How to make a Fusion reactor work!

I don't know anything about fusion research so this could be completely out there, but let me give you my assumption.

Fusion currently is a large magnetic field generator like a doughnut to condense a fusible material in the core ring that forms the doughnut until critical mass is achieved. So the ring of fusing material is condensed by too much energy input through magnetics, thus the failure of fusion power.

My idea came to me when I was blowing smoke rings, which seemed not only effortless but a natural result of the peculiar circumstance that creates the smoke ring.

Let's try nature's method, and instead of trying to force critical mass, let's blow smoke rings toward that same core have them collide, puff enough of them at each other with a little magnetic support to chain them in place, and let the collisions increase until critical mass.

I think if this method were done, fusion would become workable.

Thoughts?

puff enough of them at each other with a little magnetic support to chain them in place

Uhh, try a lot of magnetic support. The problem with the containment (the awesome containment) is shutting it off to let more fuel in. If you think about that for a moment...

How do you keep the tremendous energy you just created contained and also feed the sustained reaction?

Like trying to place a nuclear bomb inside an exploding nuclear bomb.

intrptr

puff enough of them at each other with a little magnetic support to chain them in place

Uhh, try a lot of magnetic support. The problem with the containment (the awesome containment) is shutting it off to let more fuel in. If you think about that for a moment...

How do you keep the tremendous energy you just created contained and also feed the sustained reaction?

Like trying to place a nuclear bomb inside an exploding nuclear bomb.

Well considering two magnetic fields like opposite gears, turning to move material up or down, the magnetic fields need not converge into the center to restrict space.

So the material (new fuel) would travel along a conical inlet that gets wider as the "smoke ring" naturally expands.

When it comes into the core, it only is exposed to enough magnetic field to temporarily keep the ring in a narrow band.

The core fusion itself would be achieved by the rapid pulsing of material toward the core from two opposite sides.

In fact, I don't really know why you'd need a magnetic field to begin with, the structure of the smoke ring could remain intact by natural forces, and I've seen them rotate and condense on their own so there theoretically would need to be little more than direction and intensity required to make the critical mass?

Explain more to me?

reply to post by FreeMason

When it (the fuel) comes into the core...

Thats the problem. In order to light a small sun and keep it fed you have to open the field to let more fuel in. I don't care how you cage it, the energy being produced would sear thru the opened hole in a micro second.

Imagine a a deep submersible in the ocean at tremendous depth. Now try to open the containment at depth to bring in more oxygen. Implosion will result.

Ocean pressure is minuscule compared to the pressure produced by Fusion. Millions of degrees of heat...

Open the door and bang. They have not successfully tested this feed thing out yet. They can't yet produce more energy than required to create fusion. All tests in the chambers are currently one shot deals.

reply to post by FreeMason


My thought would be be, keeping in mind i have no idea if this is
correct, that the amount of mass necessary to achieve fusion
would be far too high to accommodate. Or from my laymen
thought process, you would need allot of weight pressing
in from all directions to cause atoms to fuse. So much so
that it would be impossible to do, at least without a magnetic
field cramming them together.

FreeMason
My idea came to me when I was blowing smoke rings, which seemed not only effortless but a natural result of the peculiar circumstance that creates the smoke ring.

Let's try nature's method, and instead of trying to force critical mass, let's blow smoke rings toward that same core have them collide, puff enough of them at each other with a little magnetic support to chain them in place, and let the collisions increase until critical mass.

I think if this method were done, fusion would become workable.

Thoughts?

Smoke rings (classical reality) and fusion (quantum reality) are two very different animals. In the words of Elmer Fudd, "When I waned to fooze wabbits, it had to be wary wary code." Look at BEC technology or the manipulation of controlled subatomic degeneracy. Why not suck all the energy out of two particles, so they collapse into each other, fuse and obtain a new ground state?

Cheers - Dave

intrptr
reply to post by FreeMason

 

When it (the fuel) comes into the core...

Thats the problem. In order to light a small sun and keep it fed you have to open the field to let more fuel in. I don't care how you cage it, the energy being produced would sear thru the opened hole in a micro second.

Imagine a a deep submersible in the ocean at tremendous depth. Now try to open the containment at depth to bring in more oxygen. Implosion will result.

Ocean pressure is minuscule compared to the pressure produced by Fusion. Millions of degrees of heat...

Open the door and bang. They have not successfully tested this feed thing out yet. They can't yet produce more energy than required to create fusion. All tests in the chambers are currently one shot deals.

I knew they couldn't make more energy, but now it makes more sense why.

Well if a magnetic field "cage" is required like a submarine hull then I guess I'll just have to throw the smoke ring idea in the garbage. Maybe quantum teleportation could occur along the horizon of that cage so that the fuel phases from the outside to the inside without the cage ever being disturbed?

Or what if the cage was built backwards? So that the field pushed outward instead of inward? And the critical mass took place along a membrane of an outer physical shell shaped like a parabola to capture light, only this shape captures the material but in a geometry that allows the magnetic force to be equally applied only in that area.

So this allows large gaps to exist between the force and the shell, where fuel can be brought in physically?

I see where the OP is coming from but at minimum it would require a double containment field like a sphere within a sphere. The outer sphere allows matter in but not out and directs it to the inner sphere which contains the core. The main problem is that we do not have the tech to produce such a double sphere and containment system where everything is a one way gate.

Construct one of these and loose containment and it would make Fukushima look like a non-event. Anyway, nice idea OP.

And here I had given up on my idea...well ellaborate about the double containment and one way gates?

My understanding of Magnetism is it is a rotating field in a right handed direction from North Pole?

So can't the field be directional and therefore one directional?

reply to post by FreeMason

Let's try nature's method, and instead of trying to force critical mass, let's blow smoke rings toward that same core have them collide, puff enough of them at each other with a little magnetic support to chain them in place, and let the collisions increase until critical mass.

Hate to break it to you, but "nature's method" as you say, is the sun, not smoke rings.

reply to post by FreeMason


There is already a contained fusion reactor, it's called the sun. It radiates up to 1kw per sqm at ground level on earth. For some crazy reason human beings are incapable of collecting all that free energy and feel the need to invest trillions in useless research to create a mini sun........hmmmm......dumb dumb dumb.

reply to post by yorkshirelad


That is a tad harsh on Mankind - even nature only manages to gather 5-10% of the available energy from sunlight during photosynthesis.

As for the Fusion idea, I am always puzzled why they chose the tauroid/doughnut shape - as has already been alluded to in this thread, nature has already got fusion licked and it is in the shape of a sphere. I know that there are other fusion projects which don't follow this shape, such as using a laser to ignite fuel pellets dropped into the reactor, but the main designs seem to focus on this odd doughnut...

I have my own ideas on Fusion - perhaps follow the fuel pellet/laser idea and combine it with the doughnut - ignite the fuel pellet into a plasma, contained within a spherical, magnetic field, continue to add more fuel pellets (according to flavour) then compress the field and the contained plasma into a smaller space, then add rotation and, hey presto, you have a mini sun...

I also have trouble understanding how they are going to obtain power from the tokamak design...Is it simply going to be used to heat water? Seems a little primitive and inefficient. If they could create a small, spinning mini-sun, it would also generate a magnetic field of its own. A rotating magnetic field generates power and would be more efficient that simply making steam for a generator........

Not that I am a nuclear scientist, however, what do I know?

reply to post by FreeMason


Is it me or does a super high temperature and explosion trapped in a tube only scare me? What if they keep expanding on this idea to actually create a mini sun? Isn't there safer ways to create free energy? Why does everything have the term nuclear that we test?

Why not water based....Air based....Something natural?

Even if this potentially dangerous machine does create free energy, we will never see it....So how about a focus on something actually usable? How much does a fusion reactor cost to create this "free energy"?? I bet about as much as we pay now over the course of our lifetime, that would be my guess...So even if it somehow does work, we will never see any real benefit...IMHO of course

I know nothing of fusion, but I will guess this isn't a cheap process or machine...Compared to what we could have, that is...

Chrisfishenstein
reply to post by FreeMason

 

Is it me or does a super high temperature and explosion trapped in a tube only scare me? What if they keep expanding on this idea to actually create a mini sun? Isn't there safer ways to create free energy? Why does everything have the term nuclear that we test?

Why not water based....Air based....Something natural?

Even if this potentially dangerous machine does create free energy, we will never see it....So how about a focus on something actually usable? How much does a fusion reactor cost to create this "free energy"?? I bet about as much as we pay now over the course of our lifetime, that would be my guess...So even if it somehow does work, we will never see any real benefit...IMHO of course

I know nothing of fusion, but I will guess this isn't a cheap process or machine...Compared to what we could have, that is...

Think of fusion reactions like a butane burner. The flame doesn't burn unless the gas is rushing out. Soon as there is not enough fuel mix the flame craps out instantly.

There is almost no risk with fusion compared to fission, compared to even a few hydrocarbon type fuel systems. The only problem is getting the damn thing lit in the first place.

reply to post by stumason

As for the Fusion idea, I am always puzzled why they chose the tauroid/doughnut shape - as has already been alluded to in this thread, nature has already got fusion licked and it is in the shape of a sphere. I know that there are other fusion projects which don't follow this shape, such as using a laser to ignite fuel pellets dropped into the reactor, but the main designs seem to focus on this odd doughnut...

I imagine 'cause the sphere is a superdense mass that has gravitational waves so powerful they actually grind atoms together so hard creating critical mass which in turn causes a fusion reaction. Now, since we can't create a mass that big, it has to be manipulated, and since we can't have all our fuel in one place and replenish it unless we are at the centre of the sphere, it makes it damn hard to create a working artificial one.

Again though, this is just my interpretation (from a layman) of what I've read about fusion, and I really haven't brushed up recently. I am pretty good at scientific comprehension, but my knowledge dissipates pretty quickly as Im always modifying my internal database.

Someone correct my if I'm off base.

As the saying goes fusion power has been about 50 years away for the past 50 years.

It is much better and cleaner than nuclear fission power. Rather than splitting heavy metal elements such as uranium or plutonium to release energy fusion smashes lighter elements together like hydrogen. Hydrogen is much easier to get hold of than uranium or plutonium and there are no highly radioactive waste products.

If fusion power can be made economically viable it would be a virtually unlimited supply of electricity and would be a new age of energy production.

The trouble is it is very very complicated and difficult. Currently the JET reactor is the biggest but the new ITER project may lead to a major breakthrough.

JET
news.sciencemag.org...

ITER facts and figures
www.iter.org...

As you can see it is a massive project.

Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 70 percent of input power. Scientists have now designed the next-step device—ITER—which will produce more power than it consumes: for 50 MW of input power, 500 MW of output power will be produced.
ITER will begin writing the chapter on 21st century fusion.

ITER progress in fusion
www.iter.org...

It really is incredible stuff and hopefully ITER can live up to the expectations.

reply to post by FreeMason

Maybe quantum teleportation could occur along the horizon of that cage so that the fuel phases from the outside to the inside without the cage ever being disturbed?

Now you understand the difficulty of opening the "cage" surrounding the reaction. One solution is to start with more fuel in the beginning, which if there is a containment failure makes a nice explosion. So they must limit the size of the pellet and figure how to feed it from outside the "sun". Let alone how to keep the sun from heating up any metal sphere its held in or to tap the heat and... (cough) boil water.

In nuclear explosions, high explosives produce the perfect, surrounding, inward pressure needed to reach criticality. That "pulse" is momentary and timed to press in, disappear and then the resulting atomic chain reaction to be released for effect.

Keeping the explosion contained and steady state is an unrealized idea they have been spending a lot of money on with no real progress to date. Why they continue do that is beyond most peoples ability to comprehend.

Personally, I think it is just furthering weapons research for the military.

Why not? Its what they build nuclear reactors based on fission for. To enrich uranium and produce plutonium to make bombs. Oh, and generate electricity to light cities at night.

there is no such thing as critical mass when it comes to fusion, the admission of many authors of posts on this thread to know nothing about fusion should be a big sign of how futile the suggestions are.

You must first understand what you are doing before you figure out how you are going to do it.

Fusion is an additive process, you simply need to be able to overcome the coulomb repulsion between two nucli/protons, such that the strong force takes over and you create a new nucleus with the two things you squeezed together.

it is simple sounding, but the reality is that even thanks to the reduction in temperature thanks to QM tunnelling effects, we need to create a plasma of high energy particles and contain those particles in a very small space. It will produce energy in the form of MeV gammas, which we need to absorb in order to get any energy out.

The only so called critical mass is just the amount of fusion you can sustain in a controlled manner, allowing you to pass the break even point.

The toroidal design allows for simple magnetic confinement, and energy collection. Many of the laser+drop methods are one shot... drop pellet in, boom - gone in a split second. In a toroidal confined plasma you can sustain the generator for avery long time.

Also, you know what would happen if you lost confinement?

Nothing... because the confinement is what is causing the fusion process, loose confinement and fusion instantly stops. Most you would do is burn out a bit of your inside surface. It would be very very safe in comparison to a fission reactor.


The whole ring of smoke idea? well what you are saying in reality is that we need to make an atom smasher, smack two bunches of particles into each other and have them fuse... we already built those, the amount of particles you can get to collide together is quite small... even in the LHC, the amount of collisions per bunch is typically a handfull at most for each event they look at in the detector. and the bunch sizes? well they are made up of something like 10^12 or so protons per bunch.... (something of that order, i need to look it up) so what you would actually do is make your reactor extremely radioactive due to nuclear spallation and get out not all that much power.... oh and by the way... accelerating and confining large large large bunches of particles is a big problem... oh yes, see above.

intrptr
Keeping the explosion contained and steady state is an unrealized idea they have been spending a lot of money on with no real progress to date. Why they continue do that is beyond most peoples ability to comprehend.

We have already weaponized fusion... not know the difference between an atom bomb and a H bomb? We already figured out the x-ray and gamma optics to make a fusion bomb.

And spending lots of money with no real progress... i could talk for pages why that statement is garbage, in fact just go look at some of my previous posts. The latest big project is budgeted for something like 13billion... errrm... guys? thats not much when you realize that that money is split between many many countries, and over many years... if you tax the Catholic church in the US for 1 year you would have made about 5 times that amount of money. If the United states spent about 10% less on booze next year and gave it all to science you would have all the money for the project... don't you see yet why such statements are total garbage?

When the banks failed, the UK injected 500billion... in a week... THAT was a real waste... projects like this are never ever a waste. All i can say is that the money spent on most people's education was either not enough, or a total waste... clearly.