- When I was just a boy, I used to be a plasma physicist working on fusion research. I worked on a tokamak at UT and later on a multiple mirror plasma device at Berkeley. There are many issues to be resolved in this field. Tokamaks resolve one by getting rid of magneto-hydro-dynamic instabilities induced by the cylindrical symmetries of solenoidal devices. The actual extraction of usable energy is another issue that may not have been resolved. (I left this field a long time ago.) But I know that the break even point of a tokamak fusion reactor generating enough (unextracted) energy to sustain the reaction was reached way back in the 1980's at Princeton's TFTR. On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 6:19 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Ah, but plants have already gathered several hundred million years of this fusion energy & stored it for us in a relatively compact form, which is currently at least an order of magnitude more compact (by volume & by weight) than the best batteries. :-)
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The U.S. govt has decided in its infinite wisdom to start charging significant duties on Chinese solar cells, so that they will be noticeably more expensive here in the U.S. :-(
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The good news is that the feature size on silicon chips is now only 3x the sizes needed to build "quantum dots" for the appropriate wavelengths of light for high efficiency solar cells. This means that we will soon no longer have to depend upon weird materials that happen to have the appropriate energy levels; we will be able to manufacture energy levels by changing certain size parameters of these quantum dots.
At 04:38 PM 5/25/2012, Robert Baillie wrote:
of course, we can already get energy from fusion!
there is a fusion reactor 93 millon miles from the earth. it is already up and running, is maintenance-free, and has a 5 billion year fuel supply.
all we have to do is collect its energy using solar collectors, wind turbines, etc.
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