Talk:Fusion woo/Archive1

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Helion Energy

I removed this item:

• Helion Energy - accelerator-based fusion

First, the Helion concept is a Field-Reversed Configuration. While Rostocker (Tri Alpha Energy) wants to run an FRC in a way closely related to an accelerator system, which won't work (I even published a paper explaining why.), Slough is in a totally different regime. I happen to know a good deal about fusion in general and FRCs in particular. I also happen to be a bona fide skeptic concerning fusion energy in general but most particularly alternative confinement. And yet I think Helion has a teeny tiny chance of succeeding. Not fusion woo. Sapere aude (talk) 19:57, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

OK, thanks for the info. I read something on field-reversed configuration and it looks like it's just an alternative implementation of magnetic confinement. --Tweenk (talk) 03:58, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

DPF

This article is not biased, if anything deserves to be called fusion woo, it is ITER and ICF, not dense plasma focus and polywell approaches. They just assert that they will not work and that ITER will.... please support the assertions, unsupported assertions are one way that this wiki itself claims are a telltale sign of BS.

The assertions are supported by Rider's thesis, please read it... --Tweenk (talk) 03:01, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Rider covered a lot of ground, but mostly in relation to non-thermal particle distributions in various ways. I don't think anyone is claiming that the DPF plasma is not thermal. Sapere aude (talk) 14:38, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

His conclusions were on the required re-circulation power to keep the plasma in the non-thermal-equilibrium condition. This does not apply in any way to the DPF. There is no recirculation. The thesis is 17 years old and makes assumptions that do not apply to this type of reactor, and it didn't even result in a paper publication (I know most of the PhD students around here get papers published before/as they finish their thesis). Furthermore, this only applies to your claim of P-B11 fusion as woo, and not a DPF in general. If you can list ICF as non woo but give caveats about the claims, then is seems absolutely irrational to call a DPF woo when it OUTPERFORMS ICF. I don't see how its unacceptable to put DPF in the non-Woo section and say that the PB claims may be unrealistic claims, but that power generation using D-D or D-T may be feasible. PB fusion may simply be marketing because non-radioactive power doesn't draw criticism from the anti- nuclear crowd - like ICF talks about fusion power rather than nuclear weapons research. The way it is written now makes it seem as if ICF is a realistic power generation technology, but DPF isn't, when the empirical data shows the exact opposite --Eagle Adler (talk) 09:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

ITER has no direct way to convert the fusion energy to electricity - a large and complex steam turbine system built around the torus would be needed. Furthermore ITER, or any otrus, cannot operate for long before the inside is burned out. Those torus devices operate on extremely short time scales, to get one running continuously would be a huge challenge, even if they obtain net power output for a few seconds from ITER. DPF and polywell approaches have the much more efficient method of direct current from decelerating the charged particles against a magnetic field.

Electricity generation is not the point of ITER, it is a research facility - the goal is to achieve substantial energy gain. --Tweenk (talk) 02:53, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Still, a tokomak design has no readily available means to extract energy from it, other than creating a thermal gradient--Eagle Adler (talk) 09:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Tore Supra is a large superconducting tokamak in France that was intended to operate in steady state. It seemed like a slam dunk, once you had the superconductors, since all the known timescales were at most several seconds. But - surprise, surprise - the plasma quenched after a couple minutes. It probably had to do with plasma wall interactions, but the point is that there is a lot of room for unanticipated problems on the road between ITER and a commercial reactor.

Direct conversion is no easy matter either, and it's not obvious that it will be possible at all with a DPF.

Sapere aude (talk) 14:38, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

-A DPF produces an ion beam and an electron beam, ie moving charges, readily directly converted to electricity by deceleration against a magnetic field (ie via induction).--Eagle Adler (talk) 09:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

DPF fusion has already achieved 20x the fusion output of any other fusion device for its level of input, at its scale of input - granted its scale of input is far lower, this machine fits in one room. The focus fusion group does publish in highly regarded scientific journals, their claims are not in doubt. They repeatedly achieve fusion many times per day, which is a stark contrast to torus designs. Additionally, their reactor designs don't need to use P-B fusion, that is their goal, but they are currently using deuterium. Its not as if these reactor designs would only work with P-B fuel, so you can't dismiss the reactor design simply because they'd like to do P-B fusion with it. FYI they've acheived the conditions needed for P-B fusion, something ITER or a torus design could never hope to accomplish. Their confinement densities and energies are far superior to torus designs, and every indication is that one of these built on the scale of ITER would produce at least an order of magntude more power than ITER may.. As for their explanations of how they hope to reduce brehmstrallung, I admit I don't fully comprehend it, but again, this reactor design doesn't need to use P-B fuel, and thus brehmstrallung is no more a problem for it than it is for ITER.

Reducing bremsstrahlung is impossible in the same way that changing the speed of light is impossible. --Tweenk (talk) 02:53, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Tokamak experiments "achieve fusion many times per day as well". That's not a big deal.

It's easy to change the speed of light, e.g. with a piece of glass. The bremsstrahlung loss from the Sun is much, much lower than the total bremsstrahlung produced, so it's not like there's a Law of Universal Bremsstrahlung.

Sapere aude (talk) 14:38, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

- Impossible to reduce Brehsstrahlung? another unsupported assertion. Actually it is directly contradicted by your favorite reference, as your reference specifically speaks of reducing Brehsstrahlung losses by having the plasmas at non-thermal equilibrium (but then its conclusion is that the savings from reducing Brehmsstralung losses are offset by other factors). And of course, it doesn't consider quantum effects.

ICF fusion with lasers is a joke... lasers are already so in efficient, then they use a frequency doubling crystal to pump it up into the UV range- more losses... and again, there's not much way to recover the energy other than steam turbines. ^{— Unsigned, by: 192.33.214.33 / talk / contribs}

bremsstrahlung is in fact reduced by extremely strong magnetic fields, > ~100 kT, which quantize the electron energy. This was predicted by Eric Lerner, and demonstrated by Lawrenceville plasma physics nearly a decade ago; LPP routinely achieves billion kelvin temperatures in their focus fusion device. -- 99.230.226.32 (talk) 03:16, 27 October 2018 (UTC)

Did you read the article at all? It doesn't say that ICF is an electricity generation technology. --Tweenk (talk) 02:53, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Did you read the article at all? The very first line of the article states: "Fusion woo refers to claims of practical, low-cost means of extracting energy from the process of nuclear fusion" How is ICF not woo when it makes claims of potential energy generation, using the definition in this article?--Eagle Adler (talk) 09:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Feel free to re-write and cite various areas if you feel you have the expertise. ^pathetic 14:42, 31 August 2012 (UTC)

We have a problem here. Or several.

• ICF has a huge base of legitimate scientific research behind it. I agree it has been oversold and that the energy tag is mostly a ploy to make the funding of weapons research more palatable, but that doesn't make it woo. MCF is much the same. However low you may estimate the chances that it will ever produce energy economically, there is sound science behind the concept.
• DPF produces real fusion, but Lerner's explanation has some big gaps, such as what pressure could be confining the plasmoid he thinks he has. (See [1].) When he talks about p-B11 fusion, he is drifting very close to woo-land, requiring never-before-obtained magnetic field strengths, and still needing to squeeze every percentage point to make a net energy balance even on paper. It's not woo if your standard is cold fusion, but it doesn't deserve the sales pitch you have given it. Your schpeel also leaves out some fundamental factors like the fusion gain factor Lerner is claiming, and how he claims it scales. (The woo-ness of polywell is much higher, but that wasn't your main thrust.)

I think DPF should not be mentioned in the article unless we can get a consensus on it on this talk page first. Sapere aude (talk) 12:08, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Agreed, which is why my last edit simply removed a reference to DPF, but Tweenk put it back up there... taking it off again.--Eagle Adler (talk) 09:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, the way it scales has been experimentally demonstrated, although not quite to the 5th power of input current (only 4.7). As far as Woo - we are talking about feasibility for energy production... in this case we have perhaps 3 standards for not being woo. I think we need to agree on a "woo" standard.

1. 1) Actually achieves fusion,
2. 2) Ok - so it produced Fusion, but is it realistic that a machine of a reasonable scale can be built to produce net power? this is sort of subjective or relative.
3. 3) Actually demonstrates net power production

Case #1) ICF, MCF, IEC, and DPF aren't Woo.

Case#2) In theory if you scaled any of them up to truly massive machines that Dwarf ITER, you'd be able to get net energy. In this case, I would argue that ICF is Woo, at least relative to DPFs. The national ignition facility is massive, and yet Lehner's tiny DPF is getting 4 times the amount of fusion per unit of input energy, and they aren't even using D-T fuel (they are using D-D fuel). The may be overly optimistic when it comes to P-B fusion, but that doesn't change the fact that empirically a DPF is massively outperforming ICF in both scale and efficiency. With that in mind, I can't imagine how you can call the DPF approach Woo without calling the ICF approach woo - so when the DPF was called woo and ICF wasn't, I thought it was appropriate to reverse them. Perhaps they should both be non-woo, with a caveat about some of the claims for P-B fusion in DPFs. My sales pitch was somewhat reactionary to what I perceived as the gross insult to it when it is labelled woo when ICF isn't, when it bests ICF by every standard except amount of funding it attracts (which others already admitted is due to weapons research).

Case #3) case everything is Woo except if/when ITER demonstrates it.

I'd be fine with a less "pro-DPF" edit, but I do think whatever the article ends up being, the following points should be made:

The DPF group is different from the others in that they are continuously publishing in well regarded peer reviewed journals. (side note about polywell: they have a contract with the DoD and are under a publishing embargo, the DoD has renewed their funding and the publishing embargo as a result. Supposedly they've met all goals so far, but with no real data, we've only got appeals to authority -ie the US Department of Defense thinks its good enough to fund - to claim it is not woo)

Scale is very important Fuel used is very important DPF achieves much better results than ICF even with the disadvantages of a D-D and not D-T fuel, and a scale [b]over 4 orders of magnitude smaller[/b]. (35 thousand joules vs 422 million, the ICF used 12,000 times more energy to get 1/4 the amount of fusion per unit energy) The DPFs predicted fusion scaling of current to the 5th power has been experimentally shown to conform to the 4.7th power. Basic math (where energy use goes up to the 2nd power of current, and fusion yield to the 4.7th, tells you that if it was operating at the power levels of the ICF, the fusion yield would be 3,898,740,733 times higher - almost 4 billion times higher for only 12,000 times the energy input. The ratio of fusion power to input power would thus increase over 300,000 times. If it was already 4x higher, then, we'd have DPF outperforming ICF by over a million fold (in terms of fusion per unit of input power). Switching to D-T fuel would make this over 15 million fold better than what ICF has achieved. If ICF is a realistic approach, than something 15 million times closer to break even (in theory) should not be called woo.

Yes, it would have been nice if they did experiments with Tritium and not simply deuterium, but money is an issue, and it is in no way controversial that D-T fusion has higher yields than D-D fusion, so there is little reason to doubt their extrapolation that if their machine operating at 1/12,000th the power of the NIF has 4x the fusion per unit of input power, that it would be 60x better with D-T fuel. As to the scaling... yes, it would be nice to see if that empirically determined scaling law hold as the device is scaled up. I suspect it will if the theory predicts the 5th power. Actual demonstrations are far better than theory, but what has been demonstrated so far is very promising. It seems to indicate that there would be a large surplus of power if built at the scale of the national ignition facility. --Eagle Adler (talk) 07:57, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

My woo-meter pegs out at creationism, cold fusion, and homeopathy. The only fusion scheme that meets that standard, which is your level 1 woo, is cold fusion. The next level (your 2) is devices that really produce fusion, but for which there are fundamental reasons that it will never reach breakeven. Beam-target and beam-beam fusion are in this category, and I would argue that p-B11 and polywell are, too. For the remaining confinement concepts, including tokamak, DPF, and ICF, there is not enough known to rule out that they could reach energy breakeven, given enough development and a big enough machine. Obviously, the most is known about tokamaks, and the probability that an electricity producing reactor could be built is high (given another few decades and horrendous sums). That cannot be said of the other concepts. A strong case can be made that no form of fusion energy is completely woo-less, in the sense that it will never be economical in comparison to alternatives. Although you and I might tug back and forth on exactly where in the spetrum DPF, polywell, and FRC might fall, it seems that we are broadly in agreement.

The question remains how we should construct the article. I initially thought we should limit it more or less to the incontrovertible woo of cold fusion, but now I'm thinking we might be better living up to our rationalist creed if we point out the difficulties of conventional fusion (without going too, too far). What's the feeling in the community?

Sapere aude (talk) 15:49, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

I would be fine with restricting it to cold fusion, and anything else that can be proven to not work. I'd be hesitant to say anything that achieves fusion is woo - anytime you have the slightest amount of fusion, the resulting energy output is higher than the input - it is simply a matter of inefficiencies in recovering that energy before it is lost to gradientless heat. Of course using 15 billion joules to release 1 joule of fusion energy will never work, even at 99% energy recovery. For this reason, I don't want to label P-B11 as woo. This QMF effect, I admit, I don't understand, it may be woo, and to make P-B11 work would require a method of harnessing the Brehmsstrahlung radiation to do work rather than minimizing the Brehmsstralung with quantum effects - its just EM radiation, there's got to be a way to use it. Without doing any calculations, I'd also imagine that if your ratio of released fusion energy to energy input is very high, you can break even despite brehmsstrahlung losses.

My first edit was under the influence of a bit of annoyance at seeing ICF placed "above" DPF, despite acknowledgement that ICF for energy research is largely propaganda - and of course despite empirical data showing that DPF is much better than ICF. If there had been no mention of DPFs at all, I probably wouldn't have been bothered to make any comments. "I initially thought we should limit it more or less to the incontrovertible woo of cold fusion" - I am in agreement with this sentiment. Perhaps we should omit talk of what approaches *might* work, and restrict the article to what clearly does not work (ie clear scams, with about as much backing as those "free energy" crackpots). I just can't tolerate seeing ICF called a more realistic approach than DPF to energy production when the data (published in peer reviewed journals, and highly repeatable) so strongly suggests otherwise.

If we talk about ITER as the only reasonable way... well, again, I'd suggest that the DPF data is so strong that DPFs should significantly outperforms tokomaks if built on the same scale. It would be simplest to just not discuss the approaches that aren't woo under my 1st definition of fusion woo. Perhaps a mention of approaches that do produce fusion, with the note that even methods of "conventional" or "hot" fusion still face many challenges, and would need to be built on large scales to produce net power.

Also in that case, a disclaimer about Muon catalyzed fusion should be made, separating it from "cold fusion" - noting that if the "alpha sticking" problem is solved, or a more efficient way of producing muons is found, it could lead to net power.--Eagle Adler (talk) 18:26, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

OK, we don't have a problem, just an opportunity for improvement. When I have time, I'll try a rewrite, but it might not be soon. Sapere aude (talk) 09:46, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Given the description of dense plasma focus on the LPP page, I have some doubts about it. There are also numerous references to p-B fusion, which is a pipe dream at best. I am wondering whether the whole aneutronic fusion marketing angle isn't just a strategy of marketing the company to investors and the real business is the legitimate (and probably profitable) hard X-ray source which LPP is already producing. --Tweenk (talk) 03:28, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Don't underestimate Lerner's potential for delusions of grandeur. He also thinks he can disprove the Big Bang. I do wonder if he is really attracting venture capital or if he is independently wealthy. Sapere aude (talk) 14:38, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, One should be careful not to dismiss claims simply because of who they come from. An example of this would be from biology, Lynn Margulis. She brought together much evidence that mitochondria (and chloroplasts) were the result of endosymbiosis. This conclusion is widely supported and not doubted by anyone but creationists. She then went off the deep-end, and proved herself a nutcase by "seeing" endosymbiosis everywhere, with ridiculous claims like Eukaryotic flagella are actually symbiotic spirochete like bacteria. She was an AIDs denier. She thought that larval forms of organism and their adult forms have different evolutionary origins, and some sort of symbiosis happened between two organisms, where the first organism is dominant during early life, and then the 2nd symbiotic organism determines the form in adulthood... She proved to be a real crackpot - yet her paper on the origin of mitochondria was perfectly valid -backed by solid evidence, but was rejected 15 times before being accepted. I wonder if she was always a crackpot, of if she became a crackpot because the mainstream scientific community rejected her initial endosymbotic theory of mitochondria. She was right, she knew she was right, she knew the mainstream was wrong - on the subject of mitochondria -> birth of a crackpot persona? If she was always a crackpot, its a good thing she lead with the theory on mitochondria symbiosis. Because if she had lead with her other shit which has no supporting evidence... well then its likely her mitochondria theory would be dismissed offhand, and that field of research would probably have been be set back a decade.

But more generally, this is more of a question of the group's credibility, than the device's credibility. Similar sentiment is expressed here: "This may be a real phenomenon, but if all I had seen was that website, I'd be quite suspicious. It reads just like the web page of a free energy hoax or something similar." With regards to the Quantum Magnetic field effect to reduce Brehmsstralung. This does sound like "woo" or the stage at which "then the magic happens", and I admit I don't really understand it. However, the mainstream physics community seems to support the effect.

Without it, it simply leads to this conclusion: "Many analyses have indicated that fusion power can barely if at all exceed plasma cooling by bremsstrahlung [5]. If unavoidable, this situation would eliminate the heating of the plasma by the fusion-produced alpha particles and would require that all the energy be recovered from the x-ray radiation." Bremsstrahlung energy does not simply disappear, it just becomes hard (but not impossible) to recover.--Eagle Adler (talk) 09:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Moved from the article

This has some useful information, but is basically a badly written fluff piece that contains heaps of unjustified extrapolation. What if some losses go up as I^7? There would be a maximum I for which there is some fusion but still no net power. Whoever wrote this should really read the first reference in the article. --Tweenk (talk) 03:07, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

What if some loses in ITER go up to I^7 - this argument against it is an argument from ignorance. You have no data to suggest losses would go up with I^7, and there is no reason to think that they would. You are basically using the poor argument of "you can't prove it doesn't, so the approach is Woo". This argument could be applied to any of the approaches. They've shown fusion yield increases, and you are arbitrarily assuming the scaling won't hold and declaring it woo.

The first reference of the article that you suggest reading is not even a published paper, and it is over 20 years old. And it contains assumptions that are not be valid. For one, it assumes a reaction operating in a continuous and not pulsed fashion. Hence it talks about "minimum recirculating power that must be extracted... and re-injected... to counteract.. scattering effects and keep the plasma out of equilibrium. " such an analysis is completely inapplicable to a fusion reactor operating in pulses with no recirculation "In virtually all cases, the minimum recirculating power is substantially larger than the fusion power..." - the first reference is not applicable to a DPF device - there is no recirculation of the plasma - as it does not operate in a continuous mode, you don't have the plasma coming into equilibrium and requiring something to keep it out of equilibrium. Secondly it states "so barring the discovery of methods for recirculating the power at exceedingly high efficiencies ..." - this is exactly what they are trying to do with the polywell, their main focus is on the efficiency of the recirculation of the electrons. The first reference makes its conclusions based on assumptions that do not apply to DPFs and perhaps not polywells.

Also, I find your statement about the impossibility of P-B11 fusion producing net power to be unsupported - please, some sort of citation or rational argument. Even if you are right, you are not making your case very well, and your argument pattern seems analogous to arguments for ID/against evolution.. --Eagle Adler (talk) 17:37, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Another approach that has garnered little funding but very good results is "Focus fusion". It is one of the few reactor designs capable of P-B fusion. It achieves much higher confinement temperatures and densities than a torus reactor such as ITER. Lehrner's group has managed to increase the fusion yield of a DPF relative to the input current by a factor of 6, and shows the reactor designs promise for net power generation. Importantly, this reactor has been shown to behave very close to the predicted fusion yeilds, with fusion yield increasing with I^5, and fusion yeild was repeatable within 3%

At this rate, when scaled up to the scale of ITER or the ICF of the national ignition facility, the fusion power exceeds those by a large factor. The much smaller DPF using D-D fuel already produced 4x the neutrons/fusion per joule of the $3 billion national ignition facility which used D-T fuel. Had the DPF been using D-T fuel, the fusion amounts per unit energy would be 60x greater than that of the national ignition facility. The data is in, and when a small scale DPF is massively outperforming the expensive ICF fusion devices in terms of fusion per input unit, it is clear that when it comes to break even fusion, between DPF and ICF fusion, it is ICF that is "fusion woo", and DPFs are superior. Furthermore, As the I^5 predicted scaling has been confirmed (actually, experimentally measured at I^4.7), If built on the same scale, the DPF would produce orders of magnitude more fusion than the national ignition facility or ITER, and would easily achieve net power. As fusion power is ultimately about fusion per unit of input, and a DPF currently holds the record for the highest ratio (although it is possible that Bussard's polywell design has bested it, but that data is not public), and this DPF was built at a much smaller scale and has been shown to have large efficiency gains when scaled up, ITER and ICF are fusion woo when compared to dense plasma focuses. The group pursing this fusion technologies believes it can make P-B fusion work by minimalazing the Brehmstrahlung losses via the "Quantum magnetic field effect". As the DPF already leads in fusion per unit of input energy, this design is also most likely to acheive enough fusion to overcome the brehmstrahlung losses even with the QMF effect.

Another problem: the first three references are actually from the same source and refer to the same experiments (Lawrenceville Plasma Physics), while the last one is a paper in the Journal of Fusion Energy, which frequently publishes shameless cold fusion bullshit. --Tweenk (talk) 03:31, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

2 of the first three are from the same website, the other is a paper in the journal of Plasma physics. The last one is the "Journal of Fusion Energy Does it really matter if they are about the same group's experiments? If some other group had tried and failed to replicate the results, that would be one thing.. but to declare that it is woo, therefore you shouldn't try to replicate the results, therefore the results aren't replicated, therefore it is woo - is again very bad logic. Are you suggesting these results are faked? --Eagle Adler (talk) 17:37, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

The biggest problem

The biggest problem with widely classifying LPP and polywell as woo is that they're pretty clearly evidentialist approaches. They could be wrong, and finding that out would be great, and we could all move on, by they do lay out hypotheses that are necessary ideas for a successful energy production system, and objectively attempt to test them. I think a stronger differentiation between fringe(which is hardly being "nice" or anything) and woo is called for. Hell, they're published in peer reviewed physics journals.

Comparing people who might be wrong to those who aren't even wrong is kinda unreasonable. Right? Am I missing something? Ikanreed (talk) 15:38, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

General Fusion (MTF)

A lot of the article deals with ITER and the Ignition Facility designs (magnets and lasers, respectively), and I was wondering if space should be allocated to the General Fusion concept (pistons). Their scale-model proof-of-concept supposedly produced fusion (as evidenced by neutron production, I think), so it must have some merit.

That said I'm not a nuclear physicist, or any other kind of physicist, and thus readily admit my optimism might be getting the best of me. Does the idea have merit enough to warrant a mention in the article, or is it another example of woo, or even potential-woo? Onychoprion (talk) 19:54, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

If neutrons were horses, then the universe probably would explode. But no, my favorite pet fusion projects also produce neutrons(I'm a DPF sucker myself), and I can't pretend that means the problems raised in the article aren't substantive. Ikanreed (talk) 20:03, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

It's true the problems raised are legitimate; my question comes with whether they can be applied to MTF, and, if not, should it be added to 'non-woo' or 'soft-woo' (most likely the latter, considering the unorthodox methods used). It certainly doesn't fall under any of the three signs of woo, as they produce neutrons (and have lead shielding), particle accelerators aren't involved (the plasma is contained magnetically, and compressed via shock-waves), and use D-T fuel (with Li being the source of the T). They seem to acknowledge and address the problems inherent with the process (again, so it seems to me: the non-physicist). Onychoprion (talk) 21:39, 17 December 2014 (UTC)

Oh man, fusion that uses pistons? That's enough to give steampunk fans an orgasm. --Ymir (talk) 23:30, 18 December 2014 (UTC)

p-B11 first experiments

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1951/cockcroft-lecture.pdf See page 5 which describes the first experimental disintegration of Boron under proton bombardment. Theories and Mathematical constructs are all worthy of consideration, but evidence based facts trump them. Further articles by the Cavendish Laboratory elaborated the investigation of atom smashing using protons and deuterons (deuterium). The p-B11 fusion was easily replicated and routinely measured. The estimated efficiency was 1 part per billion in 1934. ^{— Unsigned, by: 69.140.98.117 / talk / contribs 12:21, 21 January 2015‎}

I'm not sure why this is relevant. The question isn't whether fusion itself is woo, but the woo involved in the decades' worth of claims that safe, cheap, clean and practically unlimited fusion energy is just around the corner (usually it's "only 10 years away" which has been said since at least the 1970s). ScepticWombat (talk) 13:17, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

I don't know. This isn't that clear cut. Anyone making predictions about the future of technology is going to be wrong. Some people do that. Our article on the other hand, takes a very specific (and possibly bullshit supporting) bent that there are deeper theoretical problems with some of the science when that's not really borne out by the scientific literature. BoN here is repeating a thought I've had on a few occasions. Ikanreed (talk) 14:45, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Well, if the article overstates the theoretical obstacles, that should of course be rectified. Nevertheless, the immanent prospect of fusion power has been a pretty constant feature of technophile cornucopianism for a long time. I happened to attend a lecture/promotion event for ITER about a year ago, as a part of an event on green energy. Even in the ITER-guy's rather optimistic self-promotion the project sounded both complicated and expensive and (again) about "10 years away" from actually being able to build fusion power plants. Indeed, some in the audience questioned the wisdom of the staggering costs of this project, considering the problems with climate change which might be more immediately and effectively confronted by investing in improving existing technology. ScepticWombat (talk) 15:16, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

Now we're getting political and it'll be hard to settle anything meaningfully and factually, but here's part of the always 10/30/50 years(it varies) away explanation. Ikanreed (talk) 15:25, 21 January 2015 (UTC)

That's odd, why can there "never" be fusion if less than 1 billion dollars are spent per annum? This graph simply plays "Hey it's just because we're underfunded that marvellous gadgets haven't materialised"-counterfactual history which I really can't take very seriously - least of all if we're not supposed to be "getting political", because "it'll be hard to settle anything meaningfully and factually". It also doesn't deal with some quite legitimate reasons why funding might have fallen, such as, for instance, lack of promising results from initial research etc. Don't get me wrong, I think that fusion power is incredibly interesting research, but just claiming that lack of progress is due to lack of funding when such an international mega-project as ITER is already overspending, has been allotted extra funding and now asks for even more is not particularly persuasive. Especially when the topic of this article is the unrealistic optimism surrounding fusion power.

As an aside, I think it's damn near impossible to avoid "getting political", because fusion power research is such a favourite (at least as a last retreat) of what Oreskes & Conway called "cornucopians" who insist that some "technical fix" will make whatever problem (currently climate change is the typical one) go away. This then becomes an alibi for politicians to simply ignore the problem, whether the proposed fix is realistic or not. An analogy from the past, although a flawed one, would be SDI as a technical fix to MAD. (The reason I think it a flawed analogy is that Edward Teller, one of the primary scientific backers of SDI, deliberately either lied or at least cherry-picked to play up the feasibility of SDI and generally behaved more as a politician than a scientist. I don't think this is the case with fusion research) ScepticWombat (talk) 09:35, 24 January 2015 (UTC)

Commercial operation

I think it is worth pointing out that commercial operation of even the non-woo approaches appear to be nil.

In the last 10 years the cost of non-traditional generation options has dropped to parity. In doing so, they wiped out the nuclear industry. You can only economically build nukes at large sizes (500MWp and up is typical) and they cost around $10/Wp (although you will see lower estimates, every plant in the western world in the last 25 has cost over $10). So that means if you want to go to a bank to get the money to buy one, you're looking at borrowing a whole lot of money at the unsecured rate ~6%. The interest payments on that loan is higher than the value of the electricity that comes out.

What does that have to do with fusion? Well non-woo approaches generally use D-T fuel, which means neutrons in the first loop. As such, a fusion plant will be substantially similar to a fission plant outside the nuclear island. So we know that the absolute minimum cost of such a plant is the cost of the non-nuclear side. That is currently around $6/Wp (the reactor core only accounts for about 10% of a plant's cost). That is already twice the price of a wind farm that produces the same amount of energy, and we haven't even built the reactor yet.

There is zero chance these will be competitive. Everyone knows this. They've been telling the labs this since the late 1950s. When they did the Stellarator D design study in '58 they came up with a reactor that was 500 feet long. The industry groups involved took one look and told them in no uncertain terms they would never build such a thing. The ignored this, waving it away as being preliminary work, and went back to their plasmas. GE went through something similar in 65 and exited the field. Power company after company has said the same thing. No one will build this even if they can get it to work. ^{— Unsigned, by: 108.168.93.48 / talk}

And yet, ITER keeps going. I don't think it's too unreasonable to call this pathological science, but I suspect bureaucratic inertia and pork barrelling has more to do with it.

On talk pages, please sign your comments using four tildes (~~~~) or by clicking on the sign button: on the toolbar above the edit panel. You can also indent successive talk page comments using one more colon (:) for each line. Thank you.ClickerClock (talk) 08:11, 7 October 2017 (UTC)

Tag request

There is "a fusion with the 'cold fusion' article" joke to be made. Anna Livia (talk) 16:37, 19 March 2019 (UTC)

Problems with Radioactivity

The section on aneutronic fusion claims: "D-T reaction, which already has orders of magnitude lower problems with radioactivity than nuclear fission."

This is not clear-cut. Fissioning U or Pu produces ~200MeV, two nuclei of radioactive waste, and 2-3 not particularly high-energy neutrons, one of which is used for fissioning another U or Pu nucleus. 1-2 neutrons then can irradiate the reactor or convert U238 into transuranium nuclei. Some of the transuranic nuclei are burned up further, some are in the waste.

By contrast, D-T produces 17.6MeV, 14.1MeV of which are in a neutron, which is very good at irradiating the reactor. Ideally most of the neutrons will be used for breeding more T from Li6, but losses are inevitable. And you need 11 D-T reactions to produce the same energy as one fission reaction. It's less than clear that D-T has lower problems with radioactivity, much less "orders of magnitude lower". It does not have a transuranics problem, but that's about all. Anton (talk) 14:37, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

If you can provide a citation, please correct the text. Thanks. Bongolian (talk) 17:51, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

I have no specific citation, but then I did not make a claim. Does the author of the claim I criticized have a citation to back it up? (I spent a little time looking at the references in the Wikipedia article on aneutronic fusion, expecting to find some discussion of radioactivity problems caused by the neutrons, but a number of papers are not online, and the paper by Belyaev does not provide a motivation for the research. I expect there is some discussion somewhere, but am too lazy to search for it.) Anton (talk) 10:42, 12 April 2021 (UTC)