Nuclear Fusion

[Patrick Degan]

We just need to stick someone as politically connected and pigheaded as Rickover was in charge of this thing and have them bully everyone until we get the damn thing working. We would have had working fusion years ago if we had put as much drive into fusion as we did fission.

Yes, well, that drive was in large measure the byproduct of the Manhattan Project and the cold war. There is no present military imperative for fusion power as there was in the 40s and 50s.

Oil closed at $51.30 today. That looks like a damn military imperative from where I'm sitting.

Not anywhere near the same thing as being in a war of national survival with an enemy you're in a race with for the Bomb.

[tharkûn]

We just need to stick someone as politically connected and pigheaded as Rickover was in charge of this thing and have them bully everyone until we get the damn thing working. We would have had working fusion years ago if we had put as much drive into fusion as we did fission.

Bullying the wealthiest and most powerful nations in the world, all of whom have competing interests is a daunting task. If you are going to head that route you'd be further ahead to find some way to bully an individual state into coughing up the support.

Why don't they build it somewhere else. Like Australia, or Africa. I'd like to have a Fusion Reactor in my backyard. Makes your bog standard BBQ look kinda ordinary.

Nowhere in Africa has anything close to needed support infrastructure, not to mention the problems should a civil war flare up. Australia, I beleive, lacks the heavy hydrogen infrastructure and faces even worse costs due to its geographic isolation. Eventually it will most likely get built in Japan or France, personally my money would be bet on France getting it but I lean to Japan as being a better location.

What happened to that one idea of taking metallic spheres filled with hydrogen and using lasers to detonate them? I take it it's just not as economically feasible as a plasma torus?

Getting the shockwaves to work with the correct differential geometry is a major bitch and the energetics don't look promising. Most everyone is banking on plasma tori.

[Admiral Valdemar]

The sphere idea is bad given the "hairy ball theorum" hence why tokamaks using the toroid configuration help maintain fusion and containment and avoid this problem.