![]() The comparison as I understand it is essentially turning your gen-1 A-bomb into a thermonuclear H-bomb (grossly over simplified). Some design variants speculate much higher plasma gain and/or impulse.įor a fission rocket using the nuclear pulse propulsion design (back to firing nukes behind the rocket) it would essentially give you more bang for your buck. This works differently for fusion vs fission, but in either case the end result is much greater impulse and fuel economy from the drive than you would get with either method on it's own.įor inertial confinement fusion it would save the initial energy investment necessary to start the reaction. Personally, I am much more convinced that something between spiked fusion rockets and antimatter-catalyzed nuclear pulse propulsion are much more likely to become the standard.įeel free to correct me if I'm misunderstanding literal rocket science.īasically, fusion and/or fission rockets are the primary propulsion method, however antimatter is used to essentially supercharge the entire reaction. I would like to note that fusion reactors and fusion rockets are two different things, but it stands to reason that once you have reactors, rockets aren't too far behind. Likewise, our current ability to produce antimatter is heavily limited by energy production and confinement (described as a magnetic bathtub in a documentary I saw once), which will likely be supplemented by the completion of fusion reactor designs. A purely antimatter drive would probably be more akin to early designs of exploding nukes behind a rocket, except it would be detonating antimatter (in layman's terms). It has already been noted in other answer's and in comments that one of the biggest differences is that fusion is much better for sustained energy release, while antimatter releases more energy immediately. Simply put, we have been working on it for decades and are already on our way to having it. Fusion has been "20-30 years away" since the 1950's because we got to the point where we can't go further without massive investment, and that investment just hasn't happened.įusion, but probably with an antimatter boost. The science is done, but the very expensive development has never been funded. This is what caused one of the early fusion pioneers, Lev Artsimovich, to say, "Fusion will be ready when society needs it." (Note that the problem of nuclear waste and nuclear contamination are more political problems than technical problems.) From a technical standpoint nuclear power is just as clean as fusion power would be, and in the modern era there's much more of a focus on making renewables incrementally cheaper and more efficient rather than building a whole new technology. Unless there is a clear and convincing reason to spend billions to trillions of dollars developing this technology, it's much cheaper not to. ![]() The only problem is that all of this is terribly expensive. That will be another big learning experience, and probably 5-10 years after that you will see the first generation of Mark 1 fusion reactors starting to be installed around the world. Eventually we get to the point where all of the apparent kinks are ironed out and we will build the world's first pilot fusion plant. We will have to do a lot of very expensive modeling and simulation, then build prototypes, then go back to the design stage and improve those prototypes, then build more prototypes. These are really questions of the geometry of the reactor, of the mechanisms that need to be built, of how many and how strong of magnets do we need to confine the reaction, etc. So how do we keep that fusion reaction stable enough that we can keep feeding it new hydrogen and keep the reaction going? Once the fusion reaction is started, it generates so much heat that any fusion reaction naturally wants to blow itself apart. How do you reliably start a "cold" fusion reactor by cramming enough hydrogen together and getting it hot? ![]() The problems are technical, not conceptual: You use that energy to boil steam, and after that a fusion power plant looks just like a regular coal, gas, or nuclear power plant. The process of fusion is pretty well understood: you cram a bunch of very hot hydrogen together, it fuses into helium, and releases a bunch more energy. In fact, we (probably) have done all of the basic science that's needed to build fusion power plants, the only thing that remains is a very expensive development process.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |