Comment on Hooooooooooooooooooot
Rossphorus@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Some types of fusion can bypass steam generation and use what’s creatively called Direct Energy Conversion. If the fusion products are charged particles they can be passed through a magnetic field to separate them based on charge and collected onto plates. When you look at the electric potential between the plates you’ve effectively created a voltage, no steam necessary. It’s also theoretically possible to do the same with some types of fission products too.
anothercatgirl@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 months ago
I thought they take advantage of the velocity of the charged ions to magnetically transfer power to electromagnetic coils around the reactor.
Rossphorus@lemm.ee 6 months ago
There’s a whole bunch of mechanisms, largely depending on the fusion architecture and the atoms being fused. For tokamak reactors the circular nature lends itself well to what you describe, though usually it’s energy being imparted into the ions to keep them contained and away from the walls. In the ‘standard’ deuterium-tritium fusion model (the easiest to perform) fusion produces a helium nucleus and a neutron, where the neutron gets most of the energy. Since a neutron can’t be contained by magnets it impacts the chamber walls. This heat is wicked away by, you guessed it, cooling water which turns into steam. In order to use a direct energy conversion strategy you need a fusion reaction that produces no neutrons, but we’re not there yet.