mvanwink5 wrote:Actually, as I understand it, the problem GF has at the moment is achieving adiabatic plasma compression. Plasma stability and progress towards compression has been made, but the idea is that temperature needs to go up with plasma compression and that is not tracking what is needed. That is the last I heard. Plasma is tricky and unpredictable stuff.
TriAlpha is the best bet at this point in the horse race as they have the team, the results, and the money. All three are needed.
mvanwink5 wrote:Claims are one thing; I have no belief in commercial tokamaks (nice science projects). Does anyone see a path to commercial for any tokamak (other than as a career for government funded physicists)?
TriAlpha has enough results with C2U to make me optimistic,
“We have totally mastered this topology,” Binderbauer says. “I can now hold this at will, 100% stable. This thing does not veer at all.”
TriAlpha, stability has been achieved at full scale, massive accomplishment. They are going for temperature now, cash is not an obstacle. More importantly, they are optimistic.
Plasma stability remains an issue as they implement chamber based compression. As I understand, they are still working sims, not real plasma, regarding an integrated test device. Thus they have not yet integrated plasma generation and injection with the acoustic compression (sounds just like EMC2).
Did I miss something?
Delage explained that in the full-scale prototype, twin plasma injectors resembling five-metre-long cones, each attached to opposite ends of a three-metre-diameter sphere, would pulse a few milligrams of hydrogen gas, heat it until it becomes a plasma, and inject it into a vortex of swirling liquid metal.
Globe and Mail GF Reuters Article Mar/May 2015
While they have worked on compact toroid generation (not there yet), they have not injected yet into the actual chamber, nor attempted the compression cycle. This has all been sim based as I understand to date.
See Section 3 & 3.1, pages 8-14.
GF Project Status Paper as of 2013
and...
To start the reactor, each cannon would fire a plasmoid into a central chamber, where the two would merge into a larger, free-floating plasmoid that would survive for as long as it could be fed with additional fuel.
and, which appears to state they have done it live in the full machine, until you read the refs from notes 2 and 3...which show they have not, it was speaking to FRC compact toroid merging component, not merged toroid "acoustic compression" as would happen it the full machine.
With its current test machine, a 10-metre device called the C-2, Tri Alpha has shown that the colliding plasmoids merge as expected(2), and that the fireball can sustain itself for up to 4 milliseconds — impressively long by plasma-physics standards — as long as fuel beams are being injected(3)
GF 2014 Nature Article
The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)