Elusive fusion reactors to be commercialised by 2025-2030... Or so they say

FoxEye said:
Interesting, but could any part of that (home-made) device legitimately be said to be operating at a temperatures of "millions of degrees"? That would be crazy...
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Yes the individual hydrogen nucli moving at around 40k electron volts (top end for a home device) 1 electron volts is about 1000 kelvin iirc so we'll into the millions/hundreds of millions.


But it's also at near complete vacum so there's not many gas atoms so while they are hundreds of millions of degrees they wouldn't be able to warm much of anything
 
A Bloomberg video outlining current progress, especially in private sector. Things are going well with the first fire-ups happening in the space of the next 3 years:

Helion seems most confident as does General Fusion, ITER won't be ready until 2025 at the earliest going by their roadmap.


Feels like we are on the current equivelant of the 60s space race. Exciting times.
 
It’s only 5 to 10 years away lads and lasses :D

I thought we’d have heard more from the National Ignition Facility since they achieved more energy output than input last year.
 
Probably because they are still experimenting, and that their operating goal is more focused around weaponry than commercial fusion energy:

“These extraordinary results from NIF advance the science that NNSA depends on to modernize our nuclear weapons and production as well as open new avenues of research,” said Jill Hruby, DOE under secretary for Nuclear Security and NNSA administrator.
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Seems like the real advances will be coming from the peeps at the Oxford facility as well as ITER and General Fusion as they race toward net gain.
 
mrk said:
Probably because they are still experimenting, and that their operating goal is more focused around weaponry than commercial fusion energy:



Seems like the real advances will be coming from the peeps at the Oxford facility as well as ITER and General Fusion as they race toward net gain.
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The military have a lot to answer for the shambles that is civilian nuclear.
Not only were they the main proponents of only investigating fission which could be useful for weapons (okay, thorium might still in the end be declared unusable, but we know why it wasn't investigated properly in the 60s), but also having civilian nuclear fission so tied to the military meant that secrecy was always so intrinsic to everything. Rather than someone exposing a flaw with GE or BNF, since everything was so secret the full power of the secret state was applied to them.

I know this thread is about fusion, but it's depressing to see the same military lot involved here too.
 
Thankfully their involvement is not as exclusive as Fission was since we now have a global effort at play with private sectors focused on commercial side of things.


They can try and keep the laser based Fusion quirks a secret, but pole how the Bloomberg video shows, there are a number of flavours of fusion all offering the same clean energy between private and public sectors around the world.
 
The UK location for the first commercial fusion reactor has been given the go-ahead. Will be operational and providing power to the grid by 2040s:

www.bbc.com

Nuclear fusion plant to be built at West Burton A power station - BBC News

West Burton A will be the site of the prototype fusion energy power plant, the government announces.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com

It literally is less than 20 years away this time :p
 
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Stu999 said:
It’s only 5 to 10 years away lads and lasses :D

I thought we’d have heard more from the National Ignition Facility since they achieved more energy output than input last year.
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They didn't really, unless you consider the input energy to be the amount delivered to the target by the laser rather than the amount actually used by the laser. It's a...different...way of measuring Q.
 
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