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."

Comments

Pollution-free?

[MadDog Bob-2]

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.'

Call me a cynic...

[marm]

...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.

Re:Call me a cynic...

[sigwinch]

Call me a cynic but we see these stories appearing in the news media every time fusion researchers get a little concerned about their funding.

Give me a break. Designing fusion reactors is a business just like any other: turn off the PR and the venture dies. It's just like tampons and beer, you have to keep it in view or people will forget about it. The only way it could be any different is to have total centralized economic control, which has historically proven inferior.

It's sad that public-funded science has to do this, but this is just how it is in modern Western society.

Give me a break! Developing and productizing commercial fusion reactors takes an *enormous* amount of resources, comparable to the development of modern semiconductors. At the same time, petrofuels are so cheap that the incentive to perfect fusion is negative for even the largest corporations. The private money that's going into fusion right now is pretty much a gift, since there is no expectation of meaningful return on investment. Thus much of the effort is carried out by international programs and academic researchers.

Re:what in the hell

[jspaleta]

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

Re:Definition of "Real Soon"

[Goonie]

Instead, we're wasting billions on fusion research welfare for a few academics who spend entire careers doing it, and retire handsomely with no useful results!

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.