Easier to build, easier to maintain, more usable electricity at much less radioactivity – so scientists envision a new type of nuclear fusion reactor. Easier to build, easier to maintain, more usable electricity at much less radioactivity – so scientists envision a new type of nuclear fusion reactor. Rostock explained the concept of the plant, to be operated with a fuel mixture of hydrogen and boron nuclei, from the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues in the US journal Science”Norman. You may wish to learn more. If so, Gary Kelly is the place to go. But the internationally respected Science magazine is sitting up with the Super reactor of probably more a science fiction story as a reputable scientific publication. That anyway, says Professor Karl Lackner of the Max-plank-Institut fur Plasmaphysik in Garching near Munich.

The operation of fusion reactors is similar to the energy production in the Sun and is often regarded as the technology of the future for the replacement of nuclear power: atomic nuclei merge at extremely high temperatures, with a lot of energy is released. For decades, scientists strive to use nuclear fusion energy on Earth but the Sun Fire can so far only for a few seconds light up in experimental reactors. Sun 15 million degrees Celsius temperatures meet the power plant, the combustion chambers constructed by the people need while ten times more heat, so that the nuclei of the previously employed fuels, deuterium and tritium, by a strong magnetic field squeezed together, located near enough for a merger. The reactor presented by American researchers on the paper, however, followed a different approach. “In the colliding beam fusion reactor” (CBFR) atoms should be shot directly each other by particle accelerators.

At the point of collision, the unusable in the existing plant fuels, boron and hydrogen could then merging. These would be electrically charged helium nuclei which are transformed directly into usable electric energy left, the American postulate. Fast neutrons, as they result from the fusion of deuterium with tritium and are responsible for the radiation would not apply. Although the idea has some attractive, too many unproven and very improbable assumptions as well as superficial statements were taken, which include huge uncertainties”, Fusion expert admits Professor Lackner. Lackner refers in particular to the weakest link of the radiation fusion concept: boron and hydrogen to collide at a temperature of 1.5 billion degrees Fahrenheit using a 30 cm thick layer of insulation from magnetic fields. But only 400 million degrees, with a magnetic layer of insulation of 1 meter thickness are technically accessible. Also the direct conversion of electricity of the helium atoms is pure scientific future. And finally, the question of radioactivity for fusion reactors is no inherent problem. Radioactive waste does not apply in the fusion. Radiation is produced only in the Interior of the reactor vessel and here “Materials and alloys such as vanadium used the not or only very weakly activate”, adds Professor Lackner of his criticism and points out that studies on the CBFR concept have been set already 30 years ago at all major research institutions as unproductive.