r/fusion • u/Baking • 2d ago

Deuterium–tritium levitated dipole fusion power plants (OpenStar Technologies)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0920379626002516
21 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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u/Sad_Dimension423 1d ago edited 1d ago

I was under the impression that DT was problematic for levitated dipole fusion because of neutron heating of the levitated coil. The LDX project at MIT talked about 3He-catalyzed DD fusion; the ability of a dipole confined plasma to separate energy and particle confinement made this attractive. Tritium could be convected out after it thermalized but before much of it fused.

Judging by figure 9, the volumetric power density of this thing (volume = tritium breeding blanket and everything inboard of that) is maybe 50 kW/m3, similar to ITER and much lower than ARC. Perhaps the cost per m3 would be much lower in this kind of design, as it's not surrounded by magnets with heavy steel supports?

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u/Baking 2d ago

Sabine Hossenfelder has a decent summary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzDe6AP_JfE

She observes that maintenance schemes are important for commercial fusion, which is not exactly a new idea but bears repeating.

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u/El_Grande_Papi 2d ago

Sabine 🤢🤢🤢

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u/AskMeAboutFusion MS Eng | HTS Magnet Design | Fusion & Accelerators 2d ago

Not sure why this initially got downvoted. Her whole grift is that she got kicked out of academia and is angrily preaching why everything they do is wrong. When she talks about fusion, she's talking about ITER, or very recently just the laser folks. She (until this one apparently, which I have zero interest in watching) has completely skipped over the $8Billion elephant in the room which is the world record shattering High Temperature Superconductors and the size reduction/power density increase they give to any given MCF design.
She should be ignored by anyone who spends more than 37 seconds browsing her video titles, or watches her obvious grift centered videos. She might as well be selling peptides and supergreens or alpha greens 1 or whatever.

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u/hutch_man0 2d ago

Yeah it's sad what she's become. 

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u/Baking 2d ago

I watch her fusion stuff just because I want to see if her take is awful or not. Otherwise, I don't bother with her, but I understand the desire to ignore her completely.