> Fusion energy production doesn't (really) have that equivalent.
It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
It does, actually. It's the miniaturization that's the hard part.
Besides, what's the bathing suit name reference ? I don't get it.
We don't have a working fusion system to miniaturize. Stellar fusion happens at much lower temperatures than what we're trying to do on Earth.
And in a way that higher temp is a result of trying to do this at a smaller scale, if you want to be net-positive it gets easier as you get hotter as far as I understand it.
So what we are doing is in fact to re-create conditions roughly on par with what is happening in the core of the sun. And it turns out that doing that small, for extended periods, net positive and reliable (without the machine suffering damage from the process) is a very hard problem. Even so I'm very much impressed with these projects, the engineering and the physics are way over my head but I do hope that one day they'll get it working. But I'm not going to hold my breath.
Incidentally, the implications for energy storage if TFA turns out to be on the money are possibly more interesting than fusion in the short term.
My understanding is we are not. (Not an expert!) The Sun's core runs around 15 MK [1]. A tokamak, 150 MK [2]. Orders of magnitude rarely come for free in physics.
We need those higher energies because we can't, like the Sun, swaddle with the mass of a hundred thousand worlds a low-temperature, low-frequency weak-force mediated proton-proton reaction [3]. The Sun relies on quantum tunneling to overcome the Coulomb barrier. We humans have to increase the reaction energy so it doesn't all bleed off before anything happens [4], which means using the strong force [5].
[1] https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/
[2] https://euro-fusion.org/faq/what-is-the-temperature-generate...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton–proton_chain
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bremsstrahlung
[5] https://medium.com/@deepfuturetech/practical-proton-proton-f...
So the smaller you make your reactor the hotter you'll have to make it to make it net positive. This leads to the counter intuitive result that making a much larger reactor is actually quite possibly easier than making a really small one. The rate of heat loss is much smaller for a larger reactor and so it becomes easier to sustain the reaction and to extract useful energy from it.
It is very well possible that none of the reactors currently on the drawing board and under construction are going to be working well enough to give us a sustained reaction resulting in net yield. But we're getting closer and closer to that and there is some (small) chance that I will still see this in my lifetime.
The catch is that as long as you can't get a small reactor to work getting funding for a much larger one (which you actually may be able to get to work) is going to be extremely difficult. We like to see proof before we scale up. In this case it may well be that such small scale proof can't be done or can't be done in a way that it it will convince backers that a larger scale device will work.
It's also nice when your reaction quits flinging antimatter at your containment vessel :)
I very much doubt currently known materials and structures could be used to construct a reactor 10 times the size of ITER.