Slashdot Mirror
US Joins ITER Tokamak Fusion Project
WannabePhysicist writes "Energy secretary Spencer Abraham
announced at the Princeton Plasma Fusion
Laboratory
that the U.S. will join ITER
, the international plasma fusion reactor effort. They're currently
planning a tokamak (doughnut) design, and have some pretty optimistic energy
production predictions for 2014. As many of us in science know, estimated
times are usually off by a factor of two, and then sometimes and order of
magnitude -- but hopefully they'll get it to work.
Many people push this as the cleanest form of energy, but fusion reactors
will most likely contain deuterium, tritium, and lithium (tritium's not exactly
water) The deuterium and tritium fuse, giving off an alpha (4He nucleus),
a neutron, and some energy. This energy causes more reactions (the controlled
fusion part). The neutrons hit a 6Li blanket (surrounding the chamber)
which then produces more tritium for burning."
Mmmmmm tokamak..... *homer simpsons drool*
Tastes crunchy in beer!
It's not exactly water, but it's not exactly plutonium either.
Its a pity that fusion based electricity generation will take so long to arrive. With fossil fuels being used at ever more larger rates, its THE technology that humanity needs to replace the current systems of electricity generation. The environmental benefits of using clean fusion to generate say, hydrogen for fuel cell powered cars as well as normal electricity use would be astounding. Unfortunately commercial greed would stiffle any hopes of that.
At this point, there are very few major research tokamaks out there. In the US, there is only really one that is flexible enough to do a wide range of experiments on (at GA).
This isn't going to necessarily lead directly to a commercial design, it's still a research reactor, but there are a LOT of big questions in fusion that can be answered by this device, and it would be irresponsible of the US to not be a part of it (that is, as long as we want to at least look like we're trying to find clean energy). At the rate different things are going, fusion might not be the energy source of the future, but you never know, it's always worth trying. It's only through programs like this that we'll get there.
When the US first left the project it was because it was billed as a demo commercial reactor, which just wouldn't have worked. It might be able to get more energy out than you put in, but the cost of construction and upkeep is still too high for such large reactors. A major part of fusion research now is making the reactors more efficient, require less repair and have a smaller size. Oddly enough, we can't do that unless we build a larger research reactor.
Of course not. Tritium's a form of hydrogen. You'd need oxygen to make water (assuming those two extra neutrons don't get in the way, IANA-Nuclear-Physicist).
But then again, I could be wrong.
Anyone know where this thing is going to be realized. I remember reading (maybe newscientist ?) that they want to built this test plant in Spain or France near the Atlantic, so they could easy get supplies and cooling from the ocean.
I'm glad that the US finally decided to go along since the project was not funded completely yet.
As for the prospects of energy supply, I read that they also think a postive effiency could be realized somewere around 2008, but would then just go out the drain......
withput an obious reason I can remember
seems like a waste
Why is anything anything?
Princeton Plasma Fusion Laboratory...
...and he grinned, like a fox eating shit out of a wire brush.
and then sometimes and order of magnitude
you do mean 'an order of magnitude more' don't you?
I wonder what happened to the Joint European Torus project that was so much hyped, but couldnt produce sustained energy after many trials across years. Instead of doing everything America vs Europe vs Japan, they could so join the europeans for reduced costs and better maintenance across years, unless theres weapons technology involved of course.
I also wonder if its at all possible to locate the reactor close to other Big Science labs and create larger science community centres, maybe at BNL or LANL or Fermilab. Sharing ground and resources with other Big Science labs will help cut costs, and considering the fact that alot of construction/computer/other materials used for accelerators can also be used for the torus so uniting the location will make sense. Am I wrong?
At least in one state they should build large multiple torii if this succeeds. The abundance of energy will allow the government to enforce a clean-fuel-only vehicles law, which will really make a practical difference.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Yes, isn't it amazing that the US rejoins a project which they left in 1998, delaying it in the process?
Deuterium, tritium, and lithium-6 are right behind plutonium on a nuclear bomb builder's shopping list. Especially if he wants to build a more efficient (powerful) bomb, or (really powerful) H-bomb. You can Google for details and bomb designs.
Deuterium is fairly available; tritium & lithium-6 are extremely hard to get...but a decent fusion reactor will give you an ample supply. I think some (hypothetical) types of fusion reactors are also great for breeding plutonium (from uranium).
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
What's the big deal if you have D, T and Li at a fusion power plant? You can't make a fusion bomb out of these materials by themselves. Fusion reactions require high energies to set off. As a result, reactors require magnetic or inertial confinement schemes. An H-bomb still needs a fission bomb (requiring highly enriched Uranium or specific isotopes of Plutonium) to cause fusion. The real concern then is preventing the spread of fissile material in the first place.
Umm, at the risk of spoiling your conspiracy theory, if what we wanted was cheap oil, we would lift the sanctions, or do what the French did (sign an oil deal with Saddam in contravention of the UN sanctions and resolutions). Or do any of a hundred other deals which would allow us to get that oil cheap without the expense of a war, but wouldn't liberate the people of Iraq or end the threat of WMD.
At any rate, we only get about 17% of our oil from the entire Middle East, so your black-helicopter cliams just don't hold up...
I believe the point is that although it is claimed to be safe, it's not like it's all that safe, as it uses tritium, which is very dangerous, and not at all like water.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Ahhh...and since we're absolutely, 100.000% sure that no bad guy anywhere has gotten (or ever will get) his hands on plutonium, we have no need to control the ingredients that a bad guy could use to upgrade a bomb (extra bonus +250,000 people inside fireball, +1,000,000 people in radius of total distruction, etc.).
BTW, you know that T alone is good enough to build a "dirty bomb", right?
It's easy to make up & spread cool- and credible-sounding stuff. Finding & checking hard facts is hard work.
Heh heh, so much on the "not water" part. I guess I wrote this kinda fast -- all I was thinkin was that tritium is not the SAFEST material in the world (I get that tritium != water), though I don't know enough to comment more than that.
ITER would be "hot fusion." No one really works on cold fusion -- that was just a little thing that sizzled in and out of the headlines awhile ago, but seems to stay alive in the minds of science fiction writers. The only possibility of something a little bit like cold fusion was called muon-catalyzed fusion, which was a brilliant idea put forward by some brilliant people, but it doesn't work in practice... unfortunately :-(
What ?
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Something good: Brought to you be the Bush Administration.
No one dares mention that its a decision by the Bush administration when its something good. Why is that ?
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
If someone has weapons-grade U or Pu and sophisticated enough to build a weapon, what makes us believe that acquiring D or T would be any more difficult? You pointed out yourself that D is easy to acquire. Yes, these materials should be protected to some degree (mostly to prevent exposure to the public), but if fusion works, we can derive enormous benefits while still assuring ourselves that nuclear weapons will still be difficult to acquire.
.... You wouln't even need too much radiation to freak the public.
A dirty bomb is easy to produce given the vast quantities of radioactive materials that can be fairly easily acquired, mostly from weakly defended (if at all) "non-nuclear" facilities. Walking into hospitals, stealing density gauges from construction sites, amassing old fire alarms, swiping stuff from a university,
Building a Pu production reactor using a fusion neutron source is unattractive since everyone does it easily using fission reactors. Hmmm...build a multi-billion dollar fusion reactor or build a multi-million dollar fission reactor?