UK startup's nuclear fusion gun to fire 1B-G projectile at fusion fuel pellet

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/nuclear-fusion-gun-fire-fusion-fuel-pellet

by bookofjoe • 4 years ago

12 5 4 years ago

Someone• 4 years ago

FTA: Comparing tokamak reactors to inertial fusion, Hawker added that "magnetic fusion is like a furnace. It's an always-on hot process because the particles are going around the donut. Whereas inertial fusion is more like an internal combustion engine. It's a pulsed process where you have a repetition rate and the energy per event multiplied by the frequency gives you the power."

Let’s give them that they will be able to get more energy out of a single shot than they put in.

Even then, how many shots do they plan to do per second, and how long will their setup last? The barrel of a hand fire-arm lasts for a few thousand shots or, expressed differently, a few seconds of use (https://www.accurateshooter.com/technical-articles/facts-abo...). Do larger guns fare better?

John23832• 4 years ago

This is actually a good comparison. I guess that intuitively means that tokamak's will have a higher lifespan to even out their cost.

jbms• 4 years ago

They plan one shot every thirty seconds. But the gun is for research, the plant concept is an electromagnetic accelerator of some kind.

https://firstlightfusion.com/technology/power-plant

jjk166• 4 years ago

Gun type fusion was heavily investigated in the 60s. Unfortunately the velocities this company is looking to achieve even with their next iteration (20 km/s) is nowhere near what is needed (~150-300 km/s) to achieve ignition.

The generally agreed upon strategy that you would use to achieve such speeds is a long series of rail guns with each stage accelerating the projectile a few km/s. The stages would have identical power supplies, just the rails would vary in length, so you don't have lots of one off parts; and with a large number of stages the amount of power in any one set of rails (and thus the amount of wear) can be kept manageable. The limiting factor turns out to be the projectile's ability to hold itself together, which puts the minimum size of such a system at around 300 meters - big but not absurd. You run into most of the same issues as with other inertial confinement fusion proposals - you need to mass produce extremely precise fuel capsules extremely quickly and you need very high power drivers which can fire in rapid succession. Railguns may be preferable to lasers, but not by a huge margin. At the time it was viewed as a technically possible but likely uneconomical method of power generation.

https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofimp00impa/page/n3/m...

gabrielsroka• 4 years ago

Full title was too long: "UK startup's nuclear fusion gun will fire a 1-billion-G projectile at a fusion fuel pellet"

UK startup's nuclear fusion gun to fire 1B-G projectile at fusion fuel pellet

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