• fubo@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The problem with fusion reactors is exactly the containment of the plasma and avoiding that it dissipates its heat through light emission.

    That’s one problem. Neutron embrittlement is another.

    • Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I was just addressing the previous post.

      In all fairness I only checked what’s going on with fusion once in a while as my background is Physics (as in, I started a degree in it and then ended up going to EE because in my home country there really only are jobs for theoretical physicists, not the more hands-on kind) and hence only know it at a superficial level (of somebody with the background to understand Particle Physics but not a domain expert).

      Yeah, I do know about the embrittlement of the container walls due to neutron emission from the fusion reaction (no idea how bad or not that is compared to the rest), but last I checked plasma containment was still a bit of a problem as was the plasma cooling through photon emission (mind you, that might not be as much of a problem for the kind of temperature of the plasma the previous poster was mentioning, which - I assume - are less that what’s need to induce fusion).

      That said, all in all it just sounds strange to use fission to generate a plasma - I mean, bloody fire generates a plasma (the flame is a plasma) - so I don’t quite see the point of generating plasma with the whole overhead of a nuclear reaction rather than, say, high powered lasers, high-voltage currents (yeah, lighting is plasma) or just plain old chemical reactions.

      That whole thing sounded a bit too much like “fancy sciency words thrown around to deceive the ignorant” so common in scams.