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U.S. and China Join Fusion Project
Garp writes "According to the BBC News website, the U.S. has finally decided to join the international Fusion project, Iter, along with China, with the aim of building the worlds first commercially viable Fusion reactor. Fusion is one of the cleanest forms of energy conversion, excluding renewable natural sources, like wind farms, tidal generators, and solar cells."
This was in the BBC news thingy on my right sidebar a few days ago.
So who gets to set off the first fusion bomb?
Fusion has been the nuclear reaction in all the modern weapons. Typically, a fission reaction is used to initiate the much more powerful fusion reaction. The real trick is getting CONTROLLED, CONTAINED fusion to work. That problem is what fusion as a viable energy source is all about. Just getting atoms to fuse and produce tons of energy is no great feat.
GMD
watch this
I suppose "cleanest" may be literally true, but in terms of overall environmental impact, fusion has got to easily whip at least the first two. The environmental footprint of windmills and tidal hydroelectric is huge. And, of course, most of the world doesn't have a tide to draw on, and I'm not even getting into the "draining the angular momentum of the planet" issue.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I see from the Iter website that this reactor is essentially trying to get fusion to occur using the magnetic-confinement technique of the Tokamak reactor. The other approach to controlled fusion studyied over the last few decades is inertially-confined fusion. Can anyone tell us what the state of inertially-confined fusion is? Does the US's and China's joining of the Iter project signify that the mainstream thought is that inertially-confined fusion is dying? My understanding is that both were hot research topics in the 90s but I don't know what the current thinking is. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
GMD
watch this
The third is a bitch, too, because of the Huge area that needs to be covered per kWh.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The hideously low efficiency of solar cells makes them a waste of -other- natural resources to manufacture, transport, purchase, install, and maintain.
That is, you burn more fossil fuel energy deploying photovoltaic arrays than you regain during their (short) usable lifetime. That doesn't make them any less-convenient for remote off-grid applications, but they're not going to replace other power sources anytime soon.
Solar energy is still viable for heating (obvious) as well as power generation using mirror concentrators.
Could you please back your statements up with some sort of facts, preferably from a reliable source?
This source seems to suggest otherwise. Btw, the mass-production of solar-cells has begun after the publishing of this paper.
>during their (short) usable lifetime
I don't know about your experience. But I've had a solar cell, which has been serving me well for longer than 20 years. Guarantees are usually issued for 20 years lifetime.
Interestingly, I've heard similar stories about nuclear plants. Not that I'm claiming that they are true.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
it may produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for 500 seconds or longer, but how much energy is required to initiate the process? i'm not really that familiar with fusion, but it would seem that quite a bit of energy would be required to heat the elements to the balmy 100 million Celsius.
I have visited thermal, hydro-electric and nuclear power plants. At thermal and hydro-electric plants, even low level workers had some idea how the things work and what control panel indicator means what. At nuclear plant, all they could say was, "if this light is red, we are screwed" (well, this is oversimplication). When you have such things, it is hard to expect, safe, reliable and cheap power. The same remains true for fusion tech. Only few qualified people exists and hence, it would be too costly atleast for next 30-50 years to use fusion to replace other types of power. We are still at early experimental stage and nowhere close to commercial exploitation of fusion power.
They don't like to mention how many hundreds of tons of material would be made radioactive by the heavy neutron bombardment from hydrogen reactors. The whole apparatus would have to be replaced frequently as it gets too damaged by the bombardment to hold itself up, and the scrap would have to be put somewhere safe, just as with fission reactors.
(These remarks apply to thermal neutron processes, not those that extract electromagnetic energy from kinetic charged particles. For some reason nobody likes to talk about those.)
Being the only internationally shared landmass, and being a very nice distance away, I humbly suggest putting it in Antarctica.
OR they could spend the next 3 years dickering over who gets it.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
The U.S. did. In 1952. It was called the H-bomb. You're way behind.
While it is true that the result from Iter will be a lot of radioactive waste, this project must continue because it is vital to fusion research. The radioactive waste will result because of the plan to use stainless steel in the reactor construction. Stainless steel is easy to activate (because of the nickle and other elements in it) however it is one of the few materials that can take the reactor wall loading that we know how to work with (Vanadium would be an excellent replacement and have a very short halflife (on the order of decades) except for the fact nobody really knows how to roll it, weld it, make it into a pipe etc...). Don't forget that the vast majority of our industrial complex is built on the understaning of steel.
As with any prototype, there are issues. Fusion by itself is clean and if low activation materials can be used, such a silicon carbide and vanadium, which will result in very little radioactive waste with short halflifes.
The other aspect of ITER, which is a boon for fusion research, is that it is the first comercial "scale up" of a fusion reactor. Current research reactors are small and thus too small to generate enough fusion power to be useful on a grid. Fusion does occur, but it is not at a "density" (I am taking a bit of liberty with the nomenclature for a simplified explanation) that is sufficient to offset the power put into the system (ie other lossy effects are not overcome until there are more fusion reactions per unit time in a given volume)
In short future reactors will be a LOT cleaner after ITER. It's sort of like the early days of fission. A crude graphite pile lead to intrinsically safe and efficient boiling water reactors. It seems to me that a little bit of pain to jumpstart the research is worthwhile.
Also, there's the safety factor - with fusion, if containment is breached (as you know, I'm sure) the pressure and temperature drop to the point of no reaction very quickly. Also, couldn't less mass of material be used to shield the reactor (compared to fission)? That would very much reduce the environmental impact of low-level waste when the plants are decommissioned. And there isn't much high-level waste at all, is there?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
That's why a lot of us like the prospect of aneutronic reactions, like B11-p. Vessel activation isn't really an issue anyways, if you build your reactor vessel with the correct materials (I wasn't aware steel was the only structural material around). Activation is not a long term problem in fusion. Doing self-sustaining fusion is. BTW, I am not a fan of ITER. It is pronounced "Eater", by the way, as in "it ate my budget". Fusion will never be economical using current 'build big = better' methods. We need to learn how to do self-sustaining fusion at smaller scales. 1000 small experiments net more knowledge than one humongous one. Yes, IAFP. Yes, these views are heretical. Yes, I've already pissed off most of the fusion community. Particle physics has its small science proponents (they tend to live on mountaintops), why don't we?
At $5bn each the US could buy 10 of these things for the projected cost of the current action on Iraq ($95bn) and remove the need to protect interests the Middle East at all. (The remaining money would be needed to research replacements for fossil fuel equipment)
As an added bonus, it seems likely that it can double as a generator, that is, electricity can be pulled out directly with no extra moving parts.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
This is no good. This article has made me come to the conclusion that Osama Bin Laden was the spark set in motion a process that caused the US to realize, finally, that dependence on Oil is a very dangerous thing. It makes you dependent on oil-rich countries, which gets you into all kinds of nasty nations and their politics, which just pisses off just about everybody and causes war and terrorism, and still we have limited energy. It causes mean old bastards who are happy living in a desert, if it means money for them, to have a substantial amount of power in the world. Mean old bastards shouldn't have that kind of power.
Fusion power is the obvious way out, and with the US behind fusion for real, we'll get the thing worked out.
A lack of energy is really the root cause of most of life's problems. The cost of making goods trends towards zero as you have more power to feed into a system - Clarke points out your real pollution problem becomes heat in a couple hundred years' time, but I digress. Fusion can provide the energy that will provide most people with essentially unlimited power, raising the standard of living all over the world. Stop and think about this for a minute or two. This will cause a socio-political reorganization on Earth that will allow, for the first time in history, a real chance at world peace.
Now this is all great news, but look at the cause and the effect. Sure, it's just the 10000-foot overview, but, fuck, that doesn't fit anywhere in my moral framework. "It adds up. You just don't like what it adds up to."
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The construction cost for Iter is put at about $5bn. However, the cost will be shared among all of the collaborators, who will provide most of the components in kind.
I expect the US DoE(nergy) to build a copy of it, and do it faster that the Iter project. I would not be at all surprised if the USA has a copy of this fusion power plant before the official version is built. I would also not be surprised if it were a secret until it is producing power optimally. After all, we all saw Contact: "Why buy only one, when you can buy two for twice the price?" It's only $5B.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
The problem with nuclear fusion is that it has been the classic example of a tech that's 50 years away- and it's been that way for the last 50 years. It's turned out to be a much more thorny problem than people anticipated- uncontrolled fusion reactions are fairly easy to produce after all- just direct the energy from a fission primary at an appropriate quantity of tritium. Unfortunately, this is a hydrogen bomb, and makes for a rather inefficient power source.
However, controlled confinement of plasma has proven to be much harder. ITER will use the most popular confinement method, a tokamak, which is a design devised by the Soviets (Tamm and Sakharov) back in the 1960s. So essentially, the basic plan is 40 years old, but there have been a number of obstacles- political and economic as well as technical to making this work. It will be interesting to see if their tokamak avoids the key problem of the design; in a tokamak, the plasma itself has an internal current running through it (as opposed to other designs like stellarators) and has proved rather deifficult to contain in the torus. I believe the Joint European Torus has had several "disruptions" of this sort that have lifted the several hundred ton vessel off its bolts. The good news, of course, is that such events (which are rare, and should be much more rare in a non-experimental reactor) are really the worst things that can happen to a fusion reactor. Although the plasma is extremely hot, it is not very dense at all (obtaining a critical density is really the greatest challenge) and thus there exists no possibility of 300 million Kelvin plasma vaporizing the container walls in some sort of runaway accident. Also, while they are not completely clean (no power generation method is) the radioactivity produced is low level, especially in comparision with fission reactor spent fuel rods.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
cost of power:n d 8$wh @12mph avg wind?
;)
fusion 27$wh 5b$/500mwt@.45(steam cycle eff.)
solar 16$wh 6$w@.40(night,clouds,..)+1$w(inverter,batery)
wi
when the price == solar I'll trade in my liquid metal salt breeder
USA joins China in fusion project? Okay! Let's see who in China we can put with our Stanley Clarke and Pat Metheny.
'failsafe' my ass.
and if you cant imagine it then you have a small brain.
it was done a good two years before we did it.
Not really. The hazards are about identical- the lithium reactor can still melt down,
While the lithium blanket can certainly melt, this does not in any way resemble the catastrophic runaway reaction that is called "meltdown" in a fission reactor. It's caused by inductive heating from the same currents used to heat the plasma. If anything, your reactor would stall if the blanket melted or boiled off, as you'd be losing more neutrons (as opposed to breeding more tritium from neutrons impacting the blanket).
Re. fission, all tritium breeding from the lithium blanket is far into the sub-critical regime. If a runaway fission cascade in lithium were possible, we'd have bigger problems than unstable fusion reactors to worry about (fission reactors and weapons would be a lot easier to build, for one).
The tritium-tritium reaction is a different beast though; that's potentially pretty clean, and pretty safe
Um, no. It's dirtier than D+D or D+T (more neutrons for the likely reaction paths; you get 4He + 2n in the best case, and you don't just get the best case).
IANAThermodynamics prof, but all energy conversion processes require a heat dump. More heat windes up in the dump when: 1. the incoming energy is larger and; 2. the process is less efficient. Even a perfect process generates heat.
When attending a high school field trip to a nuclear power plant, I recall the plant rep saying that the river water (their heat dump) is 2-3 degrees higher in the surrounding area. However, I didn't know how much to trust any of the info provided because she also said that cigarettes are cancerous due to extremely minute amounts of plutonium found within.
Either way, a heat dump is required. This WILL affect the neighboring environment, but (by extension) so will any other power generator. I guess the real question of generator pollution excludes the issue of heat. In that case, fusion does look more attractive.
One last note:
And, of course, most of the world doesn't have a tide to draw on...
But, most of the world is covered by water. Of course, practically speaking, I'm just being stupid here...
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Nice to see we're collaborating with a morally bankrupt, ideologically perverse Communist gangster government for this project. After all, I'd just LOVE to see those guys with fusion reactors. I'll just have to assume the Russians weren't available to screw up everything. Let's hear it for progress.
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