Talk:Nuclear fusion

Mimicking the sun's pressure waves & central region of fusion

an old idea which was mechanically impossible...
Pressure waves by trembling shields which focus on a central ring of the fusion torus have been suggested. The shields should not touch somewhere, but should be held in place magnetically. It is extremely hard not to break the shileds while they tremble hard enough. A spherical (non-toroid) chamber with two poles (looping input and output for the gasses) has been proposed. A spherical chamber will have a more concentrated pressure center.

Some pressure waves are created without moving shields, simply with variation of the intensity of the magnets. a. It is very hard to impart the desired force on the pressure waves, b. Achieving strong enough pressure waves that make a difference, usually costumes way more energy than what we extract. (The pressure waves should be focused, not turbulent and arbitrary.)

note: correct harmonics DO MATTER!!! If you don't fine-tune the oscillations, you burn energy and money.

Wiki Education assignment: Engineering in the 21st Century - Section 002

— Assignment last updated by Sagte102 (talk) 22:22, 29 September 2024 (UTC)

Zero worth for lay person

Probably all lay persons looking up this article would like to know if nuclear fusion can be used as an industrial source of energy, how far we've come with it, and if radioactivity and nuclear waste are a problem, esp. in comparison with fission. Buy a paragraph dealing with this is nowhere to be found. None of those users would have the patience, and very few the knowledge, to sift through the article in search of hidden answers and filter them out from among all that theoretical science - and that's not the way to go about things on a platform like Wiki anyway. Arminden (talk) 10:24, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Hopefully a lay person is capable of reading the very first sentence, clearly stating this article is not about the nuclear power - and following a link instead. Evgeny (talk) 11:53, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Complete misunderstanding!

"The US National Ignition Facility, which uses laser-driven inertial confinement fusion, was designed with a goal of break-even fusion; the first large-scale laser target experiments were performed in June 2009 and ignition experiments began in early 2011. On 13 December 2022, the United States Department of Energy announced that on 5 December 2022, they had successfully accomplished break-even fusion, "delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of energy to the target, resulting in 3.15 MJ of fusion energy output."

The NIF result did not achieve break-even in any usual sense of that term. In fact, there are so many ways to define "break-even" that the term should not be used. The issue is, "Break-even with what?" In the NIF case, the energy release by fusion reactions exceeded that of the laser light delivered to the target. Other "break-even" milestones might be fusion energy produced equal to wall-plug energy input, or electricity produced in a power reactor that is enough to sustain the reactor.

I'm going to delete this paragraph. It will mangle the article, but this misinformation must not be propagated. Someone with Wikipedia expertise and sufficient knowledge of the field should write a suitable revision. (My Wikipdia knowledge is rudimentary.) Wcmead3 (talk) 23:56, 20 December 2024 (UTC)

Instead of deleting, I patched the offending paragraph. The revision corrects the worst of the misstatements. Please do not revert. If you can improve upon it, fine. Wcmead3 (talk) 00:22, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

The article "Fusion Energy Gain Factor" is useful in explaining "Q", and explains the various uses of the term "break-even" very well. It also illustrates the problem with using the term "break-even" without a qualifier. From the public's perspective, the distinction among break-even definitions is and will continue to be a mystery. That is the reason I recommend moving away from the term completely. Wcmead3 (talk) 18:23, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

Bigger picture: poor organization

WP articles entitled "Nuclear Fusion" and "Fusion Power" are partially overlapping and poorly organized. After some reading, I doubt that either one deserves a B-Class rating. Both would benefit from a major overhaul. I suggest starting by changing the titles to (1) "Nuclear Fusion Reactions" and (2) "Fusion Reactors" or "Fusion Power Production". Perhaps a disambiguation page would help the WP users. Wcmead3 (talk) 00:43, 21 December 2024 (UTC)

My apologies: there is a disambiguation page for "Fusion" and both the "Nuclear Fusion" article and the "Fusion Power" article have cross links. That helps. I think the problem remains that the separation of topics is not complete: the "Nuclear Fusion" article has content that belongs only in "Fusion Power". Wcmead3 (talk) 18:02, 21 December 2024 (UTC)