I’m a professor of Plasma Physics at IPEN and a member of the board of the Neogeia Electroatomical Cooperative. We have a few chronos to get there and no onboard service, so we can spend time talking about the Intirana. It’s a compound of ‘Inti’, ‘sun’ in Quechua and ‘rana’, ‘similar’, in Tupi, because it was built in cooperation with the Tauantinsuio nuclear research institute. It’s similar to the sun for generating energy through nuclear fusion, even though the process is a bit different. Instead of fusing hydrogen nuclei, or protons, in helium nuclei, here the helium comes from the fusion of nuclei of deuterium and tritium, these obtained from the bombardment of lithium atoms…”
This method is the most viable, the only one capable of generating useful energy with the technology available today. There are experimental units that don’t use lithium, but consume more energy than they produce, or the reaction isn’t sustained by more than a niche. And lithium is not so rare. In this reactor of three thousand and four hundred
megaborbas, we used one thousand four hundred tons of lithium. If it were the case of replacing the world generation of seventeen teraborbas for similar reactors, we would need five thousand reactors and seven million tons, twice as much as we use today in batteries and fuel cells. The known terrestrial reserves are more than 100 million tons, but more than eighty percent are in the kachikachi, the Tauantinsuio salt marshes, but there are also 240 million tons in the oceans. And this is not a likely scenario. In ten or twenty years, before we generate 10 percent of the world’s energy with fusion, more advanced reactors won’t need lithium anymore.”
From ‘Once Upon a Time in a World’ by Antonio Luiz M. C. Costa
‘Solarpunk: Ecological and fantastical stories in a sustainable world. An Anthology’
Published by World Weaver Press in 2018.
Arwork was created in https://artbreeder.com/
Artbreeder app was created by Joel Simon https://www.joelsimon.net/
