Electricity Directly from Fusion

en.wikipedia.org

5 points·badcppdev··3 comments

With all the news about German and Korean fusion reactors I thought people might be interested in various ideas people have had over the years about how to generate electricity from a fusion reactor without requiring steam and turbines.

Thank you. I think this was helpful!

Can I ask if the final entry about photoelectric output from high energy X-Rays is basically using the Xrays to energise emission of photons which are then captured using PV cells? Or is it an analogous pathway to DC voltage from a PV cell tuned to high energy Xray energy?

I kind of hoped it was 'X ray in, optics out' because that would be enormously entertaining: We could run PV cells at night. The "no green energy when the sun doesn't shine" is fixed by .. shining your own suns.

What was missing as well, was the comparison to thermal efficiency. I am pretty sure direct extraction even with its losses is ahead, but couldn't see this in the article.

I wasn't really sure about some of the technical details myself including the X-rays. I think when you are talking about something with as much energy as an X-ray you would be looking at multiple effects with a cascade of electrons and photons being emitted and absorbed at different energy levels. But I think it would all be optimised for wrapping around the fusion core.

I also think comparison of efficiency is tremendously hard because if you managed to create a fusion device with direct energy conversion you might have something that is essentially solid-state with no moving parts (apart from fuel injection). That implies being smaller, having faster control of the output power levels, and less maintenance. Hard to compare but a nice dream I think.

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