Nuclear Fusion

[AbstractDreamer]

Just read an article on nuclear fusion http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-china-blog-43792655 while eating my oatmeal porridge I drifted off with wild fantasies of imaginations, which needed some more knowledgeable people to ratify or ridicule.

If leakage is a problem, why not just build it in space?  Nature worked this out a long time ago!

What about using the center of a gravitational well to mitigate the electromagnetic cost to confine the reaction. Is there a planet or moon with center that is plausibly cool and low enough pressure in which to build a reactor, but of sufficient mass to be significant in confining the plasma?  Can also use the body mass itself as the actual walls of the reactor, to both absorb and to transfer the output energy?  The body might be slowly destroyed and consumed eventually over time, but that's a problem for the next eon. A planet-eating fusion reactor is cool!

What about centrifugal forces as an supplement to electromagnetism in fusion confinement?  Is it more efficient or precise to control an object's rotational motion to control a fusion reaction, than do achieve the same result with electromagnetic fields?  So the plasma is "spun", not just "squashed".

Are lasers only required to produce high symmetry with the fusing particles, to make it the reaction more precise and easier to contain? It is possible to generate enough centrifugal force to fuse a deuterium nucleus and a proton?  Say a large mass of deuterium with protons in centrifuge around it, increasing the energy  in the protons until some start to fuse?

How do you impart angular momentum to an object in a vacuum, with nothing to "push back against"?  Stored chemical energy in rocket fuel can be released with exhaust, but what if the object is atomic sized?  Is the artificial gravity from centrifuge only a relative force, and not something "real" that might affect fusion?

Maybe the answer lies not in precision, but in scale.

A moon-sized fusion reactor, in the vacuum of space, near absolute zero temperature environment orbiting in the permanent shadow of a planet.  The reaction occurs at the very center.  The body's mass is used both as a natural shield and as the structure used to house the lasers,  electromagnets, and energy collection.

Brain dump over, I'm late for work.

[Strange]

24 minutes ago, AbstractDreamer said:

If leakage is a problem, why not just build it in space?  Nature worked this out a long time ago!

What about using the center of a gravitational well to mitigate the electromagnetic cost to confine the reaction.

You mean, build a star !?

Apart from the fact it would be impractical, we don't need to: we have one. The challenge is getting the energy from there to Earth effectively. The same problem would face any space-based generation system.

25 minutes ago, AbstractDreamer said:

What about centrifugal forces as an supplement to electromagnetism in fusion confinement?

 Centrifugal force throw things apart, so I'm not sure what you are thinking here...

[AbstractDreamer]

Well on that point, which is more practical:  a fusion reactor satellite in orbit around the earth, or solar panels in space?  Assuming the problem with energy transfer is the same for both systems.

Perhaps, the planet sized fusion reactor solution is better suited to interstellar travel.

Good point on centrifuge. Ok lets turn it around... 

On the point of fusion,... a Shell of deuterium, inside of which protons are centrifuged into fusing with the shell.  I'm guessing deuterium is liquid near absolute zero, but will be gaseous near the reaction plasma.  So a liquid body of deuterium with protons in the core, spun to create centrifugal induced fusion.

On the point of confinement, I'd have to speculate on quantum anti-centrifugal forces  https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0108069.pdf

Apparently, possible either with negative energies with a delta-function potential, or with positive energy with vanishing angular momentum, in a two dimensional eigenstate space. 

[Strange]

3 minutes ago, AbstractDreamer said:

Well on that point, which is more practical:  a fusion reactor satellite in orbit around the earth, or solar panels in space?  Assuming the problem with energy transfer is the same for both systems.

Solar panels. Because we know how to make them already!

But in both cases, there is no practical way of getting the energy to Earth.

[AbstractDreamer]

Well my point was about comparing the scale of solar panels required as the problem, compared with the technology of fusion required.

Pulling some random figures out of air....  building solar panels spanning 1 million km square, or a £4 trillion orbiting fusion reactor  (that hasn't been invented yet... unless the vacuum problem can be solved with building the thing in space!)

So far as getting the energy back to earth is concerned, how about geosynchronous orbiting laser firing energy back to earth?  It would be easier to attach a fusion reactor to this than some vast array of solar panels.

Edited April 20, 2018 by AbstractDreamer