This type of hot fusion has three problems that have not been solved
or even widely acknowledged.
1. The fusion is between D+T. The tritium must be created because it
is not a natural isotope. The plan is to convert the neutron flux into
tritium which is fed back into the reactor. Unfortunately, this
conversion process is not 100% efficient because many neutrons are
lost without making tritium. This missing tritium must be made using a
fission reactor or accelerator, with the added expense this gives.
2. The first wall is exposed to an intense flux of radiation. As a
result, its integrity is gradually compromised. Replacement is a major
problem and requires shutting down the reactor for an extended time.
During this time, the missing power must be supplied by expensive
backup generators, thereby increasing the average cost of power.
3. The system is very complex and as a result has many failure modes,
most of which have not been identified. These will only be identified
after the money has been spent and the machine is put into service.
Consequently, more money will be required, but at this stage too much
will have been invested to abandon the method, which seems to be the
case even now.
The comment below is exactly correct. This program is a waste of money
and will never produce commercial power. The method was given its
chance to prove its worth and it has failed. Yet it goes on. In
contrast, cold fusion was never given a chance to prove its worth.
Ed Storms
On Jan 24, 2013, at 4:23 PM, James Bowery wrote:
My response:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=south-korea-makes-billion-dollar-bet-fusion-power&posted=1#comment-18
18. jabowery
06:21 PM 1/24/13
From a founder of the US Tokamak Fusion Program to Congress:
The DoE committment to very large fusion concepts (the giant
magnetic tokamak) ensures only the need for very large budgets; and
that is what the program has been about for the past 15 years - a
defense-of-budget program - not a fusion-achievement program. As one
of three people who created this program in the early 1970's (when I
was an Asst. Dir. of the AEC's Controlled Thermonuclear Reaction
Division) I know this to be true; we raised the budget in order to
take 20% off the top of the larger funding, to try all of the
hopeful new things that the mainline labs would not try.
Each of us left soon thereafter, and the second generation
management thought the big program was real; it was not. Ever since
then, the ERDA/DoE has rolled Congress to increase and/or continue
big-budget support. This worked so long as various Democratic
Senators and Congressmen could see the funding as helpful in their
districts. But fear of undermining their budget position also made
DoE bureaucrats very autocratic and resistant to any kind of new
approach, whether inside DoE or out in industry. This led DoE to
fight industry wherever a non-DoE hopful new idea appeared.
See http://www.oocities.org/jim_bowery/BussardsLetter.html
On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 5:11 PM, Terry Blanton <hohlr...@gmail.com>
wrote:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=south-korea-makes-billion-dollar-bet-fusion-power
South Korea has embarked on the development of a preliminary concept
design for a fusion power demonstration reactor in collaboration with
the US Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
(PPPL) in New Jersey.
<more>
Such a waste. Imagine if they redirected that $1B to LENR!
