Nuclear Power

[silicon]

Dr.Grass said:

mai said:
^Yeah, fusion power is the future... BELIEVE! Since... 1960s =)

I remember watching old movie about physicists that captured the moment of romantic attitude towards scientific and technical progress of humanity, it was just around the corner it seemed to the people of that era. 50 years later we still haven't seen ground-breaking results in that field, and that ITER project afaik is expected to be finished somewhere around 2040. Metaphorically speaking the pendulum of technical progress is about to swing the opposite way.

Ummm...Fusion reactors are already possible. They are just a little too expensive to build.

You basically have the fuel floating in a magnetic trap in the form of a high temperature, high pressure plasma. They are able to make fusion energy in this way. There are still a few developments needed for this to be fully practical, all that is needed is big funding. Unfortunately fusion isn't being supported as much at the moment.

Expensive financially or also energetically?
Noone does energy balances around these things, which doesn't make sense at all from a sustainability or engineering point of view.

Nuclear power should be used as a transition power souce not coal. I mean Nuclear Power plants can be combine to produce hydrogen or methane. It's unfortuate that most current plants were made ages ago. All the new high tech platns will never be made.