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Fusion Reactor Project Largest After ISS
Maktoo writes "All proper geeks know Fusion is the Way of the Future. Dec 16th is the date set for selection of the site of the new International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter). A collaboration between the EU, Japan, the U.S., Canada, China, South Korea and Russia, 'ITER would be the world's largest international cooperative research and development project after the International Space Station.' Their goal over the next decade? '[T]o produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for 500 seconds or longer during each individual fusion experiment and in doing so demonstrate essential technologies for a commercial reactor.'"
http://www.iter.org/ is the ITER Project web site. The ITER U.S. is not really in production.
Marques Johansson
As someone who works in the laser fusion camp(though just as a lowly technician), I feel obligated to point out that there may be something of a dark horse in the race to fusion power currently in the running... Besides the obvious method of magnetic confinement in Tokamaks and Stellarators, which do still have the best chance at becoming true fusion reactors of the future attaining ignition and breakeven; there is another way that inertial confinement fusion using lasers may still hold promise. There are 2 new beams (will be called "Omega EP")currently being built which will be added to the 60 beam 60 Terawatt Omega Laser in the next few years. What is special about these new lasers is they are over 1,000 TIMES more powerful than the old Omega beams at over 1 Petawatt each! The new lasers will be used to ignite a Hydrogen fuel capsule at exactly the moment of highest compression by the old Omega laser, sort of acting like a spark plug effect. The GekkoXII laser in Japan which has a (much weaker) Petawatt laser attached to it's also less powerful compressing laser recently verified this method as increasing fusion yield by a couple orders of magnitude, this puts the Omega laser as having a very high likelihood of igniting it's fusion capsules by using the new laser in conjunction with the old 60 beam Omega. If someone can then figure out how to ramp the laser up to a high pulse repetition rate (burning many capsules/second) possibly using a diode pumped Nd:glass system then you have a real contender for a fusion power plant.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
It is the Li-6 that generates the additional tritium when it is hit by neutrons. A useful reference. The tritium must be regenerated because it is rather expensive. Deuterium on the other hand is cheap and plentiful, and thus does not require regeneration.
From a disaster point of view, fusion devices are extremely boring. If the reactor vessel was breached, the inrushing air would be to the plasma as the inrushing ocean on a candle flame. A magnetically confined plasma is about a factor one million less dense than normal air. It is also about one million times hotter than normal air, so you actually have a plasma pressure of one atmosphere.
This means that the energy content of the plasma and the confining magnetic field is just enough to wreck the experiment, but not much else. The radiological risk is also negligible, because the radioactive inventory of a fusion reactor is of the order of tens of kilogrammes, enough for less than a second of operation (compared to hundreds of tons for fission reactors, which have enough for years of operation). Also, the tritium, even if it escaped the reactor building, would be gone after 120 years through decay, which is a pretty short time compared to other radionuclides.
And yes, IAAPP (I am a plasma physicist).
chl