You need to achieve million kelvin temperatures, unless you are using muon catalyzed fusion, as propose by Andrej Saharov. You can't do it in your living room. That forgetting your energy bill.
Tullio

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Did it satisfy Lawson's criterion? If yes, he deserves a Nobel prize. If not, it is just a toy.
Tullio

My thought, this is Faux news.

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The 'Fusor' design the boy reportedly used was devised by Philo T. Farnsworth, the pioneer television inventor. It originally used electron guns similar to those in cathode ray tubes, formerly employed in television. It's been commercially developed as a neutron source, but does not produce net energy.

There are certain inefficiencies in the design that tend to impede the fusion process. If these were overcome, somehow, the next problem would how to extract heat from the inner electrode sphere rapidly enough to prevent its melting. There have been attempts to refine the design, so as to make it more efficient, and to rethink how electrostatic inertial confinement could be achieved, but so far, net energy production has not been accomplished.

The ITER prototype fusion reactor which is being built in France using superconducting magnets produced by an Italian firm has cost so far 15 billion dollars and is going to cost ten more before it produces its first plasma in 2025, with break even hoped for in 2030. It will not produce any electricity and should be followed by a Demo reactor producing it. This is not a tabletop game.
Tullio

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Yes. You need very high temperatures to start a fusion ignition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_ignition

In nature, stars reach ignition at temperatures similar to that of the Sun, around 27 million degrees. Stars are so large that the fusion products will almost always interact with the plasma before it can be lost to the environment at the outside of the star. In comparison, man-made reactors are far less dense and much smaller, allowing the fusion products to easily escape the fuel. To offset this, much higher rates of fusion are required, and thus much higher temperatures; most man-made fusion reactors are designed to work at temperatures around 100 million degrees, or higher. To date, no man-made reactor has reached breakeven, let alone ignition. Ignition has however been achieved in the cores of detonating thermonuclear weapons.

An obstacle very hard to overcome technologically.
But maybe in the future...

ITER is a Tokamak, based on a Russian idea by Igor Kurcatov. There is another approach, that of Inertial confinement which consists in bombarding a pellet containing deuterium and tritium with hundreds of laser beams. But also this approach has not produced ignition. It is being followed at Livermore National Laboratory in USA.
Tullio

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The ITER prototype fusion reactor which is being built in France using superconducting magnets produced by an Italian firm has cost so far 15 billion dollars and is going to cost ten more before it produces its first plasma in 2025, with break even hoped for in 2030. It will not produce any electricity and should be followed by a Demo reactor producing it. This is not a tabletop game.
Tullio

Well, of course the Tokamak approach to fusion certainly isn't a tabletop game. One wishes them good luck in their endeavors, but the history of the development of technology suggests that it doesn't always go as expected.

I recall reading that the well-funded and famous Professor Langley thought that he would invent sustained powered flight, but his planes just plopped into the Potomac River. It was for two obscure, self-funded bicycle mechanics to actually solve that problem; the Wright brothers.

First step create plasma.

You can do that in a microwave oven with a grape.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwTjsRt0Fzo&wpisrc=nl_science&wpmm=1

More info, https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/02/13/1818350116?wpisrc=nl_science&wpmm=1

Yes but which is the temperature? One million kelvin?
Tullio

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The National Science Foundation of the USA has recently approved another ten million dollars of financing ITER. This is really big game, bigger than anything so far attemped in science. This is not a job for bicycle mechanics. The work is going on also in Culham, UK, where is the Joint European Torus which may survive even Brexit, and in Garching, Germany, with an alternative approach, the Stellarator. Lockheed Martin has promised a fusion reactor in five years, which sounds very optimistic and there are other projects. but iTER is the flagship.
Tullio

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https://www.foxnews.com/science/teen-builds-working-nuclear-fusion-reactor-in-memphis-home

I have seen there is also one other teen that do the same experiments in his parents' garage in the US.

I found the other teen like Jackson Oswalt, Taylor Wilson ~ 14 year old who builds working nuclear fusion reactor in garage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvXFrbvnpZE
Well it was six years ago and he haven't got any breakthroughs what I know.
I really like what he 's doing but that he should have ignited nuclear fusion? Nah:)

Yes one of my acquaintances here in Tennessee worked on the lasers there at Livermore. They put out 20 Billion Joules. I do remember a somewhat nebulous claim of cold fusion associated with Livermore but I cannot recall the facts.

Yes one of my acquaintances here in Tennessee worked on the lasers there at Livermore. They put out 20 Billion Joules. I do remember a somewhat nebulous claim of cold fusion associated with Livermore but I cannot recall the facts.

They actually firing "only" 2.15 megajoules (MJ) of energy with its lasers to its target chamber.
But that's only one shot at the pelllet that last for only some microseconds perhaps.
https://www.llnl.gov/news/nif-sets-new-laser-energy-record

Cold fusion is a very different technology to Tokamaks but that many scientists have tried to achive for now about a century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
Already in 1927 a Swedish scientist, John Tandberg tried that.
His and many other scientists results have not been able to replicate...

Just watched a short documentary on curiosity stream regarding fusion. It was reported that ITER "should" be producing better than break even energy by 2030 and follow on machines electricity by 2050 and commercial power before 2100. Still way in the future.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Just watched a short documentary on curiosity stream regarding fusion. It was reported that ITER "should" be producing better than break even energy by 2030 and follow on machines electricity by 2050 and commercial power before 2100. Still way in the future.

For all I know ITER is only an experimental nuclear fusion reactor that will never give any commercial power.
But there are plans to build other reactors.
DEMO (DEMOnstration Power Station) is a proposed nuclear fusion power station that is intended to build upon the ITER experimental nuclear fusion reactor. The objectives of DEMO are usually understood to lie somewhere between those of ITER and a "first of a kind" commercial station, sometimes referred to as PROTO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3245
So any commercial power from fusion is still VERY way in the future...

Inertial confinement fusion is the only right way to perform nuclear fusion. Inertial comfinement fusion is being performed at Lawrence Livermore and Wendelstein7X, the latter, being my favorite and my biggest hope for reaching the necessary breakeven energy point.

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rOZZ
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Just watched a short documentary on curiosity stream regarding fusion. It was reported that ITER "should" be producing better than break even energy by 2030 and follow on machines electricity by 2050 and commercial power before 2100. Still way in the future.

For all I know ITER is only an experimental nuclear fusion reactor that will never give any commercial power.
But there are plans to build other reactors.
DEMO (DEMOnstration Power Station) is a proposed nuclear fusion power station that is intended to build upon the ITER experimental nuclear fusion reactor. The objectives of DEMO are usually understood to lie somewhere between those of ITER and a "first of a kind" commercial station, sometimes referred to as PROTO.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMOnstration_Power_Station
https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/3245
So any commercial power from fusion is still VERY way in the future...

I thought that was what I inferred when I said that follow on units would actually generate electricity for the grid.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

Inertial confinement fusion is the only right way to perform nuclear fusion. Inertial comfinement fusion is being performed at Lawrence Livermore and Wendelstein7X, the latter, being my favorite and my biggest hope for reaching the necessary breakeven energy point.

Wendelstein7X does not use inertial confinement, it has 50 superconducting magnets.
Tullio

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Inertial confinement fusion is the only right way to perform nuclear fusion. Inertial comfinement fusion is being performed at Lawrence Livermore and Wendelstein7X, the latter, being my favorite and my biggest hope for reaching the necessary breakeven energy point.

The Wendelstein7-X is a Stellarator and resembles a Tokomak like ITER but it's not using inertial confinement fusion.
https://www.ipp.mpg.de/4550215/11_18

The experiments conducted from July until November 2018 at the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald have achieved higher values for the density and the energy content of the plasma and long discharge times of up to 100 seconds – record results for devices of the stellarator type.

There are pros and cons of the methods using stellarators and tokomaks:
The stellarator can run continuously for a long time, the tokamak only in pulses.
In the stellarator, the stability of the plasma is controlled directly by the magnetic coils, the plasma current must also be checked.
One problem with the stellarator is that it is very difficult to construct and place sufficiently accurate and stable magnetic coils.
The reactor vessel in a stellarator is (as in a tokamak) formed like a torus. The hot plasma is held in place by a helical magnetic field (see illustration) and the reactor vessel in the stellarator (but not in the tokamak) is twisted so that it also becomes spiral-shaped.

I think the secret to success is how to use minimal energy input to start fusion reaction.
Think about this, superconductive magnetic coils connect to capacitor bank.
As the capacitor bank discharge through superconductive magnetic coils, this energy input is not loss as waste heat after discharge.
Instead the magnetic coils will recharge the capacitor bank, and so it can be used for the next magnetic plasma compression.

On the other method (pinch), the capacitor discharge through plasma, energy input is totally lost as waste heat after discharge.

On the mirror confinement method, plasma ejection from north pole and south pole is not bad thing.
those positive ions ejection from both end can be used to generate electricity directly without the need "to boil water to run the steam engine".