Real Clean Energy Man

But it will still drive a steam engine, whoops sorry, steam turbine. Isn't there a more direct way to produce electricity leaving out the mechanical moving parts?

Z.

A thermopile will produce electricity without any moving parts.  But you'd struggle to make one big enough to power a city.

Part of the problem is the temperature gradients are very great - there is nothing that can go anywhere near the plasma without being boiled in a blink. Easier to let the radiant heat spread out a bit and catch it over a larger area.

There have been very ‘brave’ proposals to harness charge separation in plasma directly, but this is in the same league of “tricky engineering”  as making contacts to trickle down the voltages that arise in the thunderstorm in an atomic bomb's  mushroom cloud, but all in a smaller space with higher windspeeds.

 Even with that assumed, the down conversion from milliamps of DC at hundreds of mega-volts to something more usable  when the voltage is varying wildly is not so easy. 

As far  as I know as a concept it has never left the drawing board. 

The reverse - stiumating fusion by electric fields is more or less successful on the bench top https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

Mike

yeah i spotted this new release 1500MW from 1 kg of Hydrogen , i mean the whole renewables business goes out of business, along with oil and coal and nuclear fusion

mmmm wonder why no more energy has ever been made than put into it ?? and lets not forget what happens in magnetic field containment failure. I dont think it work in shipping due to roll of ship , but yeah best of luck to them, me thinks it wont run for more than 5 mins before they find the cooling isnt enough..   

Zoomup: 
 

But it will still drive a steam engine, whoops sorry, steam turbine. Isn't there a more direct way to produce electricity leaving out the mechanical moving parts?

 

Z.

Yes

www.wired.co.uk/.../bladeless-wind-turbine-ewicon
www.ans.org/.../

Practical nuclear fusion is ten years away.  It was with Zeta in 1958 and will be in 2058

It took 16 years from the discovery of nuclear fission by Mietner and Fricsh to the first electricity generated by fission.  Or only seven years until the first practical use of fission.

You have to throw money at these things which means that the target must be something really, really  worthwhile, like destroying a Japanese city. Rather than a mere bagatelle like preventing climate change from destroying life on this planet