A Physist I'd worked with had previously worked on the Tokamak and interacted with contemporaries at the NIF. He got out of 'the business' due to what he concluded were nearly intractable engineering challenges.
As with most things, there are secondary and tertiary effects that even a 'pure' fusion event will manifest that make everything in the facility 'hot' enough that you have to bury it for a couple of half lives after it is no longer functionally intact. Given my personal experience at various synchrotrons, I'm inclined to agree with his conclusions. It may one day be practical (I certainly hope so) but it does no one any good to gloss over the realities of any technical challenge. N. Christopher Perry On May 1, 2013, at 21:56, Sebastian Kuzminsky <s...@highlab.com> wrote: > On 05/01/2013 07:28 PM, andy pugh wrote: >> On 2 May 2013 02:18, N. Christopher Perry <n_christopher_pe...@me.com> wrote: >> >>> One thing you've overlooked is that everything near the fusion gets >>> irradiated enough to be transmuted and generally into radioactive isotopes. >> >> Yes. > > No, that's not a universal truth. > > Different fusion reactions have different end products, and it's only > the neutral particles that irradiate the containment vessel. Any fusion > end products that carry an electrical charge will be confined by the > magnetic containment field, along with the plasma that makes up the > fusion fuel. > > There are aneutronic fusion reactions which in theory can be made > completely clean. (Avoiding unwanted side reactions is left as an > exercise for the reader.) > > For example: > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#D-3He_fuel_cycle > > > -- > Sebastian Kuzminsky > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET > Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. > Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead > Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. > http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 > _______________________________________________ > Emc-users mailing list > Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Introducing AppDynamics Lite, a free troubleshooting tool for Java/.NET Get 100% visibility into your production application - at no cost. Code-level diagnostics for performance bottlenecks with <2% overhead Download for free and get started troubleshooting in minutes. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_ap1 _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
