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Nuclear fusion reactor in South Korea runs at 100 million degrees C for a record-breaking 48 seconds
(www.livescience.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Apr 2024
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Yes but how do you keep feeding this kind of reaction? I imagine you cant just drop more fuel 'down a tube'. Do they shut down the reactor and then restart it with fresh material?
I assume they shoot the fuel in with some light particle acceleration. Maybe they just let it diffuse in, but it's a gas so it's not that hard to get it to enter.
The hope is they get the cost of maintaining the electromagnets (power and cooling) to be cheaper than the power we can extract from the reaction.
My question is more about what's the logistics of getting power out? We're making a lot of heat, so it's probably steam power at the heart of it, but a lot of this effort is to keep the heat in is it not?