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."

Comments

Its a Pity itl take so long

[ThePeices]

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.

Re:Its a Pity itl take so long

[Lord Bitman]

Yeah, don't you miss the good old days when new developments took just as long, but nobody knew about them so they took ten times longer than they would have if it had any funding whatsoever, and then 90 years later when the 3 people who were working on it are long dead somebody stumbled accross it and the ignorant masses went "ooo, it lights up!" delaying useful application another 50 years?
Stop driving your car.

about time

[Goldsmith]

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.

Tritium's not water

[Finuvir]

tritium's not exactly water

Actually Tritium's not water at all, it's heavy hydrogen. That is, one proton, two neutrons.

Re:Tritium

[helix400]

Tritium is an isotope of hydrogen.

It has absolutely nothing to do with water. (H20).

I think what the poster to this article, WannabePhysicist, was thinking about heavy water, which is 2 deuteriums + 1 Oxygen. I've never heard about a 2 Tritium + 1 Oxygen though? Has anyone else heard about it? Do they call it super heavy water? Or do they just not give it a name?