Slashdot Mirror
The Quest For Fusion
Richard Finney writes: "Michael Paterniti, writing for the UK's Observer , writes about a machine called Z : an inertial confinement fusion machine. This is a well written explanation for the lay person and a philospophical look at the personalities driven to create the power of the Sun on Earth. Can these dedicated heroes reach 1,000 trillion watts and high yield fusion?"
Can they make a portable? I mean the last time I needed a couple of hundred times more power than what the entire Earth produced, I was scrambling for a handheld.
Heat's not a problem. The excess heat will always radiate out to space as long as the chemical composition of the atmosphere allows it.
Posted by PartA:
...because of all the people who love their Big Macs and the like.
Where to start...
First of all, D-T fusion reactors will all breed their own Tritium. The reaction you mention:
D + T = H-2 + H-3 -> He-4 + n + E
Is accompanied by two reactions in a surrounding blanket where the tritium is bred:
Li-7 + n -> He-4 + H-3 + n'
Li-6 + n -> He-4 + H-3
The n' above denotes that the neutron has lost kinetic energy in an inelastic collision with the Li-7 nucleus (which later fissions into the He-4 and the H-3), or is a less energetic neutron ejected from either a Li-8 or He-5 compound nucleus. The blanket material is usually either molten Lithium or molten 'Flibe' (Lithium-Beryllium Fluoride), where the Lithium may be partially enriched in Li-6. A good design will produce as much Tritium in the blanket as it fuses in the plasma core.
Contrary to your statement, the primary reaction produces *no* gammas directly - 80% of energy yield is neutron kinetic energy, 20% is alpha (He-4) kinetic energy.
Furthermore, the reaction you showed for D-D fusion:
2D = 2H-2 -> He-4 + E
Has a low branch probability (several percent?). D-D fusion is dominated by the following reactions:
H-2 + H-2 -> H-3 + H-1 (all kinetic)
H-2 + H-2 -> He-3 + n (all kinetic)
H-2 + H-3 -> He-4 + n (same as in D-T fusion)
H-2 + He-3 -> He-4 + H-1
This is usually known as 'Cat-D' (catalyzed D-D fusion) Average overall reaction is:
3 H-2 -> He-4 + H-1 + n
Thus D-D reactors do deal with some Tritium, and produce *plenty* of neutrons (40%? of total energy, versus 80% for D-T).
I won't even begin to comment on your Protium (H-1) fusion reactions (like those that occur in the Sun). They are even more complex and run 10^20 too slow to ever be useful for power production. Whether Protium could be more rapidly fused by reactions that do not seem to occur naturally is yet another matter.
As a further aside, nuclear fission and fusion are the *only* sustainable, expandable, portable (like in a star drive!) energy sources in our future.
-- Mike Greaves
Unfortunately, other sources don't agree with your (Rhodes'?) numbers. "U.S. Nuclear Weapons" by Chuck Hansen, and the Nuclear Weapons FAQ, at:
http://www.fas.org/nuke/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq8.html
Show predicted yields of 5 Mt (1-10 possible) and 6 Mt (4-8 "possible") for Mike and Bravo respectively, versus 10.5 and 14.5 Mt actual. In other words, both achieved more than double predicted yield. Bravo is only unusual because it exceeded it's "possible" yield range. And Hansen's book documents many tests of that era falling far awry (often on the high side) of yield predictions.
BTW, the *real* reason that Bravo became so infamous was that the wind was blowing in an unexpected direction that day. It's inherent radiological hazards (10 Mt fission yield) are not significantly different from Mike's (8 Mt fission yield).
This is all still partially obscured by the cloak of secrecy, and the mistaken speculation that a cloak of secrecy always stimulates. So neither of us will ever know the answers with certainty.
But these are the reasons for my original guesses about reaction branches, and my memory seems to have failed me on this original point anyway.
My *real* points were *correct*, and relate to fusion fuel breeding only.
-- Mike Greaves
Wow!
:-)
Nice work if you can get it
I used to read alot about machines like the one you're working on - and liquid metal MHD used to *really* interest me.
And here I am working with computers all the time nowadays 8-/
Believe it or not, I'm actually going to kinda disagree with you. Molten alkali-metal systems are not *that* exotic - they've been in use for about 50 years. Granted that what you're doing *is* exotic! There's no containing wall between the Li and the plasma!
Note that I never said anything about Li "walls", only Li blankets, and I was not visualizing what you are doing at all. You can have an Li or Flibe blanket between double walls - i.e. completely separated from the plasma chamber by a wall of vanadium or niobium, or even stainless steel or something. This requires only "conventional" know-how and such systems could be designed today with little need for experimentation.
They just won't work as well as a bare Li wall. If I'm not mistaken, you're getting around "first wall" heat transfer limitations, right?
Good luck in your work!
-- Mike Greaves
- there was no understanding of how the energy was created
- the use of tungsten in the Z machine was not applied scientifically
There must be some very smart people working on this, but I don't think the reporting has been especially thorough. Paul.People are the largest producers of some greenhouse gasses. We know these gasses will heat up the planet, the same way we know a rock will hit the ground if we drop it. It's a question of when, not if.
The comparison to Pittsburg is completely irrelevant. In the 1890's global industry was many orders of magnitude smaller. They could be much, much more dirty without approaching the scale of global climate. Today, people regularly generate pollution on the same scale as the global climate.
You do not appear to have grasped either the seriousness of the problem or any of the views that you're trying to discredit. Perhaps that's why you haven't seen more 'substantive' evidence?
This is not about smog, or smoke, or anything you can dig up and look at. It's about the impact of industrialisation and, indirectly, capitalism on the equilibrium of the planet.
Which isn't an intrinsically bad thing, morally, except for the fact that we depend on that balance for our survival.
Global warming is not a synonym for climate change, it's just a particular example. The most severe problems we face are not simple sea-level issues but complex climatic phenomena like the direction and strength of the gulf stream and the migration of krill in the antarctic. These are the roots of the food chain and we're not going to like it much when they're cut. There are respectable, peer-reviewed studies (reg required) of these basic cycles which show them to be disrupted by our blundering.
There's a hundred-year lead time on this one. The changes we are seeing now have been accumulating for a century, and even if we all suddenly started conducting ourselves like a sane species instead of fouling our nest and flinging it around, we would still see terrible effects for decades.
So you're right, up to a point: the ability of people to fix this is highly questionable, their possession of the necessary insight even more so. But to deny that we are responsible for careless changes to the global ecosystem with unpredictable effects is the worst kind of head-burying.
[leonb@marx leonb]$ wattroute --level=50 albuquerque.nm.us marxgen
Actually, I'd prefer a long bank of big, ugly-looking bakelite-handled knife switches, with lots of arcing and spitting. And a pipe organ. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I think that a better question is if they can keep the plant from self-destructing every ~100 years or so
Actually, there may be a much easier way. There are many more pages on this out there. Did anyone else notice the solar wind stopping for two days last March? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Neither the Chinese nor Russian civil wars were very friendly. Also, the Cold Way may have been Cold between the US and the USSR, but it got plenty warm with the littler players, in places such as Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Middle East, etc.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Books have caused more and bloodier wars than any other invention in the history of creation. (Ex: Mein Kampf, Communist Manifesto.) High explosives are regularly used to destroy rotting buildings or carve out useful features in the landscape. Everything can be used for good or for evil, you never get just one or the other.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
Even the cheapest conceivable fusion reactors would be many (hundreds? thousands?) times the cost of a large solar energy installation. Wake up people. $15 Billion to do a proof of concept that has proven that we might be able to generate more energy than we put in. So? We still have to convert that useless gamma+kinetic energy into electricity.
That $15 Billion could have gone a long way to building/maintaining a profitable solar energy installation in the desert somewhere...
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
At the very most basic level the heat from this thing will easily power a steam turbine. There's also direct-energy-conversion. This is only about 1% efficient right now, but who cares if the power is free and causes no nasty after effects.
About the promise of this energy source. Why would the US have to hand over the plans to it. It's already in the scientific community. Anyone with an advanced physics degree can understand it. There's enough detail in the article itself to get a sufficiently funded effort underway doing the same thing.
--
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
25: ten.knilrevlis@wkcuhc
*Condense fact from the vapor of nuance*
We need to put a large, black rectangle full of stars in orbit, so when we turn the Earth into a glowing ball of plasma, we can keep broadcasting, "This world, and all the trash floating around its star, is yours. Except any sattelites marked "MPAA". Attempt no reverse engineering of them."
Justa karma-whorin' this morn.
--
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
If they do manage to achieve this, the question will be what is the impact? Will it be similar to the liberating effects of the printing press, or to that of Dynamite and other high explosives turned to war?
Or perhaps it will have more of the impact of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses?
Excellent link! Love the idea of searching for spectral lines indicating the dumping of nuclear waste in stars.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
they refer to it like "The International Machine Corporation" in Contact! :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
By that reasoning, why live at all? We must protect the precious environment! Our bodies produce heat and consume materials.
Face it, we should keep the system in working order, but by no means should the environment take precedence over human needs.
I didn't mean to say that we have to get rid of electricity, etc. It's just that when you have a cheap power source available, you're going to use it. It's the same thing with cars: When you have a car, you drive even small distances that you would otherwise have walked or used your bicycle for.
... we're not going to survive on a planet that heats up constantly.
And, of course, there is a certain amount of energy we can release to the environment without doing too much damage. We just don't know how much yet.
But I can't agree to your saying that "by no means should the environment take precedence over human needs." That depends on the needs, of course. We don't do much real damage to the environment when we fulfill basic human needs. But sacrificing the environment for pure luxury (and much of the power we use is used for that) should be weighed against the fact that we need the environment
I am not saying "let's get back into the caves" or something like that. But I do think we need to be a bit more considerate of the effects such things a electrical power consumption have on the environment.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
But if we can create as much power as we want, that isn't exactly going to help global warming (well it is, but that's the point ...). Even if we get rid of the gases that contribute to the glass house effect, simply releasing any amount of heat to the environment is going to hurt it (and already does). So such a power source might not be such a desirable thing after all ...
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Well thanks, I know that much ... but the heat is released by all kinds of devices using the energy. All the eletricity the power plant generates eventually ends up as heat - a light bulb produces heat and light, the latter is absorbed by objects and converted into heat. So heat is released into the atmosphere, and the more energy there is, the more heat is released.
And when I said this might not be so desirable, I meant that it would lead to much more wasting of energy, which might not be a good thing - but not because there was any shortage of energy, but because that energy has effects on the environment. Today, the average temperature in cities is already higher than in the surrounding country. We are producing enough energy to really influence the environment, even if there was no global warming. It's not because I am entirely against technical progress ...
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Of all the articles I have read linked off of slashdot - I was disappointed the MOST by the end of this one. Well - not the end, per se; rather, I was depressed the article ended at all. I wanted the story to go on.
The topic is so huge in its implications that it deserves Paterniti's over-the-top writing style. If I recall correctly - this article is from the same author who wrote "Driving Albert's Brain". In my opinion - this piece is much better.
Never mind the hidden corporate agenda and the science of this Quest for the Holy Grail. Like Coupland's original short story "Microserfs" in Wired many years ago, *this* short piece by Paterniti demands to be a book.
Paterniti may sometimes look for meaning where there is none - but damn it - he does come close to finding it just the same. Very well written piece. This article is worth doing a "save as" folks.
.Robert
.Robert
Firstly his name was Gordan Freeman.
Secondly that accident was at the Black Mesa facillity not at the Sandia National Laboratories.
"I'll take the red pill. No! Blue! AAAaaaahhhhhhhhh"
- Monty Python meets the Matrix
True, but not every country needs one, you can simply run it over their power grid via an interconnect somewhere, it's a *lot* of power, and you can only store so much of it, you might as well do something with the rest of it.
Just because you disagree doesn't make it offtopic or flamebait.
the most ignorant and obnoxious corporate interest is allowed to learn about it.
Don't get me wrong. Corporate interest is fine. It's just that the morons who seem to hate any sort of profitmaking and the morons who piss them off have committed the perfect murder of progress and ingenuity. We'll just call the former morons for now and the latter are none other than your favorite Ayn Rand Club "meme"bers who couldn't even quote Ayn Rand to save their necks. For the slow, I love Ayn rand dearly... I hate her followers with a passion.
See it works like this:
1. Morons have made a devil in the image of what they hate. It's really just a collage of factories, smokestacks, jargon filled voice overs, and all sorts of other stereotypes.
2. Then they've created a culture, infectious one at that, that associates science and profit with the above devil.
3. That notion, especially the bit about difficult work, expensive projects, and technologies generally inaccessible to the public, has spread.
4. It has poisoned another culture (the Ayn Rand Clubs) with all sorts of ideas about corporate organization charts etc., the perfect blueprint for the 20th Century Corporation, the one whose fall Ayn Rand describes as being caused by to much dependence on trademarks, looks, and unearned pride.
5. The New Ayn Rand Clubs irritate the morons and vice-versa further entrenching their notions of good and evil into the general public's mind.
The result:
Any ingenuity and clever design is overlooked and ignored over clunky expensive overly developed hardware. Why? Cuz you know... the bigger it is the better, the more expensive the more serious the work, you know it's working because it makes more noise, etc.
And to top it off, even though a significant number of people had a computer at an early age and the first thing they did was program, computer design and programming and related technologies are considered Masters or Phd topics. Go figure.
Expect the best ideas to be ignored for at least another quarter century until we are about 50 years old and our revenge against those 50 years old in 2001 will be completed. For the slow, that means we'll have our own kids while the current day morons are scrounging for social security. Social security hopefully will have been cancelled so we can give our children the future we had briefly. The one which these morons came in and destroyed through all their moaning and groaning. Oh and a great big thank you to the Clinton family for suggesting NASA's budget should be increased.
Incidentally the reason the sound theme in most complete Windows based systems clicks when you click the mouse (in addition to the clearly audible click of the mouse button itself) is because Bill Gates is a genius! I hate his software because of the design philosophy and constant astral transcendence I have to achieve to get results from it. But mark my word, the guy knows his market. Morons need to know they clicked when they clicked. Sadly I think some who didn't hear it the first time (the mouse button), refuse to acknowledge the second click (the sound theme) and continue to miss out on the benefits Bill Gates had intended for them. Nice try Bill.
So what am I getting at? Simply this: If we weren't all gawking at all the shiny chrome on our so-called marvelous inventions we might come up with something truly useful and accessible to anyone willing to study it.
/end rant
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
If students have access to it we get salvation. If only the military gets access we get war.
Teach students science that's current.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Internet offers free stuff, Fusion offers infinite energy resources, tawk amongst yourselves.
I'd add more but I really don't know what will happen afterwards.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
I'd rather have a wank /this/ year, thankyouverymuch.
http://www.klub.org/
Well, technically it's more energy out than in. But there are reactants and products, and the energy you get out is the difference between the energy of the reactants and the energy of the products. Twice the bond energy holding the nucleus of an atom of hydrogen together is greater than the bond energy holding together the nucleus of the resultant He atom.
That was a mild bit of sarcasm on my part. Personally, I'm a cold fusion agnostic, but then I'm a mere engineer myself and not a *ahem* real physicist either.
// TODO: fix sig
I seem to recall hearing that, but I didn't want to claim it without proof.
The issues of radioactivity are important, but you have to remember that the induced radioactivity is not as severe a problem by a long shot as that of spent fuel.
Mmmm, without a working fusion power reactor design to compare, I can't be certain that will be the case. I'm not a nuclear power engineer, but it seems to me the inside of a fission power reactor is relatively mild compared to the inside of a fusion power reactor. The radioactive flux (for lack of a better term) on the internal components will be much, much higher, so we have little idea on how much radioactive waste a fusion plant would create. But again, we have nothing to compare it with yet.
Another interesting benefit of this technology is that if there is a failure you can easily turn it off.
In theory anyway.
There is no problem with potential thermal runaway, ...
There are fission reactor designs that solve the thermal runaway problem, like the CANDU previously mentioned on Slashdot.
I'm not certain I'm completely in agreement with this anymore. Not that I want to shutdown hot fusion research, but I've been hearing this argument for the last 30 years and it's wearing a little thin.
// TODO: fix sig
The proof of concept machines, like the Z-machine are extremely expensive, extremely complex and delicate, and they haven't even reached break-even yet. Unless there are orders of magnitude simplifications, I imagine a practical fusion power reactor would be even more expensive because it would have to be built rugged enough to operate 24x7 (which blows away the hope for cheap, limitless power).
The inside of a fusion power reactor would be a hellishly radioactive environment. Even assuming you don't have the nuclear fuel disposal problems you have with a fission reactor, you still have problems with storage and disposal of the highly radioactive internal reactor parts; injectors, heat exchangers, reactor walls, etc..
Oddly enough I'm not against research into hot fusion reactors, but I cringe everytime some journalist writes about fusion research promising "limitless, cheap energy". I especially remember that's what they promised about fission reactors.
// TODO: fix sig
It was well written, and provided a decent amount of information on the subject. Personally, I hope that funding for this kind of thing is continued. They mentioned spending some $4bn over the last 4 decades on this. That kind of money is just a drop in the bucket when the budget is looked at. Even if the don't produce anything for another decade, that's still several deacdes before we're suppoed to run out of oil (altough that could happen sooner/later)
---GEEK CODE---
Ver: 3.12
GCS/S d- s++: a-- C++++ UBCL+++ P+ L++
W+++ PS+ Y+ R+ b+++ h+(++) r++ y+
Uhm... just for the sake of accuracy... the sun does not transmit heat to the Earth. Heat is a measure of the activity of molecules, which are pretty damned thin between Sol and here. It is only after the LIGHT it transmits to us hits molecules in the atmosphere and on the ground/the ocean that the photons impart motion (heat) to the various elements of our planet. That is why seasons are influenced by the angle of sunlight rather than distance to the sun; it is winter in the northern hemisphere and yet summer in the southern hemisphere, and mountains (highlands) have climates which differ from the climates of surrounding lowlands - it has nothing to do with how close we are, and everything to do with how much air the sunlight has to travel through to get to the ground.
Um...no. While the heat produced by the reactor may be contained and converted into electricity, eventually all of that electricity will be turned back into heat again, warming the Earth...Basic thermodynamics, mate.
The have-not's of the world exist because of social and political issues, like corrupt third world governments and growing cash crops for export instead of food for self-sufficiency.
Ahh, but it's a nine-button mouse.
It's not so much the heat of the generator that's a problem; when you can generate vast amounts of electricity with minimal fuel costs, it will be used, probably in decreasingly efficient ways. All that energy has to go somewhere, and eventually it will, inevitably, become heat energy.
Were all geeks here... I'm sure that we've all had at least ONE math/science class... just list it as 1x10^22. Easy enough! --JamesT
--Chemguru
I'm too lazy to prove it for myself, so I'll let you do it. Try computing the source required to deliver a fatal dose of neutrons at say 1000 yards from a point source. Then consider the energy that would be released creating those neutrons. Do you really have a device that will kill people without destroying property?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
It's not to say that there's no recogniton of the value and difficulty of what's going on at Sandia and elswhere. It's just that cold fusion would have solved more problems than hot fusion.
If hot fusion is the Holy Grail, Cold Fusion would have been like the resurrection itself. It's just too bad that it doesn't seem to work. (not to say that some people aren't still trying).
`ø,,ø!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Wind power baby!
God damnit, yeah. Powerplants were so expensive that you never had enough cash for them after 50 years, especially in the first 100 years or so. That always used to screw me up. :/
What was the cheat to get free cash though in Sim City 2000? I used to know this one...
Syllable : It's an Operating System
Hey, it worked in Spaceballs, didn't it?
For God's sake, please don't tell me a Mel Brooks movie was a visionary look at the future.
But remember, if you get tired of them you can always make them go *POP*... You can even make them all go *POP* at the same time. No need to sleep or fooling around with your monitor.
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
Fission waste has a halflife of less than a 1000 years. It's not exactly halflife, because it does not decay exponentially at first since some isotopes decay into other radioactive isotopes. Anyway, the estimate is that spent fuel activity from a normal light water reactor decreases to about the level of uranium ore in about 700 years. FYI uranium ore is not very active.
Well, I am not afraid to applaud your rant logged in. Right on.
And in response to one of your detractors - I live in Texas. NICE and sunny. And I have plenty of power. Don't start on the Houston pollution thing, its a political stunt. Those readings were taken within 1/2 mile of an oil refinery. Not very good methodology.
Derek
"can't prove it, but the only and only reason we are not running on fusionpower is political..."
No, fusion isn't yet economical. It takes more power to create the containment field and the reaction than is captured by the reaction.
Derek
Its interesting the choice of examples you use to refute climate change.
1) "well documented" increases in the sunspot cycle.
2) Increases in volcanism - "much less in the 19th and 18th Centuries"
3) Deep ocean currents - "not fully understood" 4) Polar precession - "still being debated"
As to 1) this may in fact be true. However to link changes is sun spot cycles to terrestrial temperatures is a stretch. Where is the linkage? 2) Increases in volcanism? I fail to see how you can make this claim. The VAST MAJORITY of volcanoes on this planet were not even discovered until the latter half of the 20th century. These are the mid ocean ridges which to this day remain almost entirely un explored but compromise most of the Earth's volcanic activity. Add to this the lesser known volcanoes in places like Antarctica and Alaska which had no monitoring until this century. Its hard to argue there has been more volcanism.
3) Deep ocean currents are interesting. Strong linkages between changes in the North Atlantic current and the end of the last ice age (~11K years ago) are just starting to be understood. However mechanisms explaining how these currents have been changed are still not well understood. To claim that a demonstrably important but poorly understood mechanism is the cause of climate change is not a strong argument! Indeed the argument seems to stem from the fact that we don't understand what is going on!
4) Finally polar precession. See above comments as they all apply.
As to the Greenland and Antarctica ice cores these are excellent data. Looking at Oxygen isotope data (16/18 i believe) and particulate concentrations we have good global climate data from the last 100K years or so. The picture is ugly. The Holocene (last 11K years) has had by far the least chaotic climate of the last 100K years. This is scary because it is the time in history when humans learned to farm and build civilizations. Moving us back to the Pleistocene and a chaotic climate is a scary proposition! Additionally this data points to massive climate changes occurring over VERY short periods of time (the entire change in temperature that ended the last ice age may have taken less than 20 years).
The jury really has rendered a verdict. At least the jury of informed scientists. We still don't fully understand all the mechanisms and their relative importance. Nor do we totally understand the full extent we have and continue to change the climate. However very few people working in the field disagree as to the direction of change.
Some people prefer to stick their head in the sand instead.
Not to be picky, but that would be "Gordon Freeman" ( ).
The story didn't mention cold fusion at all. It was about warm fusion. That is certainly doable (nature have been doing it since the start of time). Please don't confuse the issues.
But the heating is not caused directly by the energy generated. The heating of the earth is caused by the sun, through the mechanism of greenhouse gases. Daily the earth receives about 3E18 KCal of energy from the sun. But the generation of greenhouse gases causes the earth's atmosphere to trap a small percentage more of that energy from the sun as heat. Since the greenhouse gases so generated don't go away (unlike the energy we generate, which is mostly radiated into space), the total amount accumulates and increases the amount of solar energy trapped. And we are currently generating about 20 gigatons of greenhouse gases per year.
"Bite me, it's fun!" - Crowe T. Robot
well a flowing Li first wall gets around a lot:
heat transfer: hard to burn a hole through a moving liquid metal as compared to stainless. If the plasma decides to move around a little and brush the wall, the Li just flows right back over the contact point. Do that to a stainless wall too much and it will weaken from the thermal stresses
neutron flux: neutrons activate yer Li first wall instead of more permanent structures, providing a longer operational life of the reactor
wall recycling: stainless loads up with hydrogenic ions and impurities like oxygen pretty fast becoming a source of low temperature fuel that you waste energy on trying to heat as it outgases from the wall into the plasma, flowing a molten Li first wall keeps a clean wall in contact with the plasma thus letting you use more energy heating the core.
MHD stability: There are also some interesting plasma MHD stability issues, which I don't fully understand. Supposedly having a moving conductive first wall stabilizes some problematic MHD instabilities. Basically you can either spin the plasma or spin the conductive first wall. Flowing Li is more or less like spinning the first wall.
CDX is just beginning to look at molten Li first wall issues, primarily the low-recycling effect. The first set of experiments involve examining the global plasma conditions with a small Li probe( a Li covered Q-tip of sorts) that could be heated to a molten state.
The next set of experiments will invovle a large amount of Li in a tray circling the bottom of the machine.
I myself am very interested in seeing how MHD forces effect macroscopic amounts of molten Li that will be in the tray. Even though the MHD of liquid metals is a mature field, there is still debate about whether the surface tension in Li is enough to withstand the MHD forces that will arise at a reactor plasma boundary.
-jef
Another absurd notion is that of 'cheap energy'.
And with limitless, cheap energy, the development of poorer nations wouldn't be one of them, either.
Only 1/3 of your electricity cost is for the fuel, the other 2/3 are for equipment, delivery, and administration.
love is just extroverted narcissism
To paraphrase: "12 apples, versus 3 centimetres".
Hmmm... just how many watts are there per amp, so I can make this comparison meaningful?
And put them on fault lines near LA... Yay! :)
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
It's an article not just about science, but about the people behind the science. I, for one, found it to be one of the best articles I have read in a long time, and a reminder that the people who work on our future world are real people, who live real lives and make real sacrifices.
I was left spellbound, and was actually getting a little ticked off that Paterniti wasn't answering the questions I kept asking, first in my head, and eventually calling out, "What the $&^* is this thing?!?!?!" And then I was mesmerized for the next twenty minutes or so. If more people wrote articles about the science in this kind of format, perhaps we could get average people excited about it once more, as they were in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and (to some extent) 70s.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The problem is that with the ownership of the power plants so scattered, coordinated maintenance and upkeep of the plants is virtually impossible, which is why mere Christmas lights sent us to the brink of blackouts when we were short by about 11,000MW.
As for whether Edison, et al, are paying the same prices, please note that the utility companies are under a rate freeze, and are not allowed to charge what they pay. The upcoming compromise still won't match the funds, and will likely only stave of bankruptcy for a while. Edison International may be able to keep Southern California Edison online for a while, but if something isn't fixed, the bailout for the company will cost more than we're ready to deal with. SCE is already discussing bankruptcy, and while it may be mostly tactic to get rate caps raised, when Wall Street is talking about it in view of financial records, it is a bad omen.
I'm in favor of deregulation in some form, too, but it certainly seems to me as if some form of minimal regulation and cooperation will be necessary to keep supplies in order. And if they want to build a nuclear power plant near my house, be my guest. I feel safer near a nuclear plant than near a gas, coal, or oil-fired plant.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Emissions are already as low as possible of cars that can still do work.
*chuckle* Like the new 50+ MPH hybrids, compared with the gas-chugging SUVs? If you honestly think that you can't make a certain vehicle more efficient, put strict price penalties on it. Fewer people will buy them. You'd be surprised how fast the auto companies find a way to do it.
Tree hugging liberal enviro-nazis
I believe that "Tree-hugging liberal enviro-communists" is what you're looking to say. Nazis come on the right, the same side as the polluters; Communists on the left, with the regulators.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
That's not true. The JET pressure vessel is made of an alloy of IIRC aluminium, nickel and niobium, which is laid over a steel framework, and many elements heavier than iron can capture neutrons with no induced radioactivity. On the breeding note, plutonium is produced in all fission piles from U238, but there is no U238 required in a fusion plant, so it's much harder to hide weapons grade material breeding.
Of course shielding the fast neutrons so that they don't reach the outside world at high energies requires... wait for it... 3 metres of concrete.
The activated material (which isn't that much as some of the material can just absorb neutrons without being activated) has a fairly short half life (~50 yrs) during which time it can be stored in... more concrete. This is much easier than fission waste which has a half-life ~50000 yrs during which it must be stored safely.
Depends on the quantity of deuterium and tritum in the thing and how often a reaction takes place, basically each collision between deuterium and tritum nuclei that react releases a few MeV of energy (can't remember the exact amount, but it's 6 MeV for 4 x hydrogen -> helium in p-p chain in stars).
Power output = number of reactions per sec x few MeV - power input to keep machine running. For tokamaks the power output / power input ratio improves as the machine gets bigger, but so do the difficulties of making the magnets. The same is true of a Z Pinch (which is actually a magnetic confinement device) but the rate the ratio increases with size is different.
Hmm, the machine this story talks about isn't a Z pinch though, but a birdcage inertial confinement device, like those built by Imperial College, London for the last few years.
I suppose the problems here is with making the birdcage of frozen D wires big enough that the amount of energy used to vaporise the wires is less than that released by the D-T reaction. The main problem here is that the multiple outwards going shockwaves of the vaporising wires have to be modified so that it squeezes an amount of D and T inwards in a cylindrically symmetric fashion. This is a very difficult problem as the team that worked on the plutonium bomb found out. Their solution (explosive lenses) can't be used here, so the problems with scaling up the birdcage is making the implosion of the D-T wires smooth enough to confine the D-T together for a useful amount of time.
We will create the United Federation of Planets.
"It was considered possible that it could ignite the atmosphere and turn the entire earth into one giant fireball, but we had to try."
Read the article, they don't use magnetic fields in this "Z Machine" ... very queered
I guess they could just vent the plasma into a cyclic pattern like a turbine... or maybe there's a way to draw off the charge directly like a giant plasma battery.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
"Visionary look at the future" eh? How about the fact that we have an Oxygen bar in San Francisco RIGHT NOW. How about the fact that we (everyday) are breathing an average of 40% of the oxygen we were thirty years ago? If the rest of the country(not to mention the rest of the world--I'm looking at you Asia) does not take California's example we will end up with no fuel, no clean air or water and food that is less nutritious than crude oil.
Naturally they are too expensive at present. Name me one technology of the past hundred years that was totally affordable when it came into existence. Electric appliances, computers and yes, even cars were property of only the very rich until they had enough research to make them cheaper.
Lord! Now I understand why wish to remain anonymous. But seriously, why revel in cowardice? Are you really too much a of a pussy to take responsibility for your views/comments? I mean, I'm not publishing my real name or e-mail address either but at least one can get ahold of me if one really tries. Oh, and yes, we do have many Mexicans. I say let them come. Along with the Chinese, Koreans and everyone else. Unlike Texans I choose to embrace all cultures even when it is inconvenient (reference: George W.).
You should read more *quality* English journalism, there's also a lot of shit English journalism as well.
Read like the normal over ponced stuff from BA in-flight magzines too me though.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
Therefore, let's hope that a fusion reactor requires at least 1000 tons of equipment to start the fusion.
someone mod this down
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
It was written for the Observer, so blinding techspeak isn't called for, but neither is the totally irrelevant pap that was added, most likely just to fill column inches=£££. Leave out the padding and you'd have an interesting article about a fifth of the length.
"The Journal Science" is not spelt "Observer". Sure, it could have been written as a strictly scientific piece, but that's not the point of the publication. By wrapping the scientific details in something the average non-PhD-in-plasma-physics-holding person can understand, the author is making the science available to more people.
As for length, publications which focus on making ad revenue generally want short pieces which are easily placed in a sea of ads whereas publications which focus on delivering news want quality reporting which often (but not always) requires more space than running news releases through a thesaurus (*cough*SunMedia*cough*).
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
All the money is still spent on "thermal" fusion, where the product is high-speed neutrons that must be captured and turned into heat, at great expense and producing enormous amounts of radioactive waste material.
A reaction that produces, instead, charged particles moving at high speed can yield power by directly extracting the kinetic energy of the particles with an electromagnetic field.
The disadvantage of this approach is that there is no need for multi-billion-dollar reactors facilities, so the contractors who work on fusion see no payoff in developing it.
Whenever you see a fusion project based on neutron emission, you know it's just more of the same old boondoggle.
Of course not all factors driving climate are anthropogenic. But in the case of the current warming trend, none of the possible causes you are citing disproves, nor does it have the same level of evidence as, the anthropogenic hypothesis.
I also have to point out that attacking the integrity of the researchers who work on climate change is pretty poor form, and even poorer argumentation. 'nuff said.
To suggest that all this work is a piece of trash because you don't like the implications is really not seeing the whole picture.
Cheap and clean power isn't a silly thing to wish for. "Limitless" is.
Where to begin, indeed. If you want to challenge decades of scientific work, as in "Global warming has hardly been proven to exist", you might do well to provide some substance to your own claims. I am a meteorologist in a national weather service that shall remain unnamed. Where I come from, they don't necessarily understand all the mechanisms at work in climatic change (nor do they claim to), but the warming trend has been measured; it's there, and it's beyond the temper tantrums of those who don't want to face it. The questions that need resolving are about the "hows" and the "whens" of global warming.
Your dismissal of the original poster's concerns about the environmental impact of heat release into the environment was as superficial as it was flippant. Heat isn't "contained". It is radiated, conducted, or turned into work. Eventually, every joule of energy we produce will seep out as heat into the environment, just as it does now with other forms of energy. (With "real world" results, such as the urban heat island effect).
In the context of your happy fusion utopia, supposing it were even feasible (what makes you think fusion would be cheap? Or even all that clean?), we would be looking at gigawatts upon gigawatts of "new" heat, orders of magnitude above our current energy consumption. So it's worth looking at the implications. Heat doesn't conveniently vanish like that.
Back in the heyday of the British Empire, which was created and held by virtue of Britian's naval supremacy, the Powers that Were in the Navy tried to suppress the development of steam technology, for fear of the expense of having to replace a lot of obsolete sail-driven craft. In the end, this proved impossible of course, and they ended up in an expensive arms race against Germany to see who could build the most battleships. It could be that a similar mentality exists today with the US and power production. After all, we've been very reluctant to share fission technology. Just something to think about.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Please re-read the parent. The British suppression of steam technology *was* an arms race issue, not just mercantile. Of course, the main reason Britian wanted to control the seas was so that they could guarantee their economic prosperity, and this was achieved by virtue of their military dominance.
They had the largest naval fleet in the world, larger than the other major powers *combined*. They feared the obsolescence of their fighting vessels. The old wooden sailed ships could remain serviceable for upwards of 80-100 years, but they wouldn't be very useful as fighting ships if there were steam-driven, turreted, iron ships out there roaming the seas.
While the safety concerns of fission-based powerplants are a legitimate concern, I believe that at least part of the US's concern is that it's nuclear muscle gives it special status as a world power. The arms-race issue is actually less of a concern for nuclear weapons, because no one actually wants to use them (crackpots, zealots, and terrorists excepted of course).
Additionally, the peaceful uses of nuclear energy might help allow third-world countries to close economic gaps in terms of rate of production. If the third world gets its standard of living up to something approximating the standard of living in the US, say goodbye to your cheap overseas labor (and probably the evironment as well).
And as soon as there's no longer cheap labor to exploit, you're going to either see one of two scenarios played out: 1) a new age of corporate feudalism, or 2) marxist revolution of the proletariat. It would seem that those who would like to see corporate feudalism come about are working very hard to get their system entrenched during these remaining years of economic disparity between the first and third worlds. So I think my insight into the British naval supremacy has some merit.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Don't you mean Standardise! :)
When Einstein developed and eventually published his theory of relativity around 1915 he was far away from being a hobbyist. In fact, he had already published his theory of the photoelectric effect, for which he was later on awarded the Nobel price, in 1905. Unlike what people like to believe, he was a hard-core scientist with a formal education in natural sciences.
HAHA - Your sig made me laugh histerically! I spotted what was in the url, and booted up another computer just to test it, A BSOD straight away... NICE!
Lets not confuse liberals with communists, environmentalists with nazis or whoever you want to associate with whoever. It is pointless trolling designed to aggravate. If a nazi chose to be a vegetarian, does that mean that all vegetarians are nazis? And by "Tree hugging liberal enviro-nazis" do you mean to say that there are no environmentalists among non-liberals? I wonder at the state of their intoxication when the moderators gave this blatant troll a rating of 3.
n t/ html/teamingcover.html
In anycase, lets talk about environmentalists. Which environmentalist are you talking about? Or perhaps you have a particular group in mind? If you live in California, some environmental group is probably protecting your drinking water as we speak and even that protection is limited as all those bottled water companies well know.
The deal with Californians/Americans is that they want to maintain their extravagant, unsustainable lifestyles even as they talk about protecting the environment. You can't eat the pie and have the pie too. I don't know how many times I've seen SUVs and the only person in it is the driver. And as often as not, it is a woman who is driving it. Big dick/vagina syndrome? Do you not know that CO2 levels have been rising since the industrial revolution? Ever heard of CO2 poisoning? Produce more CO2 so we can have more power? You want you children to buy air just so they could breath? No? Perhaps instead of buying that Suburban for your daily use a more efficient car will do? And these same people complain about the price of gasoline?
How often do you really need to haul or tow anything with your car? Is it really that difficult to rent a truck when you need it? And I know people who are studying to be environmentalists who drive those monsters when they obviously do not have the need. Some have told me how good it feels to drive a large high bodied car. But I think if they took some time to think about it, they'll realize that clean air and water is worth giving up being king of the road. And this is only one of many ways, people squander our natural resources. And the very fact people still think the environment is doing ok, when such essential (as opposed to 5.0 litre mustang or that Ghz computer) resources as air and water is threaten amaze me to no end.
You call creating new industrial areas at the rim of the city a solution? Urban sprawling is the very thing we must avoid. Its the worst thing you can do, reducing the already meager amount of viable natural habitat there is. We've already taken most of the prime habitat. What's left is mostly non-optimal for much of the wildlife. Not only that but we would be decimating the very land we are depending on to reduce our impact. ow much less CO2 would be recycled?
Fish and frogs may seem insignificant to those who do not study these animals. How valid is your judgement when you know zilch about them? I would recommend that you read up a bit. Here is a good start:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/WH/EOP/OSTP/Environme
"In the mean time, suffer, you wanted to play in the sun and beach while we stockpiled acorns for winter."
You mean to tell me that you guys don't import fossil fuels? You mean to tell me that you guys are actually self sufficient? Please! Spare me the BS.
You know what this environmentalist think? I think we should more conservative with our use of natural resources. No more street lights every 100ft no more 100 watt night lights. If we're careful we should be able to reduce our energy expenditure so that we don't won't really need new powerplants and our electric bills won't be too expensive even though we pay extra for imported electricity. And if we really need more power, I say we go with nuclear power plants. Something the designer of simcity never understood is how damaging a hydro electric plant is to the environment.
"Only Real Men Have FABs." -W. J. Sanders III
you can get books in text format for free from Project Gutenberg. Atlas Shrugged doesn't seem to be one of them though. http://www.gutenberg.net/
"sweet dreams are made of this..."
1) Patents are only binding in the United States, yes?
2) Every country would love to get their hands on this.
3) Say someone were to purchase the rights to use this product... Would they be able to turn around and give the technology away for free? (Assuming they lived in another country...)
Who is going to attempt to patent this?
Amazon.
--hongpong.com
i have a simliar problem with the scrubing bubbles in my poorly ventilated bathroom.
end communication
Sim City 2000 is a DOS game, you should be able to play it with dosemu.
Jan
It's amazing that nobody ever remembers the 1957 Kystym incident. I mean, it was only the second biggest nuclear disaster in history (after Chernobyl)...
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
Too bad Pons and Fleischmann had it wrong...
-jhon
The geeks have figured out how to make a dime off the suits. But, the suits haven't figured out how to make a dime off the geeks.
Wonderful! This gives me some ideas for new Tribes weaponary.
BTW, wouldn't you rather use a device other than a wimpy little mouse when exercising such power?
Right. Or just ask Val Kilmer and Keanu Reeves.
Ummmm. I don't think this particular machine actually exists yet.
Amazing, isn't it?
Well, no need to get snotty. Don't assume that if you like something complicated, anyone who doesn't like that thing obviously isn't intellectually up to that level of complexity. That style of writing is not to everyone's taste; I found it pretentious and tiresome. I don't like Douglas Coupland either, so I guess our tastes diverge. Personally, I'd rather have heard a little more about the actual facility and the science behind it and a little less in the way of wild philosophical speculations, references to the "copulation of fusion" and other such drivel.
Link to the wired news cold fusion article
Wired news article
You do not know what you are talking about. Climate change due to human activities absolutely HAS been proven, for any reasonable standard of 'proof'.
Some random links. Yes I know these aren't authoratitive primary sources but you can't deep link into the `Nature' site :(
BBC News
BBC News
paper in `Science'
Crowley in `Science'
(UN) IPCC
more U.N.
NASA
NASA
NASA
Nature
BBC News
New Scientist's excellent overview, ideal for clueless know-nothing^W^W getting a basic grounding in the major issues
Next time, try to avoid talking nonsense on a subject you know nothing about.
--
If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
Having unlimited power is a two-edged sword. It would certainly drive innovation and improve the standard of living for many around the world, but remember that most of that wonderful, free energy will ultimately end up as heat. The planet is already in a precarious thermal balance (some would say it's out of balance). If we could clean up the atmosphere to let the heat radiate out before fusion becomes a reality, this might work out ok. Otherwise look for hotter summers, more power for AC, more heat dumped into the atmosphere, lather, rinse, repeat.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Not to mention, it can only be created in relatively dangerous fission reactors.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Well, so long as you keep your commander, you can store a bit of that. Just do what I do: build a field of nuke silos so that you can rain destruction on your enemy. Oh, and if you're not on a metal world, build Moho Metal Makers. And maybe some Krogoths.
-Jason-
"Of course, he's merely an electrochemist and not a *ahem* real physicist, so his experiments can be discounted." yup, and the swiss patent office clerk who had astronomy as a hobby should be discounted as well right? In case you missed my point, the patent office clerk was Albert Einstein.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
There is perhaps hope though - remember that "economic oppresion" is generally not a deliberate evil plot by capitalist westerners, or a means of political control over third world countries, but merely a common byproduct of government and business acting in their own interest. It can be argued that industrialization/economic development of the third world is in the interests of business, because it creates new wealth and new markets (look at how many western businesses are investing in China - this is because they do not expect, or desire, China to remain a poor, rural economy for much longer). The poor are not a source of profit. Furthermore, as you say, the reasons for poverty are largely political, but the flipside of this is that it is as often politically advantageous to encourage development in poor nations as it is to hinder it (i.e. to strengthen allies/client states). Both governments and businesses *will* "give away" technology if they believe it is in their advantage to do so. Admittedly, this requires the right circumstances, which is why I agree that the simplistic "all the world's problems solved" stories are unrealistic.
Somebody needs to develop some 'fuck the Green propaganda' exploits for SimCity. Naturally they're going to have set up the game so that 'bad' power causes problems in the long run. The whole thing is based on Gaia, an ill-thought-out 'neo-Pagan' based philosophy of 'science' that gets laughed out of academia.
Hay thar.
This is an amazing thing. The first truly cheap and clean source of power. These are indeed exciting times.
With such unexhaustive power becoming more and more promising with each new day, this poses some serious thoughts as to the future.
Could we be on the verge of being able to colonize other planets or even solarsystems. For it seems the only thing stopping us in the amount to power that we can generate. With this almost unlimited amount, we may be able to put enough energy into a system that it will be able to go faster than light.
But once we colonize the other planets, who will rule them? Will the Earth unite into one big "country", under the rule of one government or will we squabble over who gets what and the country that has the most resources will have control of the new planets?
Now that we have the means to travel beyond the stars, how will we be able to keep those colonies in check and under one rule?
When they can achieve a sustained power production, that will be another story. And that's what it's all about, of course! But in the meantime, just build more of the good ol' uranium fission reactors...
Trying to make sure I was accurate I found this useful link. http://www.alcyone.com/max/reference/physics/prefi xes.html
If anything, they will sell the excess energy to other nations, which has more potential to create a kind of energy oligopoly of developed nations with even more leverage over poorer states.
I know I'm being pretty pessimistic here, but on the bright side, discussion of any alternative energy source is great. Infact, third world countries in Africa and the Middle East (which incidently is where a lot of our energy comes from now in a pre-fusion world) could benefit immensely from solar power in their very sunny climates.
And perhaps the pessimism is necessary right from the start, to remind us that developing a new technology won't save the world.
Implementing a new technology properly could do it though...
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
I've always thought that fusion would be great, but think for a second. If all of a sudden the whole world has access to unlimited amounts of power, how would that affect the planet, the heat created from the use of all this power has got to go somewhere.
Fusion is not as clean as they say. Just because the resultant He-4 isn't radioactive doesn't mean no radiation results. All plans I've heard of for fusion require the extra neutron to be captured by something outside of the reaction. The process of capturing this neutron, which has a lot of kinetic energy, raises the temperature of something basically designed for this and then transfers it to water to make steam. After that the generation of electicity is the same as in fission reactors and coal power plants. The catch is that in capturing this neutron, whatever element did it has been, in almost all cases, made radioactive. This is the same process used to make medical radioisotopes today in fission reactors. So we will still wind up with tons of radioactive leftovers. There is no free lunch.
Jack of all trades, master of some.
Smartass... But you are right in someways, but the 4th dimension is not time...it's just another dimension...look for references to tesseracts or hypercubes. Cooooooooool! I've always thought that the only way we could travel the universe would be faster than light transport, although the energies involved are very silly... Well, we can always try!
-- EdSi2001 - "It gives me a headache just thinking down to your level!"
You're right that everyone will benefit from this, but we're going to benefit the most.
Yep; everyone will benefit, and the people who spent the hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen will benefit the most.
Is that somehow a bad thing?
If a hunter shoots a deer, and cuts it up into enough portions for the entire family plus two for himself, is that somehow wrong?
Of course we should benefit the most; we spent all the money. Of course others should benefit as well; we're human beings.
-
The initial investment to give any region fusion power will be enough to keep it out of reach from third world nations for a long time.
Irrelevant. The more fusion power we use, the more oil will be available for those third world nations to generate their own power, and the cheaper that oil will be (due to decreased demand.)
In the long term, the cheaper power will decrease the cost of American goods, which will increase the ability of the First World to aid the Third.
The people using the non-renewable resources will benefit from this. EVERYONE will benefit from this.
Assuming it works.
-
Umm. No. No, it's not. It's beside the point anyway, because the heat of the reactor is contained by a magnetic field. You see, it has to be that way - people don't react well to temperatures found on the surface of the Sun.
Actually, you do get a heat pollution problem with any power source that isn't recycled solar (i.e. solar, wind, biomass). This is due to the fact that whenever power is _used_, the energy usually winds up as heat at the end of the road. Already, this causes local problems (cities heat up their local environment and any adjacent body of water), and when/if humanity consumes an amount of power comparable to that received by the earth from the sun, it will become a global problem.
That having been said, by the time this is a concern, we'll have the industrial capacity to get rid of it. It's straightforward to dump this heat into space; just set up a few square kilometres of piping and mirrors next to each city, and put it on the "hot" end of a heat exchanger. Compared to the cost of the city, it's cheap, and it solves any heat pollution problems associated with the city.
But the desire to hold back fission technology has a lot more to do with the arms race and the inherent dangers in fission, not some mercantalistic conspiracy.
There's what, maybe a dozen countries in the world that have fission power and three of them have had serious accidents -- Three Mile Island, which was serious but not catastrophic, Chernobyl which was about as serious an accident as you can have, and Japan's Tokaimura uranium processing plant which ultimately killed a few people. This doesn't count the untold thousands of deaths from "everyday" hazards like the Hanford site and other low-level contamination workers and nearby residents have been exposed to.
Of the dozen or so with fission abilities, two of the three are probably considered the most technologically sophisticated in the world. If they have screw-ups and "perfect" knowledge of their own abilities, how eager do you think they are to pass out fuel rods to places that still think DDT is great for indoor pest control?
This of course is completely ignoring the other major contributor to fission holdback, nuclear weapons. Tons of countries would love to get ahold of nuclear power plants so that they can use them for their weapons programs. All the world really needs is another Iran-Iraq war, this time with nukes.
If there's a conspiracy, it's a conspiracy of silence to hide the gross incompetance in the operation and maintenance of places like Hanford. I don't doubt that ANY radioactive matieral can be worked with safely, I do doubt that places that fucked around with transuranics in any capacity during the cold war probably have a lot of "untold" stories about employee and community contamination which has probably resulted in fatal cancers.
Let's also not forget the extent to which organizations like Kerr-McGee were willing to go to silence people like Karen Silkwood who wanted to expose their sloppy, profit-happy management.
All of this only underscores the rationale for keeping these kinds of materials out of the hands of third-world states where corruption and incompetance are rife.
If the scientists do have that kind of attitude, it's a recipe for failure. You don't want people who sit back in awe and say "My god, this could really work" when they achieve 20% of the required power. You want them to say, "Shit, we've got a long way to go! We're doing something wrong. Must try harder!"
That said, though, a working fusion reactor would be a Pretty Damn Big Deal. It could give us the ability to power the globe without pollution, without contributing towards global warming, and with ultimately lower cost. The role of electricity would change: it would probably no longer make sense to heat our houses with oil or gas. Battery-driven cars would get their energy from a clean source, rather than ultimately from dirty hydrocarbon-powered plants. The dependence on oil could be dramatically reduced.
Is it going to cure all of society's ills? Obviously not. However, it represents a kind of wealth which allows us to concentrate our energy and resources on other, more important things. As other technological advances have allowed us to build societies which are healthier, more free, and better educated, so this has the potential to allow us to take another step forward in a direction that is actually, for a change, sustainable.
No, it won't solve all our problems, but it has the potential to make our lives easier and better, if we let it.
I think this is a very simplistic view. Go and spend some time in a poor African country, say, and see the problems involved in lifting "much of the lower-class portion of our billions from their squalor and ignorance", and you might come to a different conclusion. You can't fix someone else's problems from the outside, any more than technology can cure all society's ill's. All you can do is help to enable people to help themselves.
And if cheap, clean power isn't an enabling technology, I don't know what is.
and they haven't even reached break-even yet.
Actually that is not correct - several of the protype machines have reached or exceeded break-even. The issues of radioactivity are important, but you have to remember that the induced radioactivity is not as severe a problem by a long shot as that of spent fuel.
Another interesting benefit of this technology is that if there is a failure you can easily turn it off. There is no problem with potential thermal runaway, or accidental critcality events like the one that occurred in Japan this year.
Cost is perhaps the biggest long term issue - but the potential impact of the technology is so great that we are foolish to not be spending more on it.
Paterniti is an award winning writer. His style is over the top - but his approach of looking for meaning where maybe there is none is most appropriate to the subject matter.
The same author wrote Driving Albert's Brain. He isn't a reporter - he's a *writer*, and an excellent one at that.
In my opinion - the piece is brilliantly written and is easily on par with Douglas Coupland. To be honest - I >>WISH I could write this well.
The original poster's comments were appreciative and insightful - your reply is the usual kneejerk reaction that twits make when look at a painting beyond their comprehension.
Turn your computer off for a week - you need to go read a real book - something not published by Tor, okay?
.Robert
.Robert
I will say that I feel there are legitimate issues regarding pollution that can and should be addressed, and local pollution problems should clearly be addressed. The point I'm making is that most climate models that are being used to proclaim "Global Warming" don't usually take into account the factors I mentioned. This is even worse when you get "global warming" stories in the popular media (which in regards to climatology you must regard Slashdot as a general news source).
One particularly disturbing instance of fraudlant data collection is in the case of current weather data gathering systems: When temperature data is recorded, for the most part the weather station data is recorded on paper logs. This is going more toward automated systems, but many historical records (as in most of them) are done on paper.
Anyway, when somebody writes down the daily high and low temperatures for a station, sometimes the numbers get inverted (a daily high of 92 degrees gets recorded as 29 degrees... in July for a North American desert) Based upon what surrounding weather stations are recording and historical records for that station (including the previous day's data) a determination is made to accept or reject this data as accurate. If the data is rejected, sometimes an approximation is made for that station and date, or it is simply not including in calculations (for temperature averages, ect. based on the intended purpose of the data)
Where the real problem comes is that much of the weather data used in these models has to be painstakingly entered in by hand one daily temperature at a time. A very expensive and slow procedure at best for what is not immediately useful information by itself. This also means that most climate data before 1950 (and 1970 as a real benchmark) has not been digitized for some serious number crunching, although there are some remarkable exceptions. In many cases researcher are aware of this fact and try to do alternative forms of data collection such as ocean floor sediments, glacial core tests, and geologic queries to try and pull some longer-term information.
Now imagine if you would, that the algorithms trying to determine if the recorded temperatures are accurate, as listed above, had been tweaked by a somebody trying to prove the point of global warming. (And don't tell me that scientific data doesn't get faked or bent... even in peer reviewed journals) How could you prove that the data was fraudlent? By challenging what was rejected.
Here is the real killer: The original unmodified temperature data for most of the United States has not been preserved, and instead the researchers are using filtered data to make all of their calculations. The original data is available in paper form... usually, but imagine the expense of having to re-enter the data all over again. For very little real value besides trying to prove a poltical point.
The other aspect that I question regarding data collection is the location of the weather stations. Many times the monitoring stations are placed in locations that are:
Near population centers - Much of the weather reporting is done by volunteers, many of whom even pay for the equipment themselves. Even if the equipment is donated, it is placed near schools or businesses that have a steady supply of consistant volunteers who can constantly monitor a station. This becomes a problem in rural areas in particular (even though some land-grant universities do have rural weather station programs.... still, you gotta consider how many grad students really want to trek out to the middle of nowhere just to get a bunch of weather data)
What I'm getting at is that the collecting of the weather data can be problematic, even if everybody is sincerely trying to do their best and report the data honestly. I sincerely believe that there are _**SOME**_ individuals that have a political beef and believe that the ends justify the means, so at least some of the data may not be as accurate as you may want to believe.
Does this mean you can sit back and dismiss global warming completely? Absolutely not!
Does this mean we have to immediately shut down the entire petroleum, automotive, avation, and any other industry that uses or releases any chemicals that are proven to produce greenhouse gasses (which also includes mass genocide because you can't have all of these people breathing CO2 into the air either)? Absolutely not!
This is a public discussion that requires accurate information, and as an ordinary citizen who as a minority actually understands the scientific method believes that the researchers discussing global warming and climate changes should do a better job of convincing me that we should undergo massive changes in our society with new laws and customs.
The reporter's writing style destroys much of the credibility this project has, IMHO. This really sounds like pulp science.
Besides, there is two important issues I didn't see addressed in the article.
It is one thing t create fusion circumstances for a very short period of time, using huge amounts of energy.
But once your wires have exploded, how are you going to maintain the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion?
And even if you reach sustainable fusion, how are you going to channel the produced energy into electrical power?
Roland
Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Infinite Energy magazine seems to keep up to date on cold fusion research. It's not exactly a main-stream scientific journal, so take it with a grain of salt.
There's couple of older articles on research at SRI here and here.
Allegedly there are reports of fusion byproducts from cold fusion experiments. Dr. McKubre from SRI has reported elevated levels of helium-4 in cold fusion cells, for example. Of course, he's merely an electrochemist and not a *ahem* real physicist, so his experiments can be discounted.
// TODO: fix sig
After that incident when two guys said that they had gotten cold fusion to work but it turned out they hadn't, cold fusion has been a taboo subject. However, there is research going on and they are getting results (more energy out than in), though nobody seems to know why.
No matter how you slice it, 1000 trillion is 1.0e15. There! no more need to argue about how to say it. Isn't scientific notation great?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
This reminds me of a valid scientific point, that any good litle nerd should be familiar with.
In the late 1800's, there was DC, the virtual child of Thomas Edison. He founded the Edison Electric Light Company based upon it. He made ridiculous amuonts of money off of his idea, being the only provider, even though there was nearly no demand. (Especiially compared to California now, see my previous comment).
After Edison's company had been founded, there was another scientist continuing the search for power, though Edison had already found it. It was Nikolai Tesla, and he was developing AC (the current standard). He couldn't get funding for his project because Edison used much of his sway in the business to fight him,or what little he actully had to do since Tesla was a minor scientist, albeit with a great idea. Eventually his idea was discovered and his ideas overcame Edison's, but wouldn't it be a shame if fusion went the way of the dinosaur? It is possible, it happens on the Sun constantly, we just have yet to reproduce the effect.
I suggest reading about Tesla on your own, they're tend to be quite fascinating, especially "The Philadelphia Project", even if they do seem a bit outrageous.
My opinions are better than yours.
Twitter.com/TrentonHyatt
One important technical detail that the article lacked was how is the energy going to be converted to electricity. I don't see how houses and factories are powered with immense pulses of radiation. Technically there's still long way to go before one of these machines produces steady flow of juice.
On the other hand, I find the idea of fusion power as a source of wealth and egalitary for the whole world to be naïve bs. The reasons of poverty are political and are not swept away with technological solutions, quite on the contrary. There's no way the rich governments and corporations which have invested gazillion dollars in this technology are going to just hand it over to the poor. It'll rather end up to be a new and powerful gadget in their toolbox of economical oppression. What the third world countries must do is to build dispersed power networks utilizing various sustainable sources (wind, solar, bio, hydro...) to make them indepedent of the fuel recources and technology possesed by the first world.
---------------
Fire Your Boss!
Actually, a sustainable fusion reaction is quite possible. Perhaps you've heard of THE SUN. Of course, I suppose you could argue that several billion years isn't sustained.
-atrowe: Card-carrying Mensa member. I have no toleranse for stupidity.
I believe that figure is actually what it sucks down (which may, in your mind, be worse). On the other hand, what the machine produces, according to the article, is 80x what the entire planet produces now (for a very short period, anyhow). The scary part is, they need three times that and then some before the "Machine" is supposed to work.
I don't suppose there's anyone around who knows much about fusion, huh? How much of this energy would be sucked back into maintaining a steady...um...fusing...and how much would actually be usable?
Cyclopatra
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
"We can't all, and some of us don't." -- Eeyore
This is truely beautiful writing. I haven't read anything this good in a long time. This guy has a future. (no puns)
Who is going to attempt to patent this?
"The frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits clamber over the high bay, down metal steps, and retreat to a copper-coated room behind a foot of cement."
Crap, cause i've been seeing smaller versions of these guys running around on my desk. Maybe I need to get some sleep or raise my refresh rate.
And not all third-world nations have these fuels in their soil.
New technology doesn't automagically make the world better, and fusion isn't going to be any different. All in all, if adapted all over North America, it's going reduce emissions, stop some kinds of resource extraction, make energy much cheaper.
And not every sector will be able to switch to fusion power right away. Transportion already accounts for the bulkshare of fossil fuel consumption, and it will be along time before everyone is driving electric cars (just because of the infrastructure changes needed to be made... the cars would need someplace to charge, which requires some sort of industry adoption of electric cars.)
But who knows, maybe in process of discovering that free market economies are disasterous, we'll all learn how to live and work together, poverty and environmental degradation will be eliminated, and fusion will be one of the tools.
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
They banned nuclear power, banned coal and petroleum fired plants, hydro is out because it threatens [insert cute cuddly fish of the day], and anything else has to meet impossible-to-meet emmissions standards. What's left has all their eggs on natural gas. Which is now in short supply and sending energy prices through the roof.
Way to go, your air is still no cleaner than elsewhere and now you're running out of electricity to boot. Well, stay the fuck away from our power. Hoover Dam belongs to Nevada.
CA needs to starve for a while to learn a lesson. Namely, that legislation can't fix your air quality problems without causing other worse problems. Stop trying to STEAL people's cars and crush them into cubes (see: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1223/sb42/smo gflyer_5.html). Start drilling for oil again, both on and off shore. Don't just plunder other people's oil. Want energy? Then you have to get a little dirty yourself.
Emissions are already as low as possible of cars that can still do work. More laws can't make them any cleaner. Stop trying to squeeze blood from a turnip.
You want less smog in L.A./S.F./S.D.? Block industry and business from expanding in existing commercial areas and create new commercial areas at the rim of the city. Decentralize business and industry and you won't have so much smog all in one place. In fact, you'll have less because people will be able to get to work faster when they're not all trying to cram into the same place every day.
In the mean time, suffer, you wanted to play in the sun and beach while we stockpiled acorns for winter. Now you wanna leech off of our supply? Screw you CA. You made your mess, now lie in it.
Hi,
2D -> He-4 + E is not correct. There are actually two different reactions that may occur, and neither is the one you have stated. These are:
D + D -> p + t + 4.1MeV
D + D -> n + h + 3.2MeV
Where the first byproduct is a proton, a tritium nuclei, and 4.1MeV of energy, and the second is a neutron, a Helium-3 nuclei, and 3.2MeV energy.
Both Tritium and Helium-3 are good fusion fuels in their own right, making the D-D reaction ever more valuable, as it's products may fuel subsequent reactions.
Also note that D-D fusion is the second easiest reaction to produce, after D-T.
This information is mostly from _Principles of Fusion Energy_, by A.A. Harms, K.F. Schoepf, G. H. Miley, and D. R. Kingdon.
I regard Bad Science: The Short Life and Weird Times Of Cold Fusion, by Gary Taubes, as the definitive reference on Pons and Fleischmann's "cold fusion". It's exhaustive, but a must-read if you call yourself a scientist and are interested in this subject, or just want insight into the whole "bad science" process.
(Of course if you are bent on believing a conspiracy theory, you will find it entirely unpersuasive...)
"Can these dedicated heros reach 1,000 trillion watts and reach high yield fusion?"
I think that a better question is if they can keep the plant from self-destructing every ~100 years or so, like they tended to do in Sim City 2000... That was the most annoying problem when "no natural disasters" was set, unless of course you were also using microwave power beaming *shudder*
"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Sounds about as safe as amateur explosives to me!
Sure, I guess this is technically feasible, but really, fusion isn't going to be that cheap... one of them fandangled "Z-Machines" is still going to cost a bundle. The initial investment to give any region fusion power will be enough to keep it out of reach from third world nations for a long time.
Look how the pre-initial costs (research) are being resisted by the gov't of the USA (the richest nation in the world).
Fusion power would be a wonderful advance for the whole world, but to make it accessible for the whole world, there's more to consider than just the technology. We have to start re-thinking third world debt (ie. loaning them more money is not the solution) and reconsidering free-trade in favour of fair-trade.
Only then will we be One World.
Jeremy McNaughton
Jeremy McNaughton
------ Live simply so that others may simply live.
"The magic bean; the Holy Grail: fusion. The idea is to take two isotopes of the hydrogen atom - deuterium and tritium - and mash them together with a little energy, which in turn releases enormous amounts of energy in the form of a single neutron."
That doesn't seem quite right. The neutron is also a biproduct, and D-T fusion is just a step on the way.
This is what happens in Deuterium-Tritium Fusion.
D + T = H-2 + H-3 -> He-4 + n + E
The result is helium (He-4), neutron (n), and energy (E) in the form of part gamma radiation and (a smaller) part kinetik energy.
That is not the end goal of fusion. There are a couple of reasons for this, first of all Tritium (T or H-3) is not a good fuel source. Tritium is a hydrogen isotope that in addition to a proton and an electron also contains two neutrons. It's radioactive, very toxic, and most importantly EXTREMELY expensive.
A better, but more difficult, solution is to use Deuterium-Deuterium fusion. Deuterium (D or H-2) is a hydrogen isotope with only one neutron. Deuterium is much cheaper to produce than tritium and is perfectly harmless. Furthermore the fusion reaction would look like this.
2D = 2H-2 -> He-4 + E
No free neutron is produced. This is a good thing. Neutron's can't be magnetically confined, so they simply fly out until it hits something, usually the physical confinement of the fusion reaction, wearing it down over time. The energy is released as gamma radiation.
Deuterium is the fuel source we assume will eventually be used when fusion becomes a commercial alternative.
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But the most effecient form of fusion is neutron fusion. This is when a protium (P or H-1) is used as fuel. Its two components, a proton and an electron, fuse into a neutron.
P = H-1 = e + p -> n + E
This is partly what the sun does, it produces helium from protium. The sun takes two steps, first producing two neutrons and then joining them with protium to produce helium.
4P = 4H-1 -> 4e + 4p -> 2e + 2p + 2n -> He-4
___
Unfortunately, the temperatures necessary to drive the proton cycle are not attainable by any foreseeable human technology, either controlled or uncontrolled.
All of the reactions considered for fusion power require isotopic hydrogen as at least one component (not a big problem, since deuterium is pretty common in ordinary water) and generate copious neutrons (a much bigger problem, as they degrade the structure of the apparatus and induce secondary radioactivity).
This is poetic misinformation, similar to the early line about H-bombs being "clean" because they were driven by fusion. It took Howard Morland to make it public that so-called H-bombs actually derive 80% of their energy output from the dirty fissioning of U238 in a fast neutron flux created by the fusion reaction. Take away this final step, by using a secondary tamper that won't fission, and the neutrons go out into the atmosphere -- making what is called a "neutron bomb." (Remember those?)
Fusion may indeed be an important power source one day, but not if we gloss over the real drawbacks and hazards as the early champions of fission did. No technology that requires high energy densities can ever be entirely safe, and if we promise people that it is then we are only setting it up to be massively rejected in the bitter disillusionment that will follow the first big accident.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
If you want to be a smart ass... at least be smart.
Unit........ USA............. UK
Million..... 1000000 (6 0's). 1000000 (6)
Billion..... 1000 mill (9)... mill mill (12)
Trillion.... 1000 bill (12).. mill bill (18)
Quadrillion. 1000 trill (15). mill trill (24)
quintillion. 1000 quad (18).. mill quad (30)
sextillion.. 1000 quint (21). mill quint (36)
septillion.. 1000 sixt (24).. mill sixt (42)
octillion... 1000 sept (27).. mill sept (48)
so... 1000 trillion is 10exp21, in USA would be a sextillion.
when you read this big numbers in the press you have to be very careful about who wrote it and where. In other countries, like Spain, for example,10exp24= 1000 trillion (UK) would actually be a thousand million billions (Spain)
Damn! Did this guy write romance novels in a previous career?
If I'd have known physics was that exciting, I think I would've chosen a different major in college.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Scientific American gave a much more scientific review of the Z machine in 1998, and I saw no change in the numbers from that publication. They have been insisting that they are 30 years away from high-yield (read: energy-efficient) nuclear fusion since they came up with the theory in the first place. They are still about 30 years away from it.
I can almost hear Bullwinkle saying "This time, for sure". Every time they take another step forward, someone moves the finish line.
It's a really cool story, though.
Wake up - the future is arriving faster than you think.
After a horrific accident at this lab in New Mexico, Freeman Gordon had to fight his way out against aliens from another dimension.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
The article IS interesting, I'll give it that... but the writer is sadly misguided (in addition to having diarrhoea of the metaphor).
/. But please, don't go around hailing it as the ultimate solution for world peace and ending man's inhumanity to man. It's not. We already have the technology AND the resources, as a race, to lift much of the lower-class portion of our billions from their squalor and ignorance, improve their lifestyles, and improve mankind as a whole thereby. We haven't, not because we cant, but because we just don't care to. We just can't be bothered, and to tell the truth, many of those in high places prefer things this way.
The "Machine", as he capitalizes it, may well be a fascinating invention, but all these references that seem to call for its worship as some sort of god really disturb me. He never comes out and says that, but he gets into the subjects of religion and deism, dropping smug references to "Waiting for Godot" and in general, clearing a path for the Lord in the desert. =P
It's just a tangle of wires and some reaaaaally high-tech gadgetry. It's not a god; it's not the final solution. Free, safe, clean power is a Good Thing, that is true. But it won't answer all the problems, and he holds to one of the most common fallacious beliefs in existence today. I quote Poul Anderson, from his short story "Superstition", set in a post-apocalyptic future :
"...But the superstition is this, son: that science could understand everything, and do everything, and make everything good... I wonder how they could have held so odd a belief, even then."
It's a good idea, and a great new technology, and so it deserves a reference on
Before a technological advance can "cure all of society's ills", it first needs to cure the common flaw of society - human nature.
And there's no cure for that.
-Kasreyn.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger