Fusion Fuel?

I know this is supposed to be about flying or computers, but I wrote a senior thesis on nuclear fusion back in 1987, and I was sure it was 'just around the corner'.

Obviously not as much progress has been made as I hoped. I think if it had, we would at least being seeing cheap electricity and less expensive gasoline since oil wouldn't be burned to power generators. There are also some reactor designs that promise to scale easily to house powerplant size or even for use as a car engine.

Some bright guys at the University of Gothenburg have figured out how to make an ultradense deuterium*. When they say ultradense, they mean more dense than the core of the Sun -- they figure a 10cm cube would weigh 130 tons. The article is pretty light on hard details, but if this stuff turns out to be relatively easy to make and safe/easy to handle**, it could make an excellent fuel for fusion reactions as well as being easy to store and move since a small volume is simpler even with an immense weight than some huge pressurized tank of a flammable gas.

If this works out, there are a lot of plans to make cars that run on electricity if only electricity were cheaper, some even use electricity to disassociate hydrogen from water in a garage -refueling unit and use fuel-cells to drive the wheels. So far, range is the problem and lack of infrastructure for refueling, but if electricity were much cheaper***, everything would change. The cost of fuel for the plant would be negligible compared to fission (28% of annual budget) or coal (53%) without even counting the cost of disposal of radioactive waste or the mountains of ash from a coal plant.

What if they can scale a fusion plant to car-size? A cube of this stuff .5cm per side weighs 32.5 lbs and might provide as much power as 40,000,000 gallons*** of gasoline. Your car would sell fully fueled and you'd only buy more if there was an accident or something caused a leak. It would produce trace amount of tritium (H3), which is hazardous, but this should be able to captured, then cleaned out annually and sold to industry. Even if some escapes, the half-life of tritium is only 12 years, making it not nearly the problem that radioactive waste from fission plants are with half-lives in the thousands of years.

Here's hoping that more progress will be made in this twenty years than the last.

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* - deuterium (H2) is a naturally occurring, stable (non-radioactive) isotope of hydrogen (H2). Fusing two deuterium atoms will give you Helium (He4) plus gobs of energy. Deuterium is rare, occurring about 1 in 6,500, but the Earth has a lot of water.

** - The mad scientist in me is imagining a small cube catching fire -- a 1cc cube weighs 260 lbs -- too heavy for its size to be moved by hand; however, one placed in the center of a table would probably be overlooked. If it caught fire though, it would produce superheated steam as if you'd boiled over 32 gallons of water and the volumetric expansion could be an explosion similar to a stick of dynamite depending on propagation.

*** - My source of fusion figures is here and includes 10M:1 ration for energy output of fusion vs fossil fuels, and fuel cost of fusion being 1% of the cost of power generation.