Another nuclear fusion company failed :(Why is this so hard?https://www.zapenergy.com/announcement
>>108760971>Why is this so hard?Because fusion is essentially one branch away from artificial gravity on the tech tree. In both cases we know it exists, we know what it does and we're completely out of luck trying to understand how to make it happen at small scale.
>>108760971zero use case
>>108760971>Why is this so hard?Basically as I understand it, it's hard because we cannot create a plasma so dense like what the Sun has to work with under its immense gravity, for example. This means that we need to crank up the temperature to many times that of the sun, or else particle collisions which could lead to fusion basically do not happen. But then keeping such a hot plasma contained is difficult and pumping it up to that temperature is difficult as well, plus to make things more difficult we cannot fuse just regular hydrogen, again because getting those too fuse is too hard.So fusion reactors need special fuel like tritium to work, but tritium is not easily available or easy to make, so the way they want to make it is by using the fusion reactor itself, by wrapping the reaction chamber in something which generates tritium when neutrons hit it. This basically means the containment wall needs to handle energy extraction, actual containment and fuel generation on top, plus it needs to be durable as well.
>>108760971It would probably be easier to move the sun.We could just accelerate the solar system to sub-light speed and use solar power.
because most of these companies are just venture capital cash grabs
>>108761080Works on my machine and that's after removing the option in the configs
>>108761025we can make it happen on a small scale, but not in any useful waywe finally got net positive fusion last year but it's still only in lab conditions and only energy positive counting energy directly applied to the fuel source vs energy produced by the fuel source, not including all the energy to power the various other shit needed to keep it running like cooling, energy to produce the fuel pellet etc
>>108760971Free energy isn't a profitable business model.Same thing as curing patients.
>>108760971Fusion power is possible with today's tech, these engineers just need to stop being pussies.
>>108760971they forgot that nuclear fusion is always 20 years away :)molten salt reactors, on the other hand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbdZcLxsX5s
>>108760971why doesnt anyone listen to physicists? They could have told you this a decade ago. The only promising road to sustainable fusion is accelerator driven boron proton fusion and that requires intensities 3 order of magnitudes bigger than what is currently achievable. It however solves both the neutron problem and can be easily sustained. Its a no brainer yet zero investments no the Trump grift isn't going to work.
>>108760971Need geniuses to make big jumps in tech, but number of geniuses steadily decreasing because smart people have no kids. Looking at human civilization today, I can start to understand the Fermi paradox.
>>108760971sun is the giant fusion reactor just build more solar panels for free energy
wow wtf how could this have happened now how will we power all them ai data centers?
>>108764088/pol/ tier demoralisation. We have more geniuses than ever, they just get ever less spotlight because TikTok and media in general needs ever more flashy content. A Steve Hawking isn't possible anymore or have you ever heard of Michael Cates?
>>108764907Right, what we actually have less of is low hanging fruit. If a scientific question is easy, it probs was solved long ago.
>>108761134I've heard there's a bunch of tritium on the moon?
you need superconductors, i.e. shit cooled down to extreme sub zero temperatures, right next to an extremely hot plasma
>>108760971I didn't even realise there were nuclear fusion "companies". It's all government stuff
>>108766932you're probably thinking of helium-3, which the moon has a lot ofthere might be some tritium (hydrogen-3) on the moon, but nothing compared to the helium
>>108761025>artificial gravity>we know it existsWhat do you mean?I'm guessing you're not talking about using 'centrifugal forces' or linear acceleration.(Unironically curious).
>>108767456Because Tritium has a half-life of 12 years and decays into Helium-3.
>>108767495Probably related to what's needed to achieve the Alcubierre drive which essentially relies on a form of "artificial gravity". Local spacetime expansion/contraction.
>>108767495The only thing I can think of that doesn't require matter with negative mass is the Casimir effect.
>>108760971nuclear fusion companies or startups are all a scam the only thing to follow if you want to be serious is ITER
>>108766861The actual problem is institutional inertia and the fact that everyone has to spend 20+ years memorizing existing paradigms and most people - even geniuses - don't have any creativity for fundamentally groundbreaking insight left for that, and the few that do suck at grant writing.
fusion power, even if the reaction is relatively harmless, still makes a shitload of nuclear waste thanks to the neutronsthere will be a ton of irradiated shielding components that will need to be replaced frequentlyand from what i read this time a lot of gaseous nuclear waste too. will they just vent that? because no other way to deal with it has been found yet
