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a white dwarf according to this page

Operate your own Tokamak reactor

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.

Don't get me wrong because I agree, but I am amazed when I see comments like this on a slashdot. This is the most liberal site I have ever seen in my life. Most on here voted for Kerry I would bet and don't even keep track of which party does the most to help things like this or hurt it. Most tree huggers are Democrats. The tree huggers are the ones trying to stop things like this. Bush has dedicated funds to this and I submitted the story in 2003 (rejected of course...was pro-Bush). Here is an html ver of the doc. here or the pdf if you prefer.

From the article: Friday, January 31, 2003By ROBERT STERNPLAINSBORO - After a five-year hiatus, the United States next month will rejoin internationalnegotiations to develop fusion energy as a commercial power source, U.S. Energy SecretarySpencer Abraham said yesterday.

5 year hiatas...who was in office then? Oh yeah democrats.

U.S. participation in construction of the $5 billion project would cost an estimated $500million in constant 2002 dollars over a 10-year period, according to the Department ofEnergy.

And people on here say Bush doesn't do anything to help with alternative fuel research all the time. Articles like this are rejected of course. From it you see:George Bush, an oilman, could wind up a sort of fuel-economy and alternative-fuel president.

He's already boosted mileage requirements for trucks 7%, to an average 22.2 miles per gallon for 2007 models. He's committed $1.7 billion to hydrogen-fuel research. And he has made decisions that helped the ethanol-fuel industry boost production to 3.4 billion gallons this year, double from when he took office.

In a second term, lobbyists and public policy veterans expect him to do even more for renewable fuels such as ethanol, reshape fuel-economy regulations in ways that could require even better mileage, and push a Republican Congress to pass an energy bill with generous tax credits for people who buy especially fuel-efficient vehicles.

So basically, the progress being made on fusion was funded in part by this administration and funding was cut by the previous. Anyone who mods this down is just a Bush basher and I plead to you now, don't hide the truth. The media already does that enough. I don't want a flamewar. I'm only talking about the last 2 administrations and the current topic of fusion.

You know what bugs me? The world is squabbling over where to build the 6 billion dollar ITER (international thermonuclear reactor.) See http://fire.pppl.gov/ They've been negotiating over locations between France and Japan, neither party willing to yield, for over a year now. 6 billion dollars? Screw it, build two of them, one in Japan, one in France, but that's not the point. They don't want to build it, because if anyone can make cheap energy out of rainwater, then how do you control them? The powers that be actually like the setup where they can fight and take over any limited resources, then have people come beg them for a piece of the pie. It doesn't matter to them if billions of people die, as long as they are not one of them. But civil war and social chaos is not picky.

Secondly, I would like to point out that stellar evolution is absolutely impossible. This may sound crazy, but I am willing to back up my statement. In order to create a star (according to evolution), gas must be compressed enough for fusion to take place. The problem with this theory is that gas just can't be compressed that much by anything except (possibly) a bunch of stars blowing up at the same time near each other.

As for the "big bang", you seem to be under the impression that science and religion are mutually exclusive. Science can only say that "the universe is expanding outward in all directions, so presumably it came from the same place". It can't trace back further than the evidence will support, and so rather than making stuff up, scientists wisely say "and where this 'cosmic egg' came from, we can't say".

Correct, but you see, electron volts != volts, or power. An electron volt is a unit of energy. About 6.25*10^18 electron volts per second = 1 watt.

The problem is not generating that much energy. A candle is overkill. The problem is not getting that much energy into two particles, although that is far harder. (see the cyclotron story posted to /. a week ago or so) The problem is getting this energy into two particles, and then getting them to hit each other at the right angle, and in enough quantities. This has not been done yet. (see this for some details)

To do this in a nanotech machine there are two more big problems. The energies are far more than needed to destroy any chemical bond, and it is chemical bonds that keep nanotech machines together. The second is capturing the energy produced into a useable form. The produced energy is much greater.

Last, I need to correct my post. The 2.2Mev figure was wrong, that is roughly the energy produced. The easiest reaction is D+T (see the link!) and it requires 10kev to start, straight proton proton needs 144kev or so. It varies based on the fuel alot. The < 10 ev to get free electrons is also more than in most chemical bonds.

"So I'm curious - what makes you say cheap fusion is likely? Or are you saying you think that my idea is so unlikely that you can afford to be thinking 1000 years into the future for your cheap fusion presumption?"

Unless cold fusion is actually fusion, then yes, your idea is far less likely than a cheap fusion reactor. BTW, what you are proposing IS FUSION. With mabe a little fission thrown in.

Plasma Physics and Fusion Glossary

Before spending too much money, the EU may want to consider the "Fusion Barrier Law" referenced on this site.
You'll have to dig a bit as AP is a prolific writer, but it's there.
Basically AP has 'proved' that energy out of a fusion reactor is limited to 2/3 of energy in to the reactor.

Know the differences!!!
Fusion = No long term radio active waste
Fission = Radioactive waste & possible creation of materials for Atom weapons
or just remember
Fusion "Good
Fission "Bad"

Thermonuclear fusion really needs a new name, anytime any bumkin hears "nuclear" whatever they immeadiately think "Three Mile Island" and cancerous mutation and painful death. Can we start calling fusion "Solar Combustion" or something without nuclear related to it?

Work has been started in the 1950's and is continueing today http://www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/nstx.html Selling contained Fusion reactors which generate large amounts energy would be good for the US economy (or any country's economy bold enough to make portable fusion reactors). Not to mention I'd like one in my neighborhood or basement too.

What's it going to take?
High cost of oil (We are getting there) well... possibly just getting really pissed off with idiots who control the oil supply (I think we are there too) a little psychology (informing Joe 6-pack that fusion will not create a 3 mile island event) funding (oh maybe one tenth of what we spend on oil in a year) and significant brainpower to unlock the mystery of our Sun's energy process.

Unfortunately there isn't enough uranium on the planet to support the population past a decade or two, based on current energy consumption of fossil fuels, that are about to run out in a few decades too. The only real energy reservoir around here that would last past a millenium is hydrogen and fusion, unless you're willing to cut the world population to 0.5 billion, and go back to riding horses. Solar energy, biomass energy, wind and all these other ones don't have enough density/efficiency to support us. For instance more energy is put into making a solar panel than it will ever produce in its entire lifetime.
For reference, see this awesome article: http://fire.pppl.gov/science_adv_energy_103102.pdf

Perhaps here are some reasons against Deuterium-Boron Plasma

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion#Requir ements_for_fusion

"... The higher the temperature, the higher the pressure and the more difficult it is to confine the fuel plasma."

If you read the webpage the originator provided it says

"So why, you may wonder, are researchers spending so much time on deuterium-tritium fusion when hydrogen-boron has clear advantages? The reason is that deuterium-tritium fusion is easier to ignite. It requires temperatures of only 100 million Kelvin while hydrogen-boron fusion requires 1 billion Kelvin."

1 Billion Kelvin are you insane! They use the magnetic fields in Tokamaks to keep the plasma off the walls because nothing can withstand those temperatures and you think that the FocusFusion will survive without them! Dont forget that the magnetic fields keep the plasma from losing energy when it contacts the surfaces of the reactor

Also if you read the Wikipedia article it lists various fusion reactions and their output energies. D-T creates 17.6 Mev compared to B11-H creates 8.7 Mev

http://www.pppl.gov/fusion_basics/pages/fusion_adv antages_pict.html said that their tokamak would use D + Li6 as fuel which creates 22.6 MeV

So I think that lists a few reasons why Deuterium Tritium plamsa is better.

You'd be talking about the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL). PPPL is home to several fusion experiemnts, both current and future. In fact, I used some data from PPPL's National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) during a summer internship a few years ago. If I remember correctly, the tokomak shape for ITER is based on some of the results that the NSTX produced. I really don't think you have to worry about PPPL being shut down anytime soon. According to the website, they're starting work on a new test reactor to be built in the next few years.

It looks like the ITER research facility in the US will be located at princeton. http://www.pppl.gov/news/pages/Iter_0704.html

1.) RTFA: FIRE is one of many fusion research projects in the U.S. This article gives the impression that we just 'gave up' on this whole crazy fusion thing. This is far from true...

2.) Fusion is NOT LIKE IN SPIDERMAN 2. Go read this: Fusion Basics at PPPL

3.) ITER is the next step towards a steady state or 'burning' plasma. This is (obviously) a critical part of building a production-class fusion reactor.

- Justin

The US already has at least one of these already.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in Princeton, NJ has been experimenting with fusion since 1951.

I've toured the reactor, in addition to working there one summer, and it is a very fascinating technical achievement. Basically you have a large magnetic containment device (big donut) which contains a vacuum. The vacuum and the magnetic field keep the plasma from melting the containment device. Tritium (used to be deuterium) is placed inside and a huge amount of energy is pumped into the donut converting the gas inside to plasma with a temperature hotter than the interior of the sun allowing fusion to take place. Currently the amount of energy released is less than the energy needed to generate the fusion.

To give you an idea of how much energy is needed. The energy from the localpower company is used to get a bunch of giant dynamos spinning. To get the dynamos up to full rotational speed takes, IIRC, about 10 hours. All this stored energy is then released all at once.

Oh, and as an added bonus for geeks in that area, they have a public open house coming up on June 12!

Oh, and as an added bonus for geeks in that area, they have a public open house coming up on June 12!

The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab has been working on nuclear fusion for i believe 50 something years. They accomplished it a while ago. check it out here

The national energy research scientific computing center (NERSC: http://www.nersc.gov ) is actively working on creating computing clusters capable of a petaflop within the next five years (I can't seem to find a reference on their website, but as I understand it, this is one of their oeprating goals.) NERSC facilities are used extensively to model the kinds of processes involved in this sort of fusion as well as others (The z-pinch, for example, http://zpinch.sandia.gov/ ) I'm sure groups are using this facility to do computation for magnetically confined fusion, and certainly all theses tasks are being worked on by other groups. The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab does much work in all these fields, and their website has links to many other sites devoted to plasma and fusion ( http://www.pppl.gov )

Last time I checked, Canada, Russia and China preferred the Japanese site.

• EU (28%)
• Japan (28%)
• Russia (14%)
• USA (10%)
• China (10%)
• South-Korea (10%)

Try here.

The PPPL currently holds the record fusion reaction. I got to tour the facility when the TFTR was still operational and they'd just brought the neutral beam injectors online. That was pretty damn cool.

Try here.

The PPPL currently holds the record fusion reaction. I got to tour the facility when the TFTR was still operational and they'd just brought the neutral beam injectors online. That was pretty damn cool.

There are no fusion power generation experiments, using He-3 or otherwise, which produce anything near a sustained output surplus. Typical sustained values are output around 30 times input power for the most advanced tokmahoks. I hope you will please correct me with an authoratative cite if I am wrong.


Wow, that value is VERY wrong. From 1994 (10 years ago!!)

http://fusedweb.pppl.gov/FAQ/section6-results.txt:


The value of 6 MW should be compared to
the roughly 30 MW of input power used,

Hrm, 5 times input power. Let's move forward in time, one year (1995)

http://www.itercanada.com/introduction/s2/history_ ie.cfm# (click on 1995):

The TFTR machine in the U.S. sets a record by generating 10 megawatts (MW) of fusion power, a key step validating the progress of fusion research.

(for the same 30 MW input power - now only 3 times).

Then, in 1999, JT-60U in Japan reached what would have been breakeven, had they had D-T fusion rather than pure D fusion (since it's not a real reactor, you can just scale D fusion to D-T - you don't actually need to go through the efforts of getting tritium). In the UK, JET produced 16 MW from 25 MW input: that's pretty damned close to breakeven.

Anyway, the point is that all of these reactors are using crap fuel: everyone knows that He-3 is a better fuel, and would produce a higher energy output. It's trivial to scale the energy output of something that uses, say, D-D fusion to see what it would produce using D-T fusion.

Now, none of them have reached ignition, which may be what you're claiming for "sustained" (>couple hundred seconds): but as the directors for ITER have noted, ignition isn't important - all you care about is energy output > energy input for a commercial reactor. A factor of 50 or so is what you need, and ITER (without He-3) will probably get a factor of 10, so it's close. Essentially the fusion reactor would act as a "boost" reactor for a smaller scale reactor - essentially it'd be "weaning" us off of coal, fission, etc.

How is a plasma not a fluid?

I don't know if the telescope is associated with the company. However, in Japanese, "Subaru" is the name for the the Pleiades star cluster.

Both of these reactions yield no neutrons, and hence don't present a problem of radioactive waste, which comes from neutron activation of the reactor wall.

Except you.

Science Magazine is credible. At this point, even the Raelians are more credible than you are. Though that isn't saying much.

The burden of proof that privatizing and commercializing space is a bad idea is on you, and you aren't remotely capable of meeting it.

Though if the black helicopter boys let you go today, you can provide us with entertainment by trying.

FWEB uses your compiler(s) to compile the source code. It will use TeX to make your comments in the source code into documentation, with the source lines included (or not, if I recall correctly). This way, one file contains the code and the documentation. If you change the way it works, you can at the same time change the explanation, and the documentation; all three are there together, staring you in the face.

It's GPL, so you can use it freely, and tweak it if you need to, but it's been around for a while and probably won't need tweaking.

3. Do I have to be a U.S. citizen to work at the NSA?
Yes. Only U.S. citizens are eligible for NSA Employment.

"Hello, Mr. Gurdeep? How would you like to fast-track through all the bureaucracy, become a US citizen, get paid 25 times what you currently make, have state-of-the-art tools and a huge budget, and work with the best and brightest on encryption issues for the US Government?"

You choose:

A: "Nah, I like the crappy teaching assignments and third-world Ambiance."
B: "Thanks, but I've almost got tenure here."
or
C: "When's our flight!?"

Seriously. It freaks out the bureaucrats when they do it, but the best scientists and mathematicians have routinely held enough power to step right over the top of little niggling details like place of birth. Politics and psychology will be watched hawkishly by the 'crats involved, but they can't stop one genius demanding a benign foreign-born genius be hired. Citizenship isn't THAT hard to bestow on desirable talent.

My favorite story about the power the top researchers hold was when researchers at the Tokamak (the original big toroidal fusion device) met the new facility manager. He announced sweeping changes including a strict adherence to a 9-to-5 schedule and the elimination of 2-month-long sabbatical/vacations that were common. Understand these were both a byproduct of the Tokamak: it took half a day to start and stop, so on active days researchers were often there for 14 hours or more, and it had a couple months annually of upgrades and maintenance when nothing ran.

He finished his speech, asked if there were any questions, and one of the Nobel-caliber research heads stood up and asked him "Where will you be finding your next job?"

The tomahawk fusion reactor performs fusion very, very carefully and it is very delicate.

Tokamak, not tomahawk...

Doesn't FWEB already do this? In arbitrary languages?

The article is correct, solar wind is a stream of protons not photons.

Phillip.

When I competed in a sceince fair back in March, amoung other awards I won the "Princeton Plasma Physics Award", an award sponsored by the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) here in New Jersey, and as a winner I was given a free tour of the facilities. For those of you who don't know, PPPL is "The hottest place in the Universe", lying at the forefront of Nuclear Power and Plasma research...very cool.

So I was going around the facilites, visiting their $125,000,000 tokamac's and torsotrons and all this crazy equipment (very cool science plamsa physics is, too much to elaborate on here), and I get to the control room, from which they run all their Data Acquisition (DaQ) and such to monitor the expirements, and the room is filled with .... MACS? The engineer giving me the tour explained that it was in the personal interest of most of the researchers. Yes, there were Sun's and other UNIX boxes scattered on the control room floor, but I would look closely, and sure enough, amounst the three or so monitors at each workstation, one of them was hooked up to a mac. There were g4's and g3's scattered all across the floor. Wack.

So yea, Mac's are playing a key role in plasma research, helping achieve effecient fusion, one step at a time.

For another cool plamsa physics project (unrelated to mac's), check out Garrett Young's ISEF project Quasi-Elliptical Torsatron - A Study of Induced Radial Electric Fields and Plasma Turbulence. He is a senior in high school and on the cutting edge of plasma physics research. Quite the talented individual.

I need to interject here, I think "usually" is a pretty strong word to use about Li walls in a layperson discourse. The implication is that a molten Li wall is common. It isn't. Molten lithium has only been used in very theoritical reactor design mock-ups and has not been place in any large-scale plasma experiments yet.

I'm currently working on CDX-U, a small spherical torus at Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, which will be the first device to seriously look at global plasma/molten Li interactions. I have great concern over how a liquid metal such as molten Li behaves in a large plasma device. The molten Li can be pushed around by currents and fields, and could potential be pulled off the walls into the plasma core. In the core Li is an impurity and serves only to reduce energy output. Not to mention that having Li coating all the diagnostic windows is a huge problem, even in a well understood reactor.

Don't get me wrong, molten Li has been theorized to have several nice properties. But one needs to remember that molten Li walls are untested experimentally. The least interesting property to me is tritium production. More interesting are the great thermal and MHD stability properties that a flowing molten Li wall surface provides.

All these people seem to be complaining about scientists chasing the Nobel prize, implying that that's a bad thing to be taking into consideration, etc.

I mean, if you worked for several years at a company developing some sort of important software , wouldn't you be sort of pissed off if someone else came out with essentially the same product during an unforeseen server outage on your company's side?

The nobel prize is to a scientist as writing some piece of software like Napster or Linux is to a programmer - it provides:

• Lifelong job security.
• Instant name recognition.
• And most important of all, CONTINUED FUNDING FROM THE GOVERNMENT.

It's "proof" that they accomplished something. Without said proof, even if you are very, very close, no one is going to give you any more money (at least not politicians - remember, sonny boy, these fancy partickal excellorators come out of my taxpayers pockets, and they ain't done one dang thing but ask for more money! Look at what happened to the Princeton Plasma Physics lab - they were close to actually getting a positive energy return on a fusion reactor (closer than anyone else), but since they weren't actually getting one, they lost their funding and their accelerator just sits there. I've talked to some of the physicists, and believe me, they are bitter about it.

Anyway I tried to find the Princeton Fusion FAQ but all I could find was a snippet of it that someone who does Q&A posted at Princeton.

Yes someone please repost this story on the front page! I found it completely by accident.

While I have the upmost respect for Richard Stallman's philosophy and writings, I don't think his ideas for remedies in the trial have much chance of being implemented. The government has shown no interest in interoperability or fair buying practices. They do require POSIX for operating systems, but they don't require applications to use POSIX. They purchase hardware form companies that have signed NDAs with Microsoft. They use Microsoft proprietary file formats and protocols, etc.

Even federally funded research projects use MS Word on their websites. For example, check out the FIRE website.. Just scroll down to the feasibility study near the bottom. If the government doesn't require interoperability when they purchase hardware/software, how are they (the government) going to force Microsoft to share interface data when the government doesn't require it for their own purchases?

Doh! /.ed already!