significantly lower, though I expect it will still be a problem.
Fission products are typically short lived materials that eventually decay to less dangerous materials that have longer half lives. There is a curve, known ad the Mae West curve, that indicates the relative distribution of fission products and in general they're too heavy (too many neutrons) and will usually beta decay into materials with higher atomic numbers and longer half lives. The danger is posed when it becomes a gas (like Xenon and Krypton) which then becomes particulate matter (Cesium and Rubidium) which accumulates in the lungs and sticks around for a few years, doing radiation damage in the process. There is a biological half life that is shorter than the nuclear half life, but still takes quite a while to getr it out of your lungs.
So yeah, dangerous material in fission products. encase in concrete, maybe use the decay heat for something useful, but they need to be stored for >100 years until they can become "less dangerous".
Not against fission power, just being realistic. And concrete would make pretty good shielding material.
And with fusion, if you cause tritium gas or tritiated water to be released, same kind of biological danger in your lungs, etc.. So you have to be careful with it. Not as bad as Cesium and Rubidium, but still bad.
That kind of fission design was produced in the 1960s (98-99% output waste reduction, and hot enough to produce supercritical steam, which virtually no current fission reactor design can do)
It also reduces input waste by 89% (that's how much is wasted when you enrich uranium to "reactor grade") and can act as a nuclear garbage disposal for existing nuclear waste including that wasted "depleted uranium" (which is important because depleted uranium is actually your base material for nuclear weapons production, not the enriched stuff)
Fission reactors as we know them are built around the waste products of weapons-making because the original power reactor was and IT was built that way "because that's what was available"
There are better designs. Alvin Weinberg proved that in the 1960s and promptly got drummed out of the US nuclear industry (ironicaly he built the original fission reactor as we know it and built the better one because he didn't like the way his prototype was being scaled up to dangerous sizes). Several countries are working on that and China's 2MW test unit went critical last September. We should be seeing announcements on progress towards their 100MW electrical test unit soon
I think “simpler than lasers” means both simpler in terms of engineering and conceptually.
In terms of engineering: building a basic rail gun, fuel target (while the design is complicated to come up with, I suspect it’s rather easy to manufacture), vacuum chamber, and heat exchanger to a steam turbine is reusing a decent amount of tried-and-true tech, and the new tech is much simpler to build and install than an insanely complicated laser
In terms of concept: shooting the target with a large laser from multiple directions to compress it is about the same level of complexity as shooting a projectile at the target and using the target’s shape to compress the fuel, but when you get into trying to understand how much energy needs to be produced to break even or perform other efficiency calcs, or how a laser compresses the fuel, it’s conceptually more difficult.
Finally, my guess is that them saying it’s cheaper by orders of magnitude is likely true since the number of precision parts and total number of parts, along with construction costs are likely a lot less than something like NIF’s laser.
interesting idea, but impractical. However, the decay heat could be captured by something similar to a solar cell or peltier device. I think this sort of thing could offer a way to use decay heat from fission waste in a practical way.
Nuclear waste safely encased in concrete generating electrical power and/or hot water for downtown buildings. It's an idea.
(can't be any worse than recycling sewer water and pumping treated water into the city's water supply, which is jokingly called "toilet to tap" but if it is cleaner than the reservoir, who cares where it last was?)
if you thermalize neutrons [reduce energies to 'thermal' energies, like that of the ambient temperature] with hydrogenous materal (water, oil, plastic) you can absorb it with natural boron. "Borated polyethelene" is commonly used for this, but after a time it depletes and needs to be replaced.
Typically you'll have a shield tank of water (or oil) closest to the source (or surrounding it), then a layer of regular polyethelene. and for the remaining (now thermalized) neutrons, borated polyethelene that will absorb the vast majority of them.
Thermalized neutrons are also a lot less dangerous, less likely to cause ionizing radiation damage, or activation of materials.
Keeping in mind fusion potentially generates a pretty high neutron flux compared to fission. But if the fusion reactor is surrounded by a tank of water (read: boiler) the heat from gamma AND neutrons would be captured. About 1 foot of water will absorb 90% of neutron, and 3 feet 90% of gamma. So you use a 6 foot border of "boiler": around the reactor to absorb >99% of energy radiated from it, and produce steam. Shielding AND boiler in one! (take boiling and foaming and bubbles into account as well, maybe make it thicker to compensate or pressurize and use a heat exchanger boiler like a fission plant).
For example, by locking up parts of research via patents with long expiration. This company seems primed to burn through whatever grants and VC money they can get, then burn out faster than one of their fusion pulses. Whatever results they get won't get the same scrutiny as public research, whatever IP they generate will either be trapped in the companies zombie corpse, or sold to the highest bidder(Patent Trolls).
That and their design is driven by a giant gas gun, so this is probably never going to be able to run as a thermodynamically efficient system, as you could burn it's fuel in a gas turbine with high enough efficiency that even if you did manage to beat the turbine, it would at best be by a few percentage points, and you would need a much bigger, heaver, and probably more dangerous apparatus.
Their approach might work as a way to cold start a more conventional design like a stellarator that might be able to run in a stable and self sustaining configuration. They may think so as well and be hoping to extract ransom for their IP.
(This is based on the fact that the gas gun is using a significant amount of fuel, and their aren't pools of pure deuterium lying around, so the energy cost to prepare the "pellets" isn't free, I don't have enough info to guess how efficient their harvesting of the released energy is)
The alternative to private companies taking risks is governments choosing the safe option.
That is building one massive Tokamaks and lots of little Tokamaks.
If that isn't the best design, without private companies, we would never know.
And if they invent something worthwhile, they should be paid for it. It's in their interests for their patents to be used and its in everyone's interests that it works.
It's always been 30 years until we get that fusion plant. I assume the shorter time-scale for modern fusion concepts owes less to accelerated scientific progress and more to the commercial pressures of investor-backed financing.
So let me be the first to predict that First Light's fusion plant won't be ready before 2050. By then, the successor company Long Shot will be ready to take a second round of financing to initiate another 30 year development cycle.
Well only 10 years away is definitely better than 20 or 30 years away. Just think, in 10 years time it may merely be "at least 5 years away", then "just around the corner", assuming things "go to plan" and "a few teething difficulties needing to be ironed out", with projected capabilities estimated to produce enough energy to power a country the size of Wales.
This will be just before funding is pulled due to costs increasing exponentially to completely unmanageble levels, which has never ever happened before in similar projects over the past 50 years so couldn't possibly be anticipated before it happens.
Still not sure why this will be better than multiple herds of trained hamsters running in hamster wheels wired to the electricity generating grid - the wheels, I mean, not the hamsters, although now I come to think of it.............
The main problem with fusion is you need things to get hot, very very very very hot. In fact so hot getting the energy out if it is difficult. While this method may look good I dont think the lithium is going to melt so much as vaporise. As indeed would anything near the target plate at the power levels require to be a powerstation.
And wasnt lithium the reason Castle Bravo was a bit more energetic than they expected?
It explodes black powder in a chamber and the explosion turns this wheel-thing, and if you get the timing wrong the internal combustion engine turns into an external combustion engine.
The geometry of the target has to be really well designed, they have to achieve really high pressure at the centre to fuse Deuterium. Like Quirm's idea it seems brutally simple, yet close enough to the more refined principle to maybe work. I wish them luck, and I might think about betting a few quid on them. If they were publicly traded, one could get ten quid in stocks, that's a glass of beer in Norway.
More in common with L. of Q. than you might think. From the First Light Fusion website:
The BFG, commissioned in April 2021, uses gun powder to launch a plastic piston in the first stage. This piston compresses hydrogen gas to 10,000 times atmospheric pressure, which launches the second stage projectile. When the projectile enters a large, armoured vacuum chamber, it impacts our targets. Our diagnostics measure the impact at very-high time resolution.
Further down they note it takes 3kg of gunpowder - I assume per firing....
"Further down they note it takes 3kg of gunpowder - I assume per firing...."
That's an awful lot of powder ...
My favorite .308 varminter (Model 700, old, not flashy, but very, very functional) can push a 220 grain Hornaday ELD-X bullet down an aftermarket 26" barrel at around 2500fps using 58gr of powder. Chamber pressures (calculated, not measured) are probably just under 60,000 PSI.
N.B. This is NOT a recommendation for your own handloading adventures! Always approach extremes like this slowly, and with great caution. Here be dragons. Really. You could kill yourself, and that would be sad. Be careful out there.
I wonder if their projectile could be accelerated with an electromagnetic rail gun? I'm assuming that their existing gunpowder and hydrogen 'gun' prototype is easier to build than a hypersonic rail gun, but thats just my uninformed assumption.
Just not the one you are thinking of.
Cycling projectiles and propellant charges on a 30s cycle is an engineering problem not an R&D problem.
The timing problem is controlling each step of a multi-fuel, multi-stage gas gun to propel a projectile to impact it's target within the tolerances they need. I expect this problem alone can/will kill their project, and that is unsolved and very very hard.
I also suspect that the minuscule neutron output in their was because that level of control is absent and they effectively grazed their target. But "Giant Fusion Cannon" seems like exactly the sort of crank nonsense that corporate grifters use to separate fools from their money. Everybody act surprised when they get bought out by a SPAC.
Exactly.
Historically these sort of guns are used for high velocity experiments, like simulating meteorites hitting the earth. These take days or weeks to set up for a shot.
Once a minute sounds quite leisurely, compared to the 10/sec of a machine gun.
But setting up the target in <60secs? Very tough.
The very attractive feature of this is that these are engineering problems. No breakthrough physics that has to work
At least, it looks that way. Good luck and have one on me.
It is quite a few fewer orders of magnitude away than First Light's and if realized would be superior in every way - 1) aneutronic fusion so no radioactive inputs and a lot of less radioactivity of the assembly to deal with 2) direct energy capture so doesn't need to use an inefficient 19th century heat engine to generate electricity 3) could be made far smaller so it could easily fit in a container and not have to be huge centralized designs for economies of scale/security like ITER and fission plants (maybe First Light doesn't suffer from this issue either) 4) no hypervelocity moving parts that are probably going to result in a lot of wear/downtime. 5) Does not require 24x7 monitoring for operations / security (again maybe First Light doesn't suffer from this but ITER type schemes sure do)
I'd be happy seeing *any* fusion scheme achieve production-scale viability - if it happens to be the most elegant/efficient/etc scheme then that'd be a bonus, but even just getting one of them working as proposed/hyped would be a big step forwards both for energy generation in general, and for preserving the credibility of fusion as something that can actually be usefully achievable and isn't just something which (as others have commented on already) is always going to be X years away...
Also, where does the gas go? The animation shows the projectile being fired down into the main containment vessel hitting the pellet which means that all of the gas is going into that containment vessel. Well it won't take long for the pressure to build up so where's the release? And, more importantly, how do they release the gas without also releasing the heat that's needed for the heat exchanger?
Perhaps the heat in the exhaust gas is reclaimed through another - not mentioned - heat exchanger? A few more details would have been nice.
The existing research light-gas guns solved that problem fortunately, and can achieve very high velocities. One way separates the boost charge stages at a T junctures where a bursting disk releases the gas into and propels the next stage. The velocity they are chasing is very doable as well. So most of the gas would get shunted before entering the reaction vessel, and the reaction (if successful enough to generate commercial power) would be highly exothermic and probably push gas out of the vessel (into a heat engine I'm guessing)
I agree it's super vague. Check any patent applications they have made to see what/if they have worked out to handle that. Until those are filed expect them to be intentionally vague and misleading, they wouldn't want someone stealing their solutions from a powerpoint.
We were promised 'cheap electricity from fusion power' back in the 1950s. In fact, I seem to recall the rags du jour proclaiming the end of electricity bills. Reality. however, bites, and cold reality, unlike cold fusion for example, has a real nip to it. Pathological science is a good source of revenue though... for the researchers, that is.
One fun one is that the lasers developed for fusion seem to have applications in drilling by vaporising rock.
There's a firm that's taken the lasers and intends to use them to make incredibly deep and incredibly cheap holes in the ground so that geothermal energy can be had anywhere in the world.
If it works, fusion might have invented itself out of being necessary.
I'm assuming the laser is lowered into the hole to operate and the rock vapour is condensed for collection and removal to avoid seriously hard rain forming higher up in the bore :). How much energy will be needed to remove the rock, it's fighting gravity all the way up.
This has merit for replacing the cutting head on current horizontal tunnel boring machines* as spoil removal is trivial in this use case and the tunnel can be lined with reconstituted rock instead of concrete slabs (another energy expensive process).
*If it can provide a large enough increase in the cutting rate over current methods which don't respond well to overheating.
You don't have to go deep for thermal. The GSHPs that heat/cool this place have the coils buried in three loops, twenty, thirty and forty feet down ... and that was way over-kill for my needs at the time. I just wanted to ensure that expansion would be possible in the future, without digging another bloody great hole in the ground. Note that you can always go vertical if you need to minimize horizontal footprint.
Why building codes don't insist on GSHP technology for HVAC and water heating/cooling needs in all new buildings, world-wide, is beyond me. Best thing since sliced bread, in my book.
Before anyone says it, our place in the high desert in Nevada (above 5,000 ft) uses nothing but GSHP for air and water temperature control ... summers get over 115 degrees, winters can drop to 10 below (both F, in C that would be 46 to -23). Indoor temperatures are maintained at 70F (21C) 24/7, year 'round. Power for fans and pumps is provided by solar and battery, with a small generator to charge the battery in stormy weather. TCO is on the order of a couple bucks per month over the projected life of the system (including battery and solar panel upgrades ... the generator, a little 2KW Honda, as used and maintained, should outlive me ... and doubles as portable power in an emergency).
One of the advantages of geothermal is providing warm water for households as this is, usually, the biggest energy demand. The idea is that, if every house can get enough geothermal energy to heat the place, we won't need as any power stations. Coupled with solar thermal and decent sized water storage and you effectively have a large battery in every house as well as the basis for air conditioning in hot weather.
Of course, doing this for every house is likely to prove a bit of a challenge and yields may drop the more people do it (like drilling wells). Still, it's better than some of the ideas out there.
As for fusion making itself unnecessary, that's unlikely to be the case, but the less of it we need, the better.
That kind of setup relies on earth (and rocks) being a pretty good insulator, so you can deposit and withdraw heat as needed year-round
Geothermal benefits and suffers from the same issue. They always start out well but once you draw off heat they invariably suffer from very slow replenishment issues unless sitting on top of a mantle plume or magma chamber (and even then it's iffy)
As I'm absolutely certain you are aware, while "a couple" does indeed technically mean "two", in this case I was using it as a vernacular euphemism for "a small number, much less than normal".
Total capital cost was about $10,000 after Federal and State tax credits. Finding the HDPE for under a nickle on the dollar[0] at a failed building project helped. Using your 50 years, that's under 17 bucks per month. It'll probably last twice that, maybe more. Yes, there will be a few wear points to replace, but it shouldn't be all that spendy. How much does your HVAC and water heating/cooling cost?
I did the digging, and indeed most of the physical installation. The engineering firm who speced it out is owned by a friend, they donated their services for free as an R&D thing. Said friend and myself also formed a company to monitor the system underground, placing sensors in a 3-D grid to keep an eye on temperature, moisture and a few other things underground. The first of many, we are now monitoring about 35 installations. The graphs are boring, as expected. Thankfully.
[0] 7 silos of 8,000 feet each, "As is, where is, get it gone by Friday", my favorite sale price. I sold off the excess at about 80 cents on the dollar, delivered.
Fusion isn't going to put an end to electricity bills, because the cost of a unit of electricty today isn't solely the cost of generating that unit, so even if the action of generating a unit of electricty was genuinely zero cost, there'd still be a cost involved in getting that unit to the consumer, as well as a share of the cost involved in setting up this zero-cost generation system and ensuring that funds are set aside to cover the cost of replacing it as and when required.
So no, I really don't think efforts to reduce the cost of electricity *generation* are being stifled by the energy companies fearful for their own futures - unless we're proposing that every household is equipped with its own Mr Fusion (other brands may be available) personal generator, then there'll still be costs (and profits) incurred in every other aspect of providing consumers with electricity, and thus there'll still be a financially viable role for energy companies to play no matter how cheap we can make the cost of generation itself.
Also consider that, if we can drive down the per-unit cost of electricity, it raises the possibility of higher rates of consumption not just from existing consumers (if a unit of leccy costs you 1/10th of what it does today, you might be less inclined to put in as much effort maximising your energy efficiency, because even if you use a bit more than you could do, you're still paying far less than you ever used to) but also from areas of consumption which emerge as a direct result of the reduced per-unit cost allowing ideas to come to market which wouldn't have been financially viable beforehand.
"there'd still be a cost involved in getting that unit to the consumer, as well as a share of the cost involved in setting up this zero-cost generation system and ensuring that funds are set aside to cover the cost of replacing it as and when required"
Right, unless we scale down instead of up, and do end up with something like Mr Fusion. Then the entire cost, forever, is whatever it costs to build the thing, deliver it, and recycle it when it wears out. In this particular design there is also fuel, so the operating cost will never be zero. Deuterium is not at all cheap.
But the grid and gigantic, expensive, dangerous generating stations may be ideas whose time has passed. Not every generating technology scales up well; fission is an excellent example of a technology with tremendous diseconomies of scale. We should at least consider what the right size is for a generating station of any given design; it might be 10 kW, 10 MW, or 10 GW. The right scale for the right technology dictates whether we even have a concept of an electric utility... and unless they're all ideal at 10 GW, the existing investment in the grid is probably a sunk cost. I don't think it's unreasonable to imagine that utilities that have invested in a particular model of generation and distribution feel threatened by the prospect of efficient smaller-scale generation regardless of the technology used to achieve it. After all, they're in the business of supplying electricity, not making and selling generators. If they had a more flexible understanding of their what their businesses can do for their customers perhaps they'd see it differently but that's not how most people think.
In the meantime, it seems likely that as long as we're talking about dangerous high-energy processes, radioactive waste, and high-pressure steam turbines, the utilities don't have much to worry about. This isn't Mr Fusion and it isn't anything you'd want in your cellar; no doubt many people will insist out of ignorance that they don't want it at all.
Higher rates of electricity consumption are current policy. So decarbonisation means the UK needs 2-3x more electricity to replace oil & gas used in heating & transportation. Plus as energy is an input cost to everything, cheap energy boosts the economy and reduces inflation.
Problem is energy policy is driven by morons who demonstrate that CO2 causes severe cognitive dissonance. See the Bbc's reporting on proposals for more info.
Reason UK energy costs are high is a direct result of policy failures. We're told bills have doubled because Covid. Ok, so demand is getting back to where it was a couple of years ago. Assuming costs are relatively unchanged, so should price.
We're told we should build more wind & solar because 'renewables' are cheap. So we've 'invested' billions in 'renewables'. Yet our energy bills are going up, not down. This is special Green logic, where cost reductions can't be expected to be reflected in price.
Then of course the way the 'renewables' industry is massively subsidised by energy users. As wind & solar are mature technologies, those subsidies should be removed. The Greens shouldn't object, because wind & solar are now so cheap.
And for good measure, we should reform the capacity market & scrap CfDs. Suppliers simply bid on capacity in say, 500MW or 1GW increments at a firm price. So bid 500MW at £50 per MWh. If there's no wind for a week, it's still the supplier's responsibility to deliver per contract.
Currently this is probably the biggest con. Subsidy farmers can bid say, 1GW of wind. Wind speeds vary, so 1GW of nameplate capacity may deliver on average 10% of that. So for every GW of 'renewables', we also need 1GW of stand-by capacity, usually gas. Consumers get billed for that, which is a scam given it'd be cheaper to just use gas in the first place.
Nobody ever thought that nuclear would see the end of electricity bills - the hope was "too cheap to meter". In other words, we'd pay a standing charge for the infrastructure and the electricity would come free.
It's not impossible, and in fact is how rail access works; train operators pay Network Rail a bit more to use the overhead/third rail system, but are not charged per kWh.
<rant>
Fusion was never meant to create usable power for the masses; that was the goal that they used to get traction so money could be thrown at it. No, fusion in essence was a game that physicists like to play with; fancy toys, cutting edge tech, a positive rubriks cube of fun stuff.
The tech needed to make the system match expectations isn’t available and is literally hundreds of years in the future at current rate.
It’s a scam; a pile of unicorns and rainbows for politicians, the great and good to fawn over.
The billions wasted could of built fission reactors, dams and hydro electric schemes to store all that power we could over produce, research facilities, refinement centres, storage and reenrichment.
Wake-up and smell the waste
</rant>
Hello from southern England, where there's not enough elevation for a dam, too many NIMBYs for fission, and the latitude (and typical power-consumption) isn't so favourable for solar - we use power for heating, not cooling, so need it when the sun is low. Fusion will certainly have its place,
Yeah, the pure toroid at the heart of a Tokamak design isn't magnetically stable. I hope the Stellarator makes it over the bar for utility generation, but all of these designs will end up looking like the Mk 1 and Mk2 fission plants.
And for those unfamiliar, the Stellarator just uses a less simplistic design so the irregularities in the magnetic field in the donut of a tokamak become self stabilizing. Think of a tokamak as an unglazed cake donut or a bagel, and the stellarator as more of a cruller. Same family, but more awesome.
MIT's Commonwealth Fusion Energy SPARC version of a Tokamak (https://cfs.energy/) is far more straightforward, safer, and further along than the First Light gun-and-pellet contraption. By taking advantage of COTS high-temperature superconducting ribbon wire for their magnets and scaling down to achieve higher density, they are way ahead of ITER with it's stadium-size massive and moon-shot expensive boondoggle.
What worries me is that the projectile will need many orders of magnitude more kinetic energy to create the necessary pressure pulse over large enough an area to do something useful. It's not going to stop just because a tiddly little pellet is in the way. You'd have to simultaneously fire a second projectile head-on at exactly the same speed. Containing even a small meteor strike is not going to be easy. FMEA safety analysis is going to eat up those ten years while it's just getting started.
Meanwhile, the projectile gun will find a ready market elsewhere...
I'm wondering how long the backstop would last. Or maybe the plan is to site these on the coast so the tungsten ends up out to sea. The French might object if these were built on the south coast, along with ship owners.
Or mebbe the projectile is consumed in some unholy & probably unphysical deuterium-tungsten fusion reaction.
Effectively yes, since it vaporises to become a plasma. But that plasma, along with the similarly vaporised fusion pellet, still has 100% of the momentum and kinetic energy of the projectile. You ain't gonna stop it with a paper bag just because it's not solid any more.
I only disagree in the order.
1 Burn VC cash
2 Burn government cash/grants/loans
3 Fire everyone but management, legal, and the janitor
4 Sell the IP, the corporate debt, and the employee pension fund.
Bonus points if it's to a SPAC, DAO, or whacky pants bazillionaire.
Actually seeing the project to market and commercial power generation is probably not in the real business plan.
Though to be fair, personal jetpacks are pretty awesome. The rocket belt was from the 80s, and which version of the flying car did you want again? We have several.
Doesn't make them a good idea though. What we have is way better... because they are LETHALLY AWESOME, just like our existing working fusion devices. Which is why I prefer the Colin Furze style flying thresher drone motorcycle myself, because why should it be any safer for me than the random passerby?
Only reality has still not gotten the message.
This is a variation of the "shoot it with a laser" type.
Currently there are 3 main types of reactors in the fusion candidate list. And have been since the first book I had in the end of the 70s. But material science has advanced leaps since then. Just the problem of needing high Tesla magnetic fields needed practical super conductors. These need near absolute zero temperatures adjacent to a 100 million Kelvin plasma.
1. Tokamak reactor. Most researched and on paper a simple design. A torus shaped system, contain the plasma in a magnetic field and heat it to fusion. This system is by design not capable of a systained fusion reaction. It has to pulse (Iter expects about 15 minute cycles), as the plasma currents is used to generate the containment field. And a electric field has to change to generate a magnetic field. So the current ramps up for 15 minutes and then the field collapses. Even getting the field to not have any dents and knots is a pita and they used the last 30-40 years mainly to get a stable field. Current record at above 100 Kelvin is 101 seconds and at 160 Kelvin 20 seconds (the chinese did not mention fusion reactions) . With fusion reactions AFAIK it is 5 seconds at JET. ITER expects test in 2025 (if not further delayed) and fulkl fusion in 2035.
2. Stellarator. Like the Tokamak a containment field for the plasma. But the field is twisted and convoluted. Was theorized, but deemed impossible to build, because they could not compute the required field shape. Computing power and other advances made that possible. The system does use different heating and containment fields and can hold a permanent fusion reaction (in theory). The current main test reactor (Wendelstein 7x) seems to be capable of generating a long term plasma field and fusion reaction. It was otoh never build to generate energy. It is just a proof of concept for this "impossible" design. They reached 100 seconds of plasma in the second phase and are currently completing the upgrade to phase 3 with 30 minutes. Expected tests this year. So even though the Stellarator was not really researched in decades and is late from the starting block, they exceed the much further developed / researched Tokamaks.
3. Laser. Simple, and elegant, but practical?.Just drop a frozen hydrogen/deuterium ball into a chamber and fire a high energy laser burst at it to initiate a fusion reaction. By design this is a pulsed system and not even a fully controlled reaction. Just a laser induced mini fusion explosion and no containment of the plasma.. Like the Stellarator it had some problems getting from the starting blocks. Just producing a laser that has enough oomph to induce a fusion reaction faster than the dissipation of the gas. Then the simple problem: what if you miss (even partial overspill)? What prevents the chamber of getting damaged from a laser shot, tha could induce fusion? And the coordination is nothing but easy. Trying to release a fusion inducing laser burst exactly on the fraction of a microsecond that the falling drop is in the focus point. High energy laser "check", highly focused laser to the size of a few frozen hydrogen atoms "check", laser with perfect timing "check". All together "not so easy". At Lawrence they use 192 lasers to generate that pulse and are currently at 70% generated fusion energy of the used laser power. Just the pulse time ist atrocious. The need months to build one capsule for a test shot.
Production of the quantities of Tungsten projectiles constantly needed alone makes this a bit of a non-starter. Then there's the problem of dealing with the tungsten debris you'll now have flying around your combustion chamber/reactor at high temperature and high velocity. Tungsten is not exactly an easy material to deal with at the best of times.
I bet my life savings this company will be bought out if they ever get close to a functioning product.
It will then be mothballed, save a gaggle of lawyers to ensure no one else threatens the energy status quo with a similarly simple and efficient scheme.
Considering the £trillions the energy market is worth, do you really think big oil/gas/coal/etc will just roll over without a fight - hell, I'd put my school dinner money on the distinct possibility that half of the scientists working on fusion are only there to fuck it up.
(Bit late to the party but never mind)
Deuterium, tritium - the usual for fusion.
Tungsten - the projectiles aren't going to be reusable, are they? Mining and fabrication costs?
And reading the above, there is talk of gunpowder!
How sustainable are projectile based systems compared to magnetic confinement that is just consuming some of its own output?
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