Comment by pfdietz
7 years ago
> So why skip over D+T if we need to go through it anyway?
Because much of what you'd end up doing to "do" D+T will be worthless for H+11B. Tokamaks, for example, are useless for H+11B.
7 years ago
> So why skip over D+T if we need to go through it anyway?
Because much of what you'd end up doing to "do" D+T will be worthless for H+11B. Tokamaks, for example, are useless for H+11B.
Tokamaks may not even be viable for steady state D+T. The bootstrap current effect still needs to be explored further. Electrostatic confinement and inertial confinement are the only known viable options for p+B11. Electrostatic has serious issues related to conduction losses, but perhaps if they were large enough scaling laws may make them viable. It’s not well explored. Inertial confinement is getting a lot of funding and shows serious promise. However, inertial confinement is not a steady state design and its pulsed nature makes it difficult to make a power plant out of. No such engineering cliffs exist for tokamaks and stellarators. The performance just needs to keep marching towards success. Then the discussion of economics can begin in earnest.
Electrostatic confinement is not known to be viable for H-11B. Indeed, Rider showed it probably isn't viable.
For inertial confinement, I understand compression would have to reach densities of as much as 10^6 g/cc for H-11B to be viable.