If you don't see the large theory difference between shooting a rocket into space and nuclear fusion, this is just a waste of time for me.lonewolf wrote:Yes, and in 1961, without the Apollo initiative, we were 50 years (possibly never) away from landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. We were also 20 years away from the 1st commercial high density integrated circuits and 30 years away from the 1st integrated microprocessors and desktop computers. Imagine if the IBM PC was introduced in 1997 instead of 1982?
We are a delayed construction project away from a Q10 (10x more energy produced than used) plant in Japan that should online in 2018. The cost is estimated at between 10-20 billion euros. Japan, huh?
Japan is either really secretive about their reactor, or they decided to put all their eggs in the international basket. I can't find anything about a Japanese fusion plant at all. Unless you mean back in 2003, when they were competing with france to be the location of ITER. France won (instead of just running away
). ITER fits your stated parameters of a Q10, although the design target is less than 1,000 seconds of Q10.Sustained output is in the Q5 range. But only if your idea of "sustained" is less than 10 minutes. And none of the generated energy will be converted to electricity as they have not figured out a stable way to extract the heat from the plasma once they've got it hot enough to do anything. (the radiation that is released (and becomes to source of the extracted energy) also weakens the structure itself)
Instead of making and sustaining a fusion reaction here (assuming its even possible to commercialize it at a price that won't make us pay $4.00kw/h), we should concentrate on harnessing the already on-going reaction that already exists.
Solar energy. We are already above 20% efficiency (meaning >20% of the photons are creating electric energy instead of heat). In 10 years with the amount of money spent on the Iraq war invested in solar, we could be at the 40-50% mark (which means it could potentially deliver the same power of todays cells, on a cloudy day). Meaning a 20'x35' solar array could easily power your house and have juice to spare to sell to your employer to run the things you use to make money. All at a rate 1/2 what you pay today.
Edit: Oh wait but that would mean anyone, even third world countries, could have it. Solar isn't something for just the 'rich' countries to enjoy, like fusion...
Also whats wrong with putting the 'power' in the hands of the people instead of a few large corporations who are just going to sell it to us for 3 times as much as it cost us the tax payers to pay for its development anyway?
Only thing worse than socialism is corporate socialism.
