General Discussions

[DJC]

Mind boggling process building a mini star/sun contained in a magnetic field within a reactor casing that can take a 1300 degrees celsius temperature.

Absolutely!  But it’s happening now!

I should have paid more attention in physics ?

[ElwoodBlues1]

Absolutely!  But it’s happening now!

I should have paid more attention in physics ?

Me too, I did Elec Engineering at Swinburne Uni  but Nuclear Fusion was never one of the prac classes...?

[DJC]

Me too, I did Elec Engineering at Swinburne Uni  but Nuclear Fusion was never one of the prac classes...?

My oldest brother is a physicist.  When he explains things like nuclear fusion it all seems so simple and feasible.

One of my staff was the humanities rep on the Australian Synchrotron committee of management.  When he explained how it worked and what it could do, it made perfect sense.  However, I still struggle to understand the theory behind it.

[kruddler]

Me too, I did Elec Engineering at Swinburne Uni  but Nuclear Fusion was never one of the prac classes...?

I did same at La Trobe, while there wasn't a prac class, there was certainly some lectures on it. The benefits of Nuclear was akin to something like Coal powered plant vs a guy a bicycle powered generator.

[ElwoodBlues1]

I did same at La Trobe, while there wasn't a prac class, there was certainly some lectures on it. The benefits of Nuclear was akin to something like Coal powered plant vs a guy a bicycle powered generator.

We had lectures on Nuclear Power but Fusion was a process considered something akin to star trek travel and it was all about Fission back in my day.
At the end of the day it's turbines being run by steam from heated water , how you heat the water is the debate. Even your so called green Windfarms still rely on Turbines, generators, gearboxes and associated electrical equipment, as well as suck up gallons of oil.
Fission, Fusion...doesn't matter as long as it's a balanced setup with renewables and nuclear working together. Fusion would be great but the tech is still in the early days..

[crashlander]

When it comes to power supplies, my favourite is Solar Power Satellites.
Yes, I am a SF freak, and yes, I even write the stuff, but there are major reasons why I like this system.

What does it consist of?
SPS consists of a series of huge mirrors in space that collect and focus the sunlight into a collector. The collector them beams the energy directly to a base station on Earth that converts the energy into electricity, which is then available to the entire grid.

My reasons:
[1] Like a dam, the initial costs are almost the only costs you have. The collector satellites can collect 24 hours a day, 365.25 days per year and they can be made almost as large as you wish. The material requires a little effort holding it in space, but can be basically like Aluminium foil. There is no structural strength required. The satellites are in orbit and don't require much at all to maintain them.
[2] Your base station is best placed in a desert area where they are few, if any, humans. The energy beams down every single minute of every day, however, it doesn't have to be visible light. You just have to be careful not to fly through it.
[3] Australia has plenty of desert that would be perfect for such base station. We would become the world's largest energy source. Taxes and royalties would be minimal per kilowatt of power, but would supply the government with huge quantities of money. And no government that has ever existed doesn't want more money.
[4] The collectors would be a series of satellites in orbit that would shift the energy around so that it is always focussed on the base station.
[5] There is space construction required, but I am all for as much of this as we can manage. The actual engineering is relatively straight forward. There are so many resources out there that do not have populations restricting their use.

The idea has been around for a long time, but neither the Soviets (in their day) nor the Americans were willing to cough up the money. That is probably more the case now, as most people just don't think of space construction. After all, nobody bothers to put reasonable quantities of money into the International Space Station, and that is a tiny triviality.
There is enormous profit to made from materials and energy is orbit, and it would produce so much energy that we could retire fossil fuels. Cheap energy is the key to improving life for all humans.
I do understand that it would take time, but I have a lot more patience than the eco-freaks do. They want an immediate end to fossil fuel usage, which is impossible.

[capcom]

I presume you're speaking of a geo stationary orbit configuration?

[LP]

The energy beams down every single minute of every day, however, it doesn't have to be visible light.

Actually it sort of has to be visible or RF, as it has to be in the region of the spectrum that the atmosphere is most transparent to, or else the atmosphere absorbs too much!

Dams are not free to run, they come with a significant maintenance and monitoring budget, emit large amounts of methane as the water levels rise fall and have cycles of algal bloom.

[Mav]

Security would also be a concern. A hostile nation could destroy that system pretty easily without any loss of life but with a major impact on the energy grid if it it became the major source of energy.

I can just imagine China wiping out our solar collector while denying responsibility for it.

[LP]

All the space faring nations are focussed on queuing up to setup permanent Moon bases, they all want access to Helium-3 resources to make fusion reactors a reality. Helium-3 accumulates in surface sediments as a result of the bombardment by cosmic rays, solar radiation and solar wind. At the moment for the test bed fusion reactors they harvest minute quantities helium-3 from conventional fission reactors. Think of the moon as a giant Helium-3 collector.

Why are they so keen for helium-3? Because Helium-3 is the only naturally occurring isotope that can be used as fuel in fusion reactors without producing radioactive by-products.

If they can't get enough helium-3 off the moon, they will construct specific types of fission reactors that are designed to generate(breed) helium-3 fuel for fusion reactors. There are a few different ways they can get to it via fission processes, one of them is using lithium, and if that pathway eventuates lithium batteries will be dead in the water as it will become a tightly controlled and expensive commodity much like normal helium is now. Normal helium is abundant in the universe, but rare on earth because it is so light it just floats away if not constrained!

Fusion reactors are like fission reactors, they get efficiency from scale, and once you get them running they are not easy to stop and start so you need to keep them running. It's likely that the best place to build one is next door to a desalination plant, steel or aluminium smelter so they have the 24x7 minimum demand meet. Australia was stupid not building nuclear plants next door to some of the myriad of desalination plants we are accumulating. Another nice industry to put in close vicinity is hydroponic agri-business that needs both heat and power to run 24x7.

Personally though, for agri-business I'd love to see Victoria make strong use of the low grade geothermal resource that exists in a band stretching between Bairnsdale and Ballarat. There is probably enough specific heat capacity to see Victoria feed all of Australia with greenhouse compatible crops all year round, consuming virtually none of the dairy critical land in the process. You won't get Federal funding for it though, because politics is mired in the Nationals farmers dig dirt mentality, that roots the bulk of the industry to Qld and WA. Politics and bureaucracy interfering in progress yet again.