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You can never take these things seriously when the never present their results at meetings like

APS DPP
Sherwood
MHD workshop
IAEA

So there is a clear path to actually producing energy with nuclear fusion? It has been theoretically possible for many decades, but the devil is usually in the details. I'm glad to hear that I will have my flying car soon!

Stop being supercilious. It's like you've never worked on a major project before.

This isn't just pie-in-the-sky ballparking. This is a major engineering project with goals and timelines. It's inevitable that something will slip due to an unforeseen complication, and IFMIF may not come up with a usable plasma facing material in time for DEMO, but there is a roadmap and concrete steps being taken in that direction. Fusion research deserves a little more respect than "flying car" slurs.

Yes, the road has been long (30+ years long), but the facility has been under construction for 5 years now, first plasma is planned for 2020, and first fusion reactions in 2027. If you want a better idea of what they've been doing/will be doing in the 2008-2020 timeframe, see this slide. See also pp. 10 & 36 of this presentation.

During a 5-second 'shot', when the stored energy was released, the motor, generator and flywheel would go from 480 to ~100 rpm, and dump 960 mega joules of energy into the coils of the experiment. You could feel the vibration in your feet anywhere you stood at the site, all the CRT's images would collapse due to the intense magnetic field generated. Then it was another twenty minutes before they could do it again.

You can certainly make fusion reactions with a collider -- but the problem is that the goal of a fusion reactor is net energy gain. The tremendous energy losses associated with running particle accelerators rules out their use as a fusion device.

So, the alternative currently employed is our only other option: heating the D-T fuel to thermonuclear temperatures (~10 keV / 100,000,000 C) and let the intrinsic thermal motion of the particles overcome their mutual Coulomb repulsion.

More info: General Atomics Fusion Education

These devices are not fusion reactors, in the power-generation sense. They are research machines used to understand the fundamental physics of plasma confinement and stability. They do not use D-T fuel, as tritium is radioactive and therefore must be strictly controlled. (Besides, the device isn't built for the neutron load of active fusion.) The fuel used is deuterium; the fusion cross-sections are sufficiently low for D-D fusion that at the temperatures achievable in the device D-D fusion events are negligible.

The idea is to discern the physics behind the ELMs and then supress them if it turns out to be beneficial. (This is an open question.) The real prototype fusion reactor will be ITER (at least before the prototype commercial electric plant DEMO comes online following ITER), soon to be under construction in France.

Nice set of links. Some additional ones, more focussed on the US program:
The largest magnetic fusion experiment in the US is the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego:
http://fusion.gat.com/
There's some nice educational material on fusion available on that site at:
http://fusioned.gat.com/
Other major US experiments are the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT (http://www.psfc.mit.edu/cmod/), and the NSTX device at Princeton (http://nstx.pppl.gov/). Rob Goldston, who is interviewed in the article is the director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, where NSTX is located.

The field of study of physicists working on (magnetic) fusion energy research is not nuclear physics, it is plasma physics. The relevant nuclear physics issues (mostly just reaction cross sections) have been largely understood for some time. The physics of plasmas (ionized gases) is the area in which the advances described in the article occurred, in particular advances in understand how energy is transported by turbulence, and how high plasma pressures can be confined by magnetic fields.

For any young folks interested in pursuing fusion research/plasma physics, some major US graduate programs are at:
Princeton, MIT, U. of Wisconsin, U. of Texas, UCLA, UCSD and Columbia.

Also, all the comments on the CS Monitor as a source here strike me as odd. The Monitor is one of the most respected publications in the US, and its reporting, particularly on foreign policy issues, but also on science, is of a quality rarely matched in the US mainstream press. This article is a nice example - it contains very few of the usual misunderstandings and misrepresentations often found in mainstream press articles about fusion. I'm surprised that so many here seem not even to have heard of the Monitor before.

Nice set of links. Some additional ones, more focussed on the US program:
The largest magnetic fusion experiment in the US is the DIII-D tokamak in San Diego:
http://fusion.gat.com/
There's some nice educational material on fusion available on that site at:
http://fusioned.gat.com/
Other major US experiments are the Alcator C-Mod tokamak at MIT (http://www.psfc.mit.edu/cmod/), and the NSTX device at Princeton (http://nstx.pppl.gov/). Rob Goldston, who is interviewed in the article is the director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, where NSTX is located.

The field of study of physicists working on (magnetic) fusion energy research is not nuclear physics, it is plasma physics. The relevant nuclear physics issues (mostly just reaction cross sections) have been largely understood for some time. The physics of plasmas (ionized gases) is the area in which the advances described in the article occurred, in particular advances in understand how energy is transported by turbulence, and how high plasma pressures can be confined by magnetic fields.

For any young folks interested in pursuing fusion research/plasma physics, some major US graduate programs are at:
Princeton, MIT, U. of Wisconsin, U. of Texas, UCLA, UCSD and Columbia.

Also, all the comments on the CS Monitor as a source here strike me as odd. The Monitor is one of the most respected publications in the US, and its reporting, particularly on foreign policy issues, but also on science, is of a quality rarely matched in the US mainstream press. This article is a nice example - it contains very few of the usual misunderstandings and misrepresentations often found in mainstream press articles about fusion. I'm surprised that so many here seem not even to have heard of the Monitor before.

The answer is here.

• "Teachers were given the materials needed to build a half-coated fluorescent tube (for an interactive plasma demo), a vacuum chamber, an EM wave model, and a 3-dimensional magnetic field bottle. All of the teachers then took away with them each of the 4 gadgets.Stay tuned for future opportunities for build-it day workshops and other educational goodies from the Fusion Education Team."

Screw it, I'm intent on making you look like a really fricking stupid idiot.... I am going to have a lot of fun at your expense :-)

let's start some links to educate you and possible get something worthwhile into your head.

one

two

three

i can go on forever..

As long as metal isn't grounded, it can go straight through it. Same with wood or (to a lesser extent) with stone which is why, *GASP*, YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE RADIO IN YOUR HOUSE!

Again I say WRONG,first off unless you have aluminum siding and a metal roof with aluminum screens and storm windows as well as metal doors with metal screens covering your windows on the doors.. RF ENERGY CAN GET IN.. Duh.. a 11 year old in basic science knows this. and they havent made airplanes out of wood for at least 50 years... and BTW carbon fiber is conductive and therefore is conductive and act's like metal.. if you need an education in that please feel free to ask.

Jesus fucking christ. is it just me or is /. getting stupider by the day?

Judging by your lack of any knowlege and obvious lack of any real cognitave abilities... I would agree.. people like you are making slashdod dumber by the day...

if you would like more of a whipping please feel free to let me know.

I suggest buying the ARRL handbook and the ARRL antenna handbook or going to www.arrl.com and start getting an education from reputable sources because whoever or wherever you get your information is either living in bizzaro world or you make crap up as you go.

This web page has a listing of the four candidate sites. It's a choice between Clarington in Canada, Vandellos in Spain, Cadarache in France, and Rokkasho in Japan. From what I've heard, France and Japan are the most likely candidates.

At this point, there are very few major research tokamaks out there. In the US, there is only really one that is flexible enough to do a wide range of experiments on (at GA).

This isn't going to necessarily lead directly to a commercial design, it's still a research reactor, but there are a LOT of big questions in fusion that can be answered by this device, and it would be irresponsible of the US to not be a part of it (that is, as long as we want to at least look like we're trying to find clean energy). At the rate different things are going, fusion might not be the energy source of the future, but you never know, it's always worth trying. It's only through programs like this that we'll get there.

When the US first left the project it was because it was billed as a demo commercial reactor, which just wouldn't have worked. It might be able to get more energy out than you put in, but the cost of construction and upkeep is still too high for such large reactors. A major part of fusion research now is making the reactors more efficient, require less repair and have a smaller size. Oddly enough, we can't do that unless we build a larger research reactor.

Given that we spend over $500 billion on electricity every year here in the US, we could probably afford to spend a little more on technology that is finally coming of age.

http://www.gat.com/asi/aero.html

In Iraq, for instance,, as well as the Balkans.

Apparently, the RQ-1 Predator is made by General Atomics. They claim that it can remain airborne for 40 hours at a stretch, and it can carry a payload of 204 kg. The weight of a Hellfire seems to be on the order of 47 kg, give or take a few depending on model.

According to a 1998 article by the FAS, it also includes a satellite link, meaning that it's providing recon up to the point where it is shot down (if and when that happens). Operating range is listed as 926 kilometers, and at 10-25 thousand feet; FWIW, the General Atomics site mentioned work on a newer version that would have a significantly greater endurance.

For those that own Hellfire missiles, the FAS site also includes a handy-dandy user's guide [PDF] of sorts.

The Altus II was not developed by NASA, but by the ASI division of my employer, General Atomics. NASA's role was providing criteria to modify the existing Altus I.

Here is a link to the GA/ASI site.

Not sure where that comes from. The GA announcement merely said they had managed to smooth the plasma by spinning it. Thought there was a lot of speculation about "improved prospects...", there weren't any claims of significant energy gains.

You can read the original release at their web site.

Oops. There's a link to safety on the General Atomics website, but when I try it I get a "403 forbidden" error from their server. maybe they still have a few bugs to wrok out?

Oops. There's a link to safety on the General Atomics website, but when I try it I get a "403 forbidden" error from their server. maybe they still have a few bugs to wrok out?

This reactor type was invented by the company for whom I work, General Atomics. The site is here.

One of the GTMHR-type reactors was built at Fort Saint Vrain, Colorado, but was beset with seal problems. In the twenty years since, these problems have been overcome with the result that GTMHR is ready for prime time. The best part of the design is negative temperature coefficient. This means that they cannot run away. If they get hot, they shut down.

GA is also one of the foremost Fusion research sites extant.

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."