204
World’s 1st nuclear fusion-powered electric propulsion drive unveiled - Interesting Engineering
(interestingengineering.com)
Minecraft command block?
this post was submitted on 24 Mar 2024
204 points (85.7% liked)
Technology
59378 readers
3459 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Not exactly inspiring any confidence trying to pass that AI-generated monstrosity as a photo of the device.
I beg to differ. I present - the Ford Nucleon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Nucleon
This was a concept. The linked article claims demonstration. Big difference.
It was a joke. WTF
The first step in designing a fusion reactor is picking where to hide the power source
But do they stack in my inventory?
Only the small grid version, which we haven’t unlocked yet
What is this cube and how does it relate to the drive?
That’s what it looks like when it’s about 50% complete. At that point you need like 2000 steel plates and it’s a pretty slow grind.
When you plug two of them into each other it goes twice as fast.
And 3 to make a sun into a torus.
The headline’s a bit misleading. The drive is a plasma thruster, and the company found that by adding Boronated water to the exhaust the plasma would fuse with some of the boron creating a kind of afterburner effect, not a sustained fusion reaction. It’s kind of interesting as a way to boost the performance of the plasma thruster, but not “OMG it’s a Fusion Drive!!!” interesting.
Imagine all this work/research on fusion and some dudes like oh yeah my space engine does that
Fusion is easy. Getting net energy out is hard.
Wasn't there an rocket concept like that from the 70's, using the freed electrons for containement or something? I saw it once on Wikipedia and then never found it again.
There has been some fusor research going on for decades. The issue that killed that direction of fusion research was ultimately that the electrons do not behave as the initial simple models suggested and in the real world the power loss from the fast electrons is just too big for any reasonably sized device to allow for self sustaining fusion.
Basically this. Look at all the big fusion reactor projects - they've been going for decades and JUST NOW hit a very miniscule amount of net output within the past several months.
Yeah, that's the fault of the article author. The actual press release uses "fusion-enhanced" which is a lot more honest.
To be fair, they're quoting a 50% increase in thrust so it's not completely clickbait to say "fusion powered" but it definitely does give the wrong picture.
This is actual snake oil
What the fuck kind of snakes do you have living around you?
Nuclear snakes
Pritchard?
O.o