What else would you use it for? At most, you could use it as a power source for something that requires a large amount of energy, like some manner of accelerated particle emitter or a rail cannon or something, but a fusion reactor is likely going to be too big to move around. What I'm more interested in from these studies is what kind of energy levels were required at this point to start the "reaction", what kind of costs are involved in the materials, facility, equipment, etc., and how durable the equipment would be under sustained fusion.
The details depend on the type of reactor, but generally they take a huge amount of start up power, in the 10's of megawatts, and ideally will be able to produce power in the 100's of megawatts to several gigawatts. If I recall, a single "good" reactor would be able to power all of California. Technologically there are many particulars, and we're employing our most advanced knowledge of physics to construct each kind of reactor, whether it's laser technology for inertial confinement reactors, or superconductors for magnetic confinement reactors.
To say nothing of the materials constraints, both economic and technical, that would be involved in building such a facility on a societal scale.
I wanna see some big ass starships powered by this stuff. Imagine if we did, we could colonize the moon or even mars by 2030.
Actually, due to the size of these reactors and the fact that the energy output is still electricity via heat exchangers and generators, anything that can't (at least not within the foreseeable future) be powered by batteries will still have to rely on fuel. And 2030 is an optimistic start date for when fusion reactors should be able to begin pumping out power in a commercially viable way.
thats awesome. what form would this fuel be in, gas, liquid, or solid cubes to be sought after by robo-aliens?
