Slashdot Mirror
British Researchers Say Fusion Is Close
sh00z writes: "The article quotes a leading scientist saying that Fusion power is 'within reach' in the next decade, with commercial plants to follow within another 10 or so years. Shhhh. Don't tell anyone at Texas A&M. They might just jump the starting gun again."
IIRC, these folks are all using a tritium-deuterium reaction, which yields helium and a neutron. For one thing, it's a much easier reaction than, for instance, deuterium-deuterium, and, for another, the neutrons give you a way to extract the energy and manufacture tritium. Of course, the other thing the neutrons do is irradiate the structure of the reactor, which ends up leaving you with all sort of fun radioisotopes to dispose of later.
Of course, that probably pales by comparison to the amount of waste generated while refining fissile fuels, and you completely avoid the possibility of a meltdown, but still, I might not go so far as to claim it's 'pollution free.'
I hope it is the end-all solution too, but I doubt it. Nuclear fission has always been condemned by environmentalists, but it is much cleaner in comparison to fossil fuel burning.
I doubt that fusion will survive implementation without similar scarring.
...but we see these stories appearing in the news media every time fusion researchers get a little concerned about their funding. It seems that the main reason these stories appear is to drum up some public support for continued funding (as with all sorts of long-term science research that's mostly funded by public money).
It's sad that public-funded science has to do this, but this is just how it is in modern Western society. This is one area where I have resigned myself to the fact that it's not worth trying to change the system - it's just not going to happen. At least a reasonable level of public funding is available for such research, even if it's never quite enough.
Anyway, fair play to the researchers, they've got their media coverage, their funding is assured for a little longer.
I hope that the great dream of widely-used fusion power is something I will see within my lifetime. Perhaps people in future centuries will then look back on our lifetimes and know that not everything that we did harmed ourselves, our rights and our planet.
anybody got any info on what tech problems?
MAST is a spherical torus....and ST's are suppose to solve a few issues that tokamaks (doughnuts) where found to have. First Tokamaks reuire a very large magnetic field for containment. Producing the magnetic field is probably the biggest overall cost money and energy-wise. An ST, like MAST or NSTX (www.pppl.gov/projects/pages/nstx.html) or the machine I'm chained to NSTX's little brother CDX (w3.pppl.gov/~cdx) use proportionately less external field that a tokamak would need for the same plasma current. For fusion reactor design that's a big advantage for the ST.
The ST also hopes to solve a real plasma physics issue...MHD instabilities. Making cold plasmas isn't all to difficult. Once you start pumping energy into the plasma you get very exotic plasma wave physics that can tear the plasma apart. You can design some of the instabilities away, if your design is clever enough....is the ST a clever enough desgin? I don't know. but ST's do allow access to a new regime of labortory plasmas
There are a lot of unresolved issues in magnetic confinement fusion. The ST machines are definitely worth exploring but it's not clear that a working fusion reactor will be based on anything like MAST.
-jef
im too tired to write anything longer
For an insight into the MAST program and its precursor START, slashdotters could do worse than click on the link at the bottom of the article.
Briefly, the START program proved the advantage of spherical tokomaks over conventional tokomaks. A tokomak is a torus shaped confinement vessel responsible for generating the magnetic field.
START was so successful, that MANY researchers world-wide are now using spherical tokomaks. The issue now is not "can we sustain a fusion reaction" but "can we do so efficiently."
Currently we can't which is why there's been no press releases. At this point it's purely an efficiency problem.
As an interesting aside, I noticed a page with some interesting uses for spherical tokomaks. One in particular caught my eye:
-- QUOTE --
Actinide Burner
Another idea for using the source of neutrons generated by a spherical tokamak is to "burn" unwanted long-lived actinides present in the spent fuel from a nuclear (fission) power station.
By transmuting these into shorter-lived nuclides, the waste burden from conventional nuclear power could be alleviated.
-- END QUOTE --
Now that's a useful fringe benefit.
Cryptimus
Compared to the total amount of money governments around the world piss away on totally useless pork-barrels, the amount of money spent on fusion research is trivial, and the payoffs potentially huge.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
While were at it, where is the Helium? If it works, I expect your fusion apparatus to make helium right?
Correct; all cold fusion cells produce easily detectable, large quantities of helium. The first use of palladium to transmute hydrogen into helium was seventy-five years ago:
BTW, if it works, why wasn't it on the market almost immediately?
Lack of funding.
Cheers,
James
We have yet to come up with a foolproof anything.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
You silly git. When will you get off that kook science dream train and join the waking world?
Let's address your paranoid conspiracy mania point by point, shall we?
Who the hell cares how he logged in? And what deep, deep nerve did he touch which so drove you to go all 'investigative reporter' on his ass? That is what we call, 'Misdirected Energy.' Do some healthy research some time rather than spend all your powers holding up the popular kid's paradigm.
This is a valid observation. (Though I did count a few other different names unique to two of the articles.) And while we would all like to see long lists of references, you must still answer this question: If the science is good, then who cares how few people are involved? Marginalized areas of study are nearly always tended to by small numbers of public researchers. The history of science confirms this pattern MANY times over. Remember: 'Popular' does not mean 'right'. In fact, it usually means 'Lowest Common Denomonater'.Now you're just acting foolish. First of all only one of the people involved wrote for "Ininite Energy Magazine". And secondly, why the heck is this bad? Of COURSE people who study marginalized areas of science are going to want to speak in forum, especially when they believe that the world is being manipulated by greedy people who want to see noble ideas perish.
Basically, you're doing it again; just because you've been told by the popular kids that certain things are 'uncool,' you blithely go about bullying the kids who have enough self-resolution and guts to act like individuals. This is, in fact, why you felt impelled to go all 'investigative reporter' on James; you obviously squirm in fear at the idea of having your own name associated with 'uncool' science, and you automatically assume that James would feel the same way too. And so you attacked him with the same ammunition that you have been kept in line with. You silly dork. Grow a damned spine.
It is obvious that you are just another sheep scared of an open gate in the pasture. TRY for once to act like you're not.
Remember; Sheep get fleeced. And eaten.
-Fantastic Lad (A.K.A., Fuck You. --People get shot by morons like you for thinking different, and I think REALLY differently. I may be brave, but I'm not stupid. Anonyminity is one of the great powers of the web! People can speak freely without fearing bullets.)