Spring RTS Engine

Why would a High School student do this for fun?

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/ra ... -boy-scout

Saw that a while back.
Me and my mate have been seriously pondering building one.

Edit: Why? because fusion is hella-cool thats why!

He won't need to pay electricity bills

Quite the opposite- he isn't generating electricity from it and it takes a HUGE amount of energy to cause it.

Oh.. Then what the hell is the point..

How the hell does it make energy.. Sounds like a retarded idea.. I'm going read it again...

Olson├óÔé¼Ôäós apparatus won├óÔé¼Ôäót work for generating commercial power because it takes more energy to run than it produces. But he has succeeded in creating a ├óÔé¼┼ôstar in a jar,├óÔé¼┬Ø a tiny flash of hot plasma. ├óÔé¼┼ôThe temperature of the plasma is around 200 million degrees,├óÔé¼┬Ø Olson says modestly, ├óÔé¼┼ôseveral times hotter than the core of the sun.├óÔé¼┬Ø

Basically he made a tiny drop of hot sauce.

I can do that too.

So if a falsh of plasma is so hot...would a plasma gun like...just be a pain the ass to be shot with?

Snipawolf wrote:Oh.. Then what the hell is the point..

How the hell does it make energy.. Sounds like a retarded idea.. I'm going read it again...

Snipa, nothing makes energy. In the end, you'll have net loss.

neddiedrow wrote:

Snipawolf wrote:Oh.. Then what the hell is the point..

How the hell does it make energy.. Sounds like a retarded idea.. I'm going read it again...

Snipa, nothing makes energy. In the end, you'll have net loss.

E=mc^2 Fo real!!

Only fusion reactors that are making some usefull energy (= converting matter to energy without the need of external energy sources) are H-bombs and of course one big unshielded fusion reactor on the skies - the Sun.

Licho wrote:Only fusion reactors that are making some usefull energy (= converting matter to energy without the need of external energy sources) are H-bombs and of course one big unshielded fusion reactor on the skies - the Sun.

Even in that context, thermodynamics will eventually get you!

What's supposed to happen when they get this right is that the fusion generator will produce all the energy it needs to do fusion. It will be a self-sufficient generator.
In the process it will boil water, force a lot of steam through a very small point to make it go very fast, then it will turn turbines which are connected to a magnet, and the magnet will spin inside a coil of wires creating electricity!
So eventually those people will get free electricity. I just hope they don't patent the method so that I can get free electricity too!!

the process isnt patented, and soonish there are hopes for hte first largescale fusion reactor to achieve more energy output than that used to produce it.

http://www.iter.org/

theres a fusion reactor in the uk somewhere that been arround for ages, but as previously mentioned it doesent work for very long and needs huge energy to start and keep going

the problem is how to extract energy from the system without breaking it (it gives of protons... collect these up and turn them into energy somehow)

they hope to have one in use by 2050 iirc :)

lol

In large scale reactors the problem right now is containment and the large energy requirements of holding the plasma together without it hitting the sides of the reactor and the whole process dissipating.

The development just takes really long. Realise that they have a plasma in the middle of millions of degrees, and next to it superconducting elektromagnets that need to stay at 70 K to operate.

and lets not forget that it's really diffcult to inject new fuel in without the plasma shooting out through the fuel injection port.

the reactor in UK is called JET...

THe Trouble starts when Human would have Fusions - not just thinking about what all the Bad Guys out there would do with it. Just imagine:

"Hey, yesterday my Fusionipod went into the Drain - and now we have electric charged Toiletts for the whole Block Humans are that way! KonFusion for the workx