Recent comments in /f/askscience

Bluerendar t1_j1bfw1h wrote

Reply to comment by Techsterr in How do fusion scientists expect to produce enough Tritium to sustain D-T fusion (see text)? by DanTheTerrible

There's two main bottlenecks I see:

  1. Energy extraction. The way their system works, it is basically impossible to be efficient extracting energy from the heat produced like how ITER (or, planned future commercial reactors using the principles in ITER) is planning. This is because the extremely strong, temporary magnetic fields they are producing use up enormous amounts of energy, which recycling from heat would be horribly inefficient - ITER uses much weaker semi-permanent fields (in comparison to Helion, ITER's fields are no joke either), which are much less energy-intensive to maintain. Therefore, Helion proposes to generate energy directly from the magnetic fields involved - the fusion process itself produces much of the energy from the motion of charged particles, which the magnetic confinement will capture as magnetic flux - thereby also recycling the energy from the magnetic fields they produce. So far, they haven't demonstrated capturing the energy back out, which will be very difficult (but, at my cursory look, physically reasonable, just difficult to do) and very difficult to do efficiently enough for their proposal to work.

A slightly different but equivalent explanation for the efficiency issue is that Helion uses much higher temperatures for their fusion - this means more energy in, which needs to be recaptured to be efficient, and following thermodynamics, the higher temperature at which the reactor can capture the energy, the higher efficiency of recycling. Magnetic fields capture the energy immediately after fusion at peak temperatures. Heat capture would be much lower temperature in comparison, which makes everything horribly inefficient.

  1. Scaling up production of energy. Helion makes relatively low-energy "bursts" of fusion - to make the energy generation appreciable, they have said they need the bursts to cycle at something like 1000+ times per second (I forget the exact number they gave). Right now, they've demonstrated fusion at 1 time per minutes, and the magnetic confinement and lauch (without fusion) at closer to, but still far from, that frequency. This means everything involved - the production of magnetic fields using their superconducting electromagnetics powered by massive capacitor banks, injection of fuel, launch process, collection of energy probably back into capacitor banks, needs to long-term reliably happen at these frequencies. As an example, in practice, one thing that probably needs to happen is the capacitors need to be done away with altogether (outside of startup and net energy capture) and the electrical energy generated needs to mostly directly power the electromagnets - cycling that much energy at those frequencies would overheat capacitors, needing multiple banks to run instead.
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Bunslow t1_j1bfexu wrote

Reply to comment by Chagrinnish in Why do we use phase change refrigerants? by samskiter

well i dont exactly have any way to burn fuel around here, so all i got are resistors or heat pumps. lol. im in IL, so not that far away. 0F and falling to the same -9F low. apparently we have the same low temperature from st louis to winnipeg, it's a massive blast of fairly homogenous air

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