Slashdot Mirror
Fusion Plasma Plant in The Future
NightWulf writes "The BBC reports that Europe and Japan are currently looking to host a new JET power plant. This new plant creates plasma, which is akin to creating a star on Earth. Interesting to note that 1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels."
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these things!
...would wipe Europe off the map.
:-p
Can I nominate France to host the project?
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
In the same sense, my logging on to slashdot today is akin to designing TCP/IP.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I'm looking forward to fusion for a number of reasons. Yes, I'm sure there will be unforseen problems - odds are, some radioactivity will be a problem, and then you're going to want failsafe's out the ass so you don't get a "Chernobl on steriods" effect.
But this is the kind of thing that governments should be pouring tons of research into. For every politician that bitches about the Middle East and oil funding some nasty stuff ( from Iran putting a $25 million bounty on Rushdie to the US government feeling that it has to support dictatorships to get oil), fusion could fix a lot of that.
Naturally, it's no Eden idea - everything in science has a good and a bad side - but the sooner we can get this working, the better off the world will be.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Step away from the car... This is a fusion research reactor, not a reactor to be used as a power source...
does this solve the energy problems?
Do you need a website upgrade?
Well, if this works it'll solve a lot of the arguments about power sources.
Although I'm not sure if they've actually achieved the energy break-even point yet. First time I heard about this was in school, when they were still having problems with the magnetic coils breaking down and letting the plasma vent. Here's hoping this'll be a little more reliable. Or sited a hell of a long way from any population centers...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
One kilogram of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000 kg of fossil fuel.
How much energy do they estimate it will take to create (and control?) that one kilogram of "fusion fuel"?
Casual Games/Downloads
This is coming from the "land of the rising sun"?
Wow, I had no idea fusion power was so far along.
It would be the first fusion device to produce thermal energy at the level of conventional electricity-producing power stations, and would pave the way for commercial power production.
This is awsome. Expensive for the amount of power though. Anything that can reduce our dependency on oil, deserves some research in my eyes.
Of course, fusion is better than fission in this regard, but the same arguments hold in either case.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Well taking that you get left with helium its obvious that a by product will be a market for baloons
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
about 40 bucks from Spensors gifts, though Google has them cheaper
Slashdot has a strange fascination with potential energy solutions. Ah...so much energy wasted thinking about potential energy.
Would this be the one that France was offering to host? Because I seem to recall they got push-back from the U.S. (part of the ITER consortium) because of their lack of support for the Iraq war, and that the U.S. was putting its support with the Japanese site.
blog |
...is how much energy it will take to maintain that 100 million degrees Celcius temp for 500 seconds or longer. Sure, 500 megatwatts sounds awesome, but fusion reactions are historically extremely difficult to maintain as the plasma constantly bumps into the container and kills efficiency. That being said, more research into the field is a Good Thing(TM).
quote from article
:-)
THE QUEST FOR FUSION What is nuclear fusion and how can it be achieved?
I guess the first part is done already
but seriously, so far, all of fusion tries were overall endothermic, they needed more power to keep fusion going than the process itself could produce
I would have thought that decision to build the project in Japan would have been unanimous. How else could Gozilla be resurrected?
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
But whats the possible damage if one of these plants pulls a Chernobyl on us?
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
In terms of the physics and huge amounts of energy involved, the project would be akin to building a star on Earth.
Does this strike anyone else as a bad idea?
(And did the picture at top of the article remind anyone else of the human harvest fields from "The Matrix"?)
Tired of waiting for that ultimate supernova your philosophy professor kept mentioning? Well, guess what...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
This is where they will need to find the break-even point. Does it cost more to maintain the necessary temperature for fusion, than the benefits we'll get out of it? My guess is that right now, yes. However, get more $$$ and research into the project and in the future this may be very, very possible.
Hmmm.
"Iter would be more than double the size of the facility at Jet, and would aim to generate 500 megawatts of fusion power for 500 seconds or longer. "
Did I take this out of context or what? 500 seconds 'or longer?' What do you do for the rest of the time there? I don't think out capacitors are THAT sophisticated to work on this kind of model, but I could be wrong...
Old news? I've heard about that reactor for like at least six months. And they still havent decided where the reactor would be at? IIRC US, Canada, Korea and Japan wants the reactor @ Japan site. But Europe wants it @ France. They better stop arguing and starting working on it. So we can have one more alternative to the fossile fuel if it becomes successful.
For a second I though they meant a "plant" as in one you water and fertilize. I kind of imagine a sunflower plant where the flower glows bright and gives of heat while you water and fertilize it every few days.
1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels
I bet there are some dinosaurs turning over in their graves right now.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
Is this a REAL fusion reactor, or is this just another prototype reactor which is a steppingstone to fusion but which doesn't get there?
If anyone is interested there is a wealth of information on JETs website
Including some pretty cool pictures of their kit.
This doesn't happen in a fusion reactor.
Fusion researchers have said for two decades that they will get it to work in 20 years, and that statement is still valid.
Take that Oil Companies!
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
I doubt anytime soon it will be developed to a functional status, not because of technological reasons, but because of economical reasons.
Imagine destroying MOST of the current energy corporations. Also, unlimited energy would permit underdeveloped countries to have enormous economic growth, destroying the Status Quo.
Not energy would be the main trade in the world, but pure human intelligence and the products of it.
So for once a Slashdot headline is actually factually accurate. Fusion is "in the future", as it has been for the last 30 years and will be for the next 30 and the 30 after that. Who remembers Tokamak?
On the other hand, I don't know enough about it to confidently say it's crap. So - anyone out there able to tell me what, exactly, this "kg of fusion fuel" is made up of? And, if possible, provide support/debunking for the 10,000,000x as much energy claim?
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I thought this was hydrogen, so I wonder: how long will it take before we are running out of water? Maybe there are other resources from which hydrogen can be extracted, but the same question remains: does this new technology increase the timespan of our use of energy?
:-(.
:-s.
;-).
I also think we should be able to store the surplus of released energy from fusion if we don't want to spoil it. This can be done by pumping water to a higher altitude, and lowering the water to get that energy back, but we're converting energy then to lower quality
Another point that raises is question is the needed temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius. How will that temperature be reached? I think we're still away from better than break-even
Sometimes I wish that articles were more detailed
Greets,
Stefano
People were talking up electric cars ten years ago... nevermind that the coal power plant that was buying and selling pollution credits to generate the electricity to charge the batteries was pulluting 10x what the engine in a normal car would've polluted.
Goodness -- I was surprised by the number of wildly incorrect postings about nuclear fusion. Some I could have tried to clear up myself, but a better recommendation would just be to read up for five minutes before posting some misinformed comment.
Wikipedia has a good article on Fusion Power. Read it, then post.
since we are addicted to oil. Until we suck the Earth dry we won't bother looking for other things. Unless Haliburton and the like invest in something else...
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Japan probably has more big power-eating industries and would need more and cheaper power, but they probably don't really have as much room to build the plant.
I also noticed that the United States wasn't on the short list to having the experimental plant. Too much fear of nuclear power started it, and so it will probably be a long time before we can ever break away from the dependency of fossil fuels.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
yes, girls read /. too...
"To use fusion reactions as an energy source, it is necessary to heat a gas to temperatures exceeding 100 million Celsius - many times hotter than the centre of the Sun."
Why is it that in order for us to achieve fussion here on Earth we have to use temperatures that are hotter than the center of the Sun? Why can't we achieve this at temperatures that are about the same as the center of the Sun? Is it a pressure issue? Or is the center of the Sun cooler and the real fussion takes place in other places?
I would hope these same scientists would also be looking for a way to tap the energy off the reaction vs superheating turbine water. How much energy is wasted in the conversion process that could be better tapped through other methods.
But since when do we power our power plants with oil?
We will always depend on Arab oil in some way or another.
Oil is used to make plastics, and from what I see it seems like everything is made out of plastic.
American cars for one.
So the Arabs will find a way to still charge $100.00 a barrel.
Eugene Mallove (RIP) had some pretty cool ideas about fusion:
h tm l
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2004/05/21.
Wikipedia has a solid list of the containment types. This helps illustrate way it's just so hard to keep the reaction going.
"The most advanced test reactors, the Tokomak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) in the U.S. and the Joint European Torus (JET), use the tokomak design and have come close to break even conditions. In fact, in November, 1991, the British-based Tokomak reported break even conditions. This occurs when the energy given off by the fusion reaction is equal to the energy input required to sustain the reaction. In order for a fusion reaction to generate useful amounts of electricity, the energy given off must be many times greater than that required to sustain the reaction. Even the most optimistic researchers feel that it will be well into the next century before this stage is reached." (from This site)
What's that? It's a Mirror!
Obligatory Wikipedia Fusion Power link.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
That way France and the rest of the EU, with their low qualms about Nuclear Power, can take the initiative in progressive technological development and join together in becoming the dominating world economic power while the U.S. is still desperately pissing away all their resources trying to secure access to inconveniently located fossil fuels.
Iter - latin for "road" - is the next stage, but not the final.
It will produce more energy than put in, will will not create electricity as such.
"Creating" electricity, as a normal powerplant does, will be the next stage. As in DEMO.
So another year before knowing where to build iter, it should have been decided long ago. A few years to build it. 20 to 30 years of research. A few years op political maneuvering for deciding demo, building and doing research for another generation.
So 50 or 60 years before we have an electricity producing fusion plant.
50-100 years looks really, really good when you compare it to the amount of time it takes for the environmental side-effects of fossil fuels to go away.
They don't rely on a 'JET' database engine to control the thing.... :)
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Expensive for the amount of power though
That's what makes me curious.
The article says, "1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels." However, how much does that 1kg of fuel cost as compared to those 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels? What if you amortize the projected differing cost of building the fusion reactor as opposed to a simple coal burner..?
energy. Its just a hydrocarbon compound, so you can mix it up and sell it via the existing distribution channels. The real stopper to doing this now is that its much cheaper than just pumping the stuff out of the ground. Now if electricity were to become dirt cheap, this changes.
Will these nuclear power plants automatically replace themselves after they blow up in about 50 years? That is, if you have enough money in the bank to cover it.
I hate sigs.
Fusion. Real Soon Now.®
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
I remember in the 80's people were afraid too many nuclear warheads going off would burn off the atmosphere. What if some accident happened where the plasma did get in contact with the atmosphere? Granted it's suposedly going to degrade rappidly because your doing all you can to keep it going, but what about the time in between? Would it be enough to cause the atmosphere to go poof like the trick paper used by magicians to make a flame appear out of nowhere?
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
After the slashdot story a few weeks ago on the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (sorry, I'm too lazy to go look up the original Slashdot reference, but at least I'm honest about it), I started reading a lot of their proposals and most of the ones regarding how to handle interstellar travel involved anti-matter.
;-)
I started thinking about that and the two biggest problems with that are: A> It takes a huge amount of energy to create anti-matter, a hell of a lot more goes into the production than comes from using it. B> We don't really have a system for containing significant amounts of anti-matter.
So I started thinking about alternative energy sources and one of them was fusion. Pound for pound, fusion produces about 1/27th of the energy of anti-matter (based on my naive calculations, so I may be way off) whereas other types of fuel are several orders of magnitude less efficient.
To me, that makes fusion a pretty good option. The only problems I have encountered so far with the idea are:
1: Fusion isn't quite ready for real applications, though by the time we're capable of sending an interstellar craft, I believe it will be.
2: For an interstellar journey, you'll need a power plant that can survive for no less than decades, if not centuries, without maintenance. That's a serious issue given the harsh environment it would be operating in.
I'm sure there are additional problems I haven't thought of yet, but I'm still thinking it might be a good option. Perhaps some sort of self-repairing reactor could be built to solve #2.
But another huge advantage of hydrogen is that you could collect fuel along the way using the Bussard Ramjet idea. You'd just need a way of separating out deuterium and tritium from the hydrogen that doesn't suffer from problem #2 as well, but it should be doable. As most here are probably aware, fuel mass is a serious issue for space travel.
Anyway, I think fusion has a great deal to offer in a number of ways. Maybe I ought to work on my NIAC proposal
It's an OO thing. The attraction of moving to electric or hydrogen-cell cars isn't so much that these are more environmentally friendly *right now* as that it provides a potential for a vast environmental-friendliness advantage because it decouples the method of energy production from energy use.
Yeah, at the moment this electricity or hydrogen would be probably just generated using fossil fuels. But the catch is it doesn't *have* to be. You could substitute a nuclear power plant for that coal-burning one and the electric cars would continue to run just the same... it makes productive change much easier. Whereas if you buy a gasoline-based automobile, it's going to be running on burned fossil fuels forever*.
* Unless you are Doc Brown and you do some retrofitting.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
I dont understand this 'kilogram' you speak of. What is that in John Goodmans or Libraries of Congress?
My understanding is that not only will the *net* energy output not be very significant, if at all (yet!), the reaction won't be expected to be sustained for more than a few minutes, even at this new facility. All these figures here are *gross* values- I haven't seen any *net* energy figures yet.
;)
That said, this is the stuff that sci-fi dreams are made of. Maybe now that less geeks are going for CS degrees, they'll take some hard-science classes- that stuff is still sorely needed. As well as cool.
I was once a physics major who couldn't cut it because of a lack of discipline to be able to master the difficulties of engineering calculus. Props.
JET is the joint european taurus. But there used to be a project called ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). ITER was supposed to be the next big fusion reactor, and was supposed to achieve sustained burn. It's costs started to look like that of the SSC, so it was scaled down.
The ITER website has lots of useful info on fusion...
... how much energy it takes to find, gather, concentrate, etc., one kg of "fusion fuel".
- Steve
Wat abt cold fusion, any ideas?
The Wikipedia definition mentions the release of Magnetic energy as a possible environmental side effect in the case of a reactor destablization. Anyone know what might happen if a field of this magnitude were to stray from the torus and effect the world outside the reactor?
And ideological spew like yours really accomplishes a lot, doesn't it? Drop dead.
500 MW?
Why, that's enough to power two Pentiums or one Opteron!
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
So SimCity wasn't too far off? =D
You just exposed your stupidity and ignorance... From the article:
Behind the scenes, there has been much political manoeuvring (sic), [...]
The European Union, Russia and China want France to win; but South Korea, the United States and Tokyo are backing Japan.
In some quarters, it is felt the US objects to the French option because of its position on the war in Iraq.
Typical US behavior (like you just proved), their little problems in front of what is best for humanity.
The only way US would not back Japan is if a new site in the US would be proposed.
Of course, if we could drop all the helium into the mountains of Afghanistan, we'd win the war on terror instantly.
Somehow I don't think a tape of Bin Laden on helium would inspire too many nut cases to commit suicide bombings....
Finally, somebody has come up with a factory that can create the plasma needed for all of those big, flatscreen TV's. I just hope this drives the price down.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels
Does it mean we could speed up global warming by a factor of 10,000,000?
There you are, staring at me again.
AtomicMan!!!
BAHAHAHAHAH.....
yes....
that's right....
I went there...
Irresponsible as this reasoning may be, there is a point at which it becomes very desirable to have one huge pollution-belching monstrosity outside of a city as opposed to ten million tiny pollution-belching ants at the heart of a city. For example, Los Angeles, which has this horrible "bowl" effect that traps smog inside the city during the day. Were the pollution being generated outside of the city and not by the city's cars, life would be better in Los Angeles at least.
(I wonder how many people are going to totally miss the "akin, relative, relativity, Big Bang" jokes... :) )
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Mod up the parent with the links, that's good shit.
Ok guys, funny voices aside, inhaling helium can be fatal if you're not careful. Several people have died from inhaling helium in the past and many more will have to die before we can get the "helium==funny voice" association from people's minds.
Look, your lungs are a vital organ. They are meant for breathing clean, fresh air, nothing more, nothing less.
While helium is chemically an inert gas, there is no guarantee that what comes from inside your baloon contains any amount of helium, let alone 100% pure helium.
Furthermore, even if you do inhale 100% pure helium, it can cause a sudden, unexpected death by asphyxiation, or cerebral embolism.
Please be careful when using your body for purposes it was not designed for. If you must inhale helium, do not inhale it directly from the baloon, and NEVER FROM THE BOTTLE!
If you dont believe me, feel free to google "inhaling helium" or something.
Seastead this.
3. The terrible secret of space
taking that you get left with helium its obvious that a by product will be a market for baloons
We simply leave the Helium into the atmosphere, and after a long time the earth will slowly float away from its orbit. We can explore space from the comfort of our home! Safe and without all these poluting rockets.
BTW, I read no good responses to my comments on the danger, pollution and explosions of this Nucular Fusion Plant.
Your friendly neighborhood Green peace organizer.
Its
Or
Next.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
Dude. you code too much. ;)
Pope Felix the Scurrilous.
Computer Geek by day, religious Icon by night.
``ITER will surpass it and actually generate power.''
So...are you saying that, if this thing works, we have a real working fusion power plant?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
All fusion reactors should have warning signs clearly posted about them saying "WARNING: DO NOT THROW ANYONE INTO THIS FUSION REACTOR UNLESS YOU ARE BATMAN OR JAMES BOND AND THEY ARE A VILLAN."
Yeah, good one. Way to go, jackass...
Or the old version:
Fat bottom girls
You make the rockin world go 'round
Forty years later, there's still no useful fusion power technology.
The US Department of Energy is terminating all work on fusion effective September 30, 2004. That's probably a good thing; it will free up activities in the EU and Japan from US interference.
Not
In
My
Back
Yard !!!
Oh, and as an added bonus for geeks in that area, they have a public open house coming up on June 12!
If that doesn't sound impressive then you need to have another look at a picture of the torus!
Seriously, all sense of scale is lost in this picture until you locate the (tiny) man standing at the bottom center of the pic.
This should also help illustrate to any fusion noobs, that the kind of power consumption required to contain a plasma at a few million degrees, since the majority of bulk in these designs is dedicated to (extremely) massive electromagnets.
MullerMn: Any idea how many tesla those are kicking out?
The stupid Euros are scared stiff of brown people, and they're still more tied up in regulation and high taxes than we are.
We should be doing fusion too, obviously, but we're still doing everything else, and there's a shitload of smart, educated people in China and India planning to hop on a plane and make a fast buck inventing things in the States.
Those immigrants won't waste their time going to Europe, where they'd have to wait fifteen years to get a membership card in the Engineers' Guild and another twenty years for government funding. Europeans have a profoundly conservative mentality: The status quo is sacred. They still regard new ideas as a threat, unless they come from a government lab or from a vast, well-established industrial combine. They regard immigrants as a threat for the same reason: Change is bad, because it might frighten some entrenched senior manager, or confuse the French bean farmers, or put an Austrian buggy-whip manufacturer out of business.
The Europeans will invent innovative new shapes for teapots from now until Doomsday, but real change scares them shitless. That's why so many smart Europeans come to the US, just like the Indians and Chinese do.
Even with all the bullshit inconveniences in the name of "security" that the US has now, we're still a vastly better bet than Europe.
3 words: mod parent down...
He was a Catholic monk who is considered the "godfather of genetics".
Associated Press writes:
::Snicker::
"With the final pieces put together for Japan's new fusion reactor, the opening ceremony will take place in one week."
"In other news, President Bush III has asked congress to consider Japan to be put on the list of the Axes of Evil, and maybe sending some occupational troops to maintain order until the disastrous regime of [insert japanese leader] is put to an end."
bah.
Currently, the DOE has so many clean up sites, not because the nuclear energy projects were not successful and profitable, but the fact that the DOE is required, COME WHAT MAY, to take care of any finality issue with a nuclear based energy company. So the companies have a whopping zero cost for failure or liability, and remember, we're talking nuclear.
So, when they think their operating costs get too high, or they just don't want to do it anymore, the nuclear companies can literally drop what they are doing right there, walk out, and it is all a Department of Energy (DOE) problem from then on. Guess what? DAMN NEAR EVERY ONE OF THEM DOES. That is their little perk. This stuff is too dangerous without permanent government supervision. The US doesn't want some weird Iranian group that they don't trust buying up their workplace (because if anyone is going to sell something to Iranians we don't trust, by god, it should be bought direct from the US government), and after all, businessmen don't care what they have to do as long as they get the cash for doing it. So, as a protection, they have no responsibility for their nuclear actions.
"We leaked some sludge? WHOOPS. That's it, it is now too expensive with the lawyers. Close shop. Call the DOE. It is their child now. Thanks for the BILLIONS, and see ya later, suckers!"
The best analogy would be that the government would now be responsible for auto manufacturing recalls. "Sorry we made some bad cars. Call the government, it is their problem now."
Could someone explain how.
Careful predicting, you never know with technology. 50-60 years is a LONG time. Before then we may have a computer that could design such a plant in its spare time, leaving us monkeys just the job of implementing it.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
The ultimate proof!
Bot Assisted Blogging
Wasn't Megatron trying to collect energy cubes to go back to the Transformers home planet?
Do you think? This pissing contest between Europe and the US and Asia has been going on since last year and the BBC has run essentially the same friggin story every month in the intervening time.
More money for the bureaucrats and old fusion technology.
Seditiously,
Kilgore Trout
I was a software wonk at D3D (General Atomic; D3D is a slightly earlier machine than JET) for a while. It was pretty cool to sit in the control room with about 500 monitors and watch when the big betatron magnetic field ramped up. The picture on every single screen would move simultaneously as the magnetic field from the machine (about 75 feet away) would steer all the electron beams at once.
sonoluminescence
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Hmmmm....
Seems to me that we could get more power from harnessing the copious quantities of hot gases that escape from a volcano.
Or Washington, D.C.....
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
ITER stands for International Thermonuclear Test Reactor.
I don't understand the details of how the reactor vessel works, but I'm wondering: do you care if it gets heavily radiated? I mean, let's say it's heavily radiated, does that mean it's no longer suitable as a reactor vessel? How often would you need to replace that, as opposed to the rods in a fission reactor.
ALso, I don't know about you, but if my choice was between a waste product that was lower volume but took thousands of years to decay, and a waste product that was higher volume and took 50 years to decay, I'd favor the latter. I mean, right now, if you bury the waste from a fission reactor, that land is totally useless, in essence, forever. But if it only takes 50-100 years, that means the land is safe again within one person's lifetime.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
Nuclear fission shows that difference very clearly. A normal person could lift the amount of nuclear fuel that would power (say) Denver for a couple of weeks -- replacing many coal trains of material that are normally dumped into chemical reactors ('furnaces').
Hydrogen reactions are about 10x more energetic than heavy metal reactions, per nucleon (proton and/or neutron) involved. The curve of the binding energy shows how much energy you can get from elemental transmutation (nuclear reactions). When you change one element into another, you have to insert or extract energy equivalent to the difference in height of the curve. Uranium is way off on the heavy-metal side of the curve, where the slope isn't great (comparatively little energy required to transmute); but hydrogen is that spike on the lightweight side. Lots of energy available there.
why don't we spend all this research and plant building money on ways that have already been proven. wind and solar power. for a relatively small investment numerous high capacity solar plants could be put up. take a few square miles in the dessert, the great planes, and other large open spaces and cover them with panels. this would easily create enough power for most of the people in this country and if we need more we could use a few fossil fuel plants and wind power to make up the difference. solar cells are getting more efficient everyday. i read somewhere that if you covered 10 square miles in arizona with solar panels it would create enough power for everyone in the US. well, why don't we? no one would miss 10 square miles in the middle of a dessert and it would look cool too.
"Well, behind every joke there's some truth."
"What about that Bavarian cream pie joke I told you? There's no truth to that. Nobody with a terminal illness goes from the United States to Europe for a piece of Bavarian cream pie and then when they get there and they don't have it he says, 'Ah, I'll just have some coffee.' There's no truth to that."
- Sheila and Jerry, in "The Soup Nazi"
And how much energy would it take to manufacture 10 square miles worth of solar cells? The "ways that have already been proven" you cite have been proven to be helpful for low-demand and cogeneration situations but don't yet have the efficiency, capacity, and low cost needed to meet our power-hungry economy. Besides, pure research is ALWAYS a good idea.
You would not heat up a boiler full of water, you would heat up a stream of water flowing through heat-exchange coils, very similar to the way that an on-demand hot-water heater works. Thus, you could begin to extract energy (make steam) within a few seconds.
Biodiesel : domestic, renewable, clean, and in the fuel tank of my bone stock 2002 New Beetle TDI
The world is changing. Increasingly, those Indians are going back to India once they've taken advantage of the U.S. college system. The world's "brain drain" to the U.S. is starting to slow. Eventually it may reverse. Perhaps this tendency is just a short-term result of current political circumstance and it will change with the political leadership. But it's hard to say.
"Bullshit inconveniences" begins to take on a different meaning when instead of just talking about "you have to wait in line at an airport" we're talking about "as a foreign academic, you are constantly harassed and your life is made incredibly difficult by tracking requirements". "Security" may well be one of the major things that winds up halting this tendency for the U.S. to be the target immigration point for the mental laborers of the world, as "security" and immigration are at direct cross purposes..
If America loses its status as intellectual magnet of the world, who gets it next? The options seem to be India, China and Europe. If America went all crappy and the intellectual diasporas of these three countries all went home, which could become the center of innovation quickest? China and India have a big emphasis on development, and already we see things like India adopting very modern technology on a surprising scale even in areas where consistent electricity and water is still a problem. However, they lack the infrastructure. India still has simply too much of its populace too close to the poverty line, and China is still lugging around its government like so much weighty baggage. These things will take time to deal with. In the meantime, Europe may not have the same level of initiative, but it has a head start in terms of societal and infrastructural development. This might hypothetically prove to be critical.
ITER is a proof-of-concept research project that is not expected to reach break-even, let alone produce any usable energy for 25-50 years. It may not even be possible to achieve ignition (a self-sustaining plasma fusion reaction) with ITER technology.
Canada has had an ITER team since the early 1990s. The plan was to put the project out near Oshawa and bring in some research dollars, but it was a bit of a lame horse politically. Our elected representatives were too busy lining their pockets , so Canada is apparently out for the running as a site for the ITER project.
Yeah, well, you know how these names come into being.
Pick something that sounds good.
Find a word for every letter in it.
Bottom line is they want to put everyone back into the stone age. That is what the Kyoto protocol was designed to do - bankrupt everyone. The other ways they tried to break the US haven't worked. You know, divorce, women's "rights", no religon, then they got ugly - the sexual harassment BS that only applies to Republican's.
How soon till Mr. Fusion(TM)?
www.sciencedaily.com
:
Excerpt
Evidence Bubbles Over To Support Tabletop Nuclear Fusion Device
Researchers are reporting new evidence supporting their earlier discovery of an inexpensive "tabletop" device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions.
The researchers believe the new evidence shows that "sonofusion" generates nuclear reactions by creating tiny bubbles that implode with tremendous force. Nuclear fusion reactors have historically required large, multibillion-dollar machines, but sonofusion devices might be built for a fraction of that cost.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
www.sciencedaily.com
:
Excerpt
Evidence Bubbles Over To Support Tabletop Nuclear Fusion Device
Researchers are reporting new evidence supporting their earlier discovery of an inexpensive "tabletop" device that uses sound waves to produce nuclear fusion reactions.
The researchers believe the new evidence shows that "sonofusion" generates nuclear reactions by creating tiny bubbles that implode with tremendous force. Nuclear fusion reactors have historically required large, multibillion-dollar machines, but sonofusion devices might be built for a fraction of that cost.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Doesn't fusion create super much mega-hard radiation? My understanding of the situation was that while you don't get spent rods or "nuclear wate" in the traditional sense you do end up with a reactor that is way 'hot' by the time you shut it down. It's not uranium, but you sure wouldn't want to grind it up and sprinkle it on your toast.
In stark contrast to say, a coal based powerplant which tastes lovely on a nice coarse multigrain with some butter.
...assuming SimCity is accurate and fusion power plants start to become available around 2040 ;-)
The way you word it, it can be construed that gold is cheap because the earth is full of it. That might be the case, but to get high-grade deuterium is not an easy or cheap task.
Tritium is also a tricky substance, but our CANDU plants produce it as a byproduct of our fission (D2O when irradiated can turn into tritium), and OPG is one the world's largest suppier of that. Too bad Canada's federal government decided not to persuit the ITER reactor too hard.
One thing you have to keep in mind is that there need to be an energy-state conversion. Fusion is all nice and neat, but you still have to harness the heat via a heat-transport system of some kind, probably a water/steam system. Those currently top out at 30-40% efficiency, so keep that in mind when you start throwing out megawatt/h statistics.
The US already has at least one of these already.
The Princeton Plasma Physics Lab in Princeton, NJ has been experimenting with fusion since 1951.
I've toured the reactor, in addition to working there one summer, and it is a very fascinating technical achievement. Basically you have a large magnetic containment device (big donut) which contains a vacuum. The vacuum and the magnetic field keep the plasma from melting the containment device. Tritium (used to be deuterium) is placed inside and a huge amount of energy is pumped into the donut converting the gas inside to plasma with a temperature hotter than the interior of the sun allowing fusion to take place. Currently the amount of energy released is less than the energy needed to generate the fusion.
To give you an idea of how much energy is needed. The energy from the localpower company is used to get a bunch of giant dynamos spinning. To get the dynamos up to full rotational speed takes, IIRC, about 10 hours. All this stored energy is then released all at once.
Inhaling Helium via a balloon will NOT cause death.
Now if you inhale helium straight from a highly pressurised tank, you have the potential to form bubbles of helium in your bloodstream, and that can kill you. Gas bubbles in your bloodstream is always a bad thing.
A balloon does not have the presure necessary to cause air bubbles in your veins and arteries. A compressed air tank can. Most compressed air tanks (all now?) contain warning about appropriate use.
I know, I've taken Nitrous Oxide before and you NEVER do it right from the tank if you want to avoid (too much) brain damage and potential death.
... and about 75 years until "Heat Pollution" becomes a household phrase.
Endless energy will not solve our problems. It will merely exchange them for new ones.
Just because it works, doesn't mean it isn't broken.
hard to calculate:
1 Atom of a fussile fuel oxidating with 1 Atom of oxigen: 1-3 eV energy released.
2 Atoms of Hydrogen fusing: a few million eV energy released...
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Before then we may have a computer that could design such a plant in its spare time, leaving us monkeys just the job of implementing it.
Fusion@Home would probably have enough power now. Writing the software to design it though - thats the challenge.
While 3 Mile Island was not as bad as Chernobyl, it was a major
incident and the US was lucky it was not worse . Very Lucky
Read the story
Wikipedia
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
People have been predicting fusion power "in the near future" for the past 50 years. Good evidence that fusion is the power of the future and always will be.
And fusion would be a hell of a lot cleaner than fission. The only problem is that we don't know how to do it.
The vast majority of their power is Nuclear, I was suprised .
77% Nuclear
14% Hydro
8 % Fossil
1 % Other
Thanks,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
China is almost 1.3B people and, in order to approach "developed" status, will need to increase its per-capita energy consumption by 3x to 5x.
:
China is looking to other sources in addition to fossil fuels , recently they started generating power
form the LARGEST dam in the world . The Three Gorges Dam is a new wonder of the modern world,
but the sheer weight of it and all the water it holds back may cause an Earthquake causing it to destroy itself .
Some stats on it
18.2 Million Kilowatts , ie. 18.2 Billion watts of power .
The cost of the damn was enormous, but the massive flood of 1998 killed many and cost almost as much .
www.pbs.org
Thanks,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
For nuclear and fossil fuels, figure in the amount of land used/ruined by fuel extraction and spent fuel storage. This gives you a base opportunity cost of land. Add to that the amount of money required to construct the plant. Figure in the amount of time the plant will last, as well. The amounts of land involved are comparable to an order of magnitude so the other factors will probably be more important.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Now what if you amortize the cost of building a fusion reactor over the energy-producing life of the reactor? That is almost certain to be significantly higher than the cost of a combustion engine and it deserves to be taken into account
(Of course, since we only have prototypes ATM, it may be difficult to estimate the cost of a production reactor...)
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
velocity(T)=A.exp (E/kT) if i recall correctly. Well I might not be correct since I learnt that long ago... Boltzman
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
FISSION I'm sorry to seem upset, but I am sick and tired of proponents of Fusion always compare it's POTENTIAL (I say potential because it has never been proven to produce anything) energy output to Fossil Fuels. What I would like to know is how Fusion compares with something that actually works and has proven itself as an efficient, near-zero emission (certainly more so than Coal, Oil or Natural Gas), energy source, Nuclear Fission. Proponents of Fusion are always quick to point out that it's fuel is Hydrogen and that Hydrogen can be collected from sea water, what they don't say is that this process requires more electricity than the resulting Fusion Reaction would ever produce. Not only would this make the entire process a complete energy sink, it would also drive the price of Fusion generated Electricity well above all existing sources (Coal, Petroleum, Natural Gas, Solar, Wind, etc.)
The tech doesn't quite exist for what I'm talking about. I don't just mean a brute force attack solution, I mean an engineer AI.
The next step in AI has been just around the corner for a long time too. In many ways it's the equivalent of cold fusion for computers. I see evidence that we're getting there. We've taught leeches to do math, and we've made some giant leaps in neural net research. I think that once we have fast, large holographic storage, it will only be a short time before we have a strong general purpose AI, and after that the sky is the absolute limit. The world 100 years from today will be either missing, or completely unrecognizable. :)
I think there is a lot of work being done in various scientific disciplines that will need to come together to give us our first "sentient" computer. I think we will need to invent a new natural language that the computer will speak. English doesn't cut it, too vague, subtle and filled with ambiguities, and the same goes for pretty much every natural language (including esperanto). Your language really limits the thoughts you can have (learn a couple more languages and you'll see what I mean). We'll need a linguistics genius and a computer genius to formulate the language. Once we have the language, the computer will have to be given an education, just like a human would, starting out just by talking to it, leading up to a formal instruction in mathmatics, physics, and so on. We could even teach it English later on when it gets "smarter", but I have a strong feeling that trying to start out with a classical natural language will not work.
Yes, I know about the encyclopedia project. It doesn't work and it won't work. They will never have a machine that "thinks", but they may have a machine that is good with analogies, and could carry on a simple conversation someday (though from what I've read, even that is dubious). I think their first mistake is that they tried to teach it english.
Anyway, that's my rant. I'm excited for what the future holds.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
Are you familiar with the Church-Turing thesis? Basically, every alternative computing formulation we've been able to come up with computes exactly the same set of functions as conventional computers. Given that, could you please explain to me how any particular hardware breakthrough (modulo a hypercomputer of some kind) is going to give us human-equivalent AI?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Or, better yet, how many Congress members would you need to burn.........
How could this be?! Fusion power isn't supposed to be here until 2050!(Simcity anyone?)
Creative Demolition
"In about 50 years."
:-)
That's what they were saying 50 years ago...
"It's true that gasoline has about twice the density of methanol, so many people will take a huge hit in performance and range in the initial switchover."
Actually you should get *more* power out of methanol, despite the lower energy density. The reason is that you can run an engine on methanol at more than twice the air/fuel ratio of a petrol engine (IIRC c. 5:1 instead of peak power 12:1). In addition, methanol has a very high latent heat of vapourisation, which cools the charge and hence gets more fuel-air mixture into the engine. Overall you should get a 15% peak power boost out of running on methanol.
Now the bad news... Obviously you'll need to fit bigger jets to carbys and bigger injectors to fuel injection systems. With EFI you'll probably have to remap it. Methanol can corrode some types of metal and rubber fittings, so you'll have to replace parts of the fuel supply system anyway. The rich mixture means more fuel gets into the oil, which means more frequent oil changes. And your range will be halved.
However these problems aren't impossible to overcome and in an electric future with methanol used for H2 storage there will probably be a big market from converting existing cars to methanol.
Note that Brazil has been selling cars optimised for ethanol since the '70s, so there's now plenty of experience in using alcohol as an everyday car fuel as opposed to just racing experience (where it's been used for decades).
The computers they were working with in those times may have computed the same fundamental computations, but they were made of vacuum parts. Now we've got computers as parts to the vacuums. We kick our feet up and drink margarittas while the vacuum does all the work. Sure enough, people like you said we'd never see it back then. Do you know why it happened? Because of innovations in both hardware AND software.
The ai of 50 years ago did simple math calculations. The ai of today vacuums our floors, manages internet packet routing, designs toothbrushes, and plays deathmatch with us. Its not too hard to see how innovation begets more innovation, and with some clever uses of brute force selection processes, massively parallel processing power, and vast data storage, it seems inevitable to me that we will have computers that can assist with the brain work in 50 years.
I may as well be describing the symphony to deaf ears. I'll go back to my armchair and stare at the pie in the sky some more now ok?
My only regret... is that I have... bonitis..
Good to see that you can simultaneously accuse others of pigeon-holing 'nuclear' technologies as dangerous whilst at the same time you are pigeon-holing 'environmentalists' as a bunch of uninformed slackers who engage in scare tactics and become hysterical based on misiniformation.
What exactly do you think the motive of 'environmentalists' is? Do they profit personally from protecting the environment? Do they get rewarded by their god? Do they get power? Do they get fame? No - they just want to make sure that the Earth doesn't get trashed. That's all - how naively selfish of them.
If you actually bothered to talk to people about their ideas rather than getting your opinions from 'Crossfire' and GWB's press office you would find most environmentalists are well informed, intelligent people who are aware of both sides of most issues and like to make their decisions based on research and facts, rather than knee-jerk responses to words like 'nuclear.' Furthermore, many environmetnally aware people do not have a single dreadlock or peace sign anywhere on their body, maaan.
And if you think most people are dumb enough to get scared by MRI because it is 'nuclear' then may I politely suggest that if you substitute 'Americans' for 'environmentalists' you may be somewhat closer to the mark.
Read Pynchon.
Comparing the 1kg to 10million kg is kind of misleading. Yes, it DOES give an idea of the differences. However, everything will boil down to economic costs. If 1 kg of fusion costs way more than 10million kg of fossil fuel, fusion would have a hard time taking off*. The "size" and quantity don't really indicate anything. For instance, 1 gram of gold typically costs way more to mine than 50 grams of silver. Clearly you cannot compare 1 gram of silver to 1g or gold. Similarly, 1kg of fusion source cannot be directly compared to 1 kg of fossil fuel.
Obviously I'm ignoring the environmental costs. Fusion would be FAR more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels.
(* Let's not get into the case of where fossil fuels are depleting and hence costs will skyrocket in the future (oil prices are expected to skyrocket over the next 15 years))
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Hmm, sounds like a new Slashdot poll.
First to be completed:
Most environmentalists do profit from seeing their initiatives passed. Their participation in their brand of religion has the same benefits to them as say, Southern Baptists have for their religion. It's an issue of control, nothing more, and the absence of a god, or the use of science to justify values (as if science can do that!) doesn't change anything.
Many environmentalists on TV, or in person, when confronted with some real facts about nuclear power, usually respond with two phrases: a) waste, but in reality any other form of energy generates -more- waste, b) chernobyl, as if saying an Airbus A300 crash means a Boeing 737 might crash.
The kneejerk reaction to nuclear power by the environmental movement is well noted and documented. The facts, though, are firmly on the side of nuclear power. Nuclear fission is the only feasible energy source (fusion too, when we get it), that does not alter global climate. Fission does not touch oceans, the way tidal generation does, fission does not touch air currents, as windmills wood, fission does not add CO2 or water vapor to the air, or extract heat from the earth. There is a problem of waste, but, viewing a potential for a nuclear waste accident in isolation without considering the guaranteed climate and health side effects of other energy sources is classic ignorance.
I would be willing to believe in environmentalists being reasonable people, but only in the same sense that I used to believe in Santa Claus too.
This is my sig.
Okay. Full disclosure: IAACS (I am a computer scientist).
I'm not sure I grok your argument. Are you implying that the church-turing hypopthesis somehow precludes an intelligent machine?
Note that I did NOT say that the only thing that we need is large-fast-holographic storage. Clearly we will need an advance in AI as well.
Basically what I'm getting at is that we will get to the point someday soon when we can model the entire human brain electronically. We might not even need to understand how it works to have a smart computer. If we just treat it like a black box, that may be enough.
If your argument is that we have the technology now to implement an intelligent computer, well, you may be right. I'm just thinking it will be easier when we have the power to model the entire brain.
If your argument is that we won't be able to do it because we haven't done it already, I don't see how that conclusion follows from your premise.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
My view is simple - the assumption that faster hardware will automatically give us human-level AI has little evidence to back it up. My arguments for this are as follows:
- The Church-Turing thesis says that new computers will be able to do the same things as old ones, just faster. I think there's an extension that says you'll only get, at best, a polynomial-time speedup (limited applications of quantum computers excepted).
- Complexity theory means that faster computers help even less than the layman thinks if it turns out that your problem doesn't have a linear-time algorithm. As I understand it, a lot of the neural-net algorithms have training times exponential in the number of neurons, in which case faster computers don't help much at all.
- Though we've made lots of progress on lots of specific problems that were once thought to be an instance of the AI problem, we're no closer to building a human-like AI than we were in 1960, despite the fact that the processing and storage available per inflation-adjusted dollar has increased maybe 100,000 fold since then.
- While, in principle, I agree that you could model the human brain on a computer, the fact is we don't yet know that much about how it works - or, more accurately, we have some idea about the individual neuron level, a little bit of an idea at the highest level of observable behaviour, but a huge yawning gap in the middle between those two bodies of research. The biologists have got a whole bunch of new tools to investigate the subject over the past couple of decades, but they don't seem to have made any radical progress so far - or, if they have, they haven't told the rest of us!
- It's been suggested, notably by Roger Penrose, that intelligence and consciousness is the result of funky non-computable quantum stuff happening in the brain. Now, there's very little evidence to support that being true, but it's not prudent to rule it out either.
In summary, it's possible that, once we have something to model, more computer power might help us model the important structures of the human brain, or an adaptation thereof. It's quite possible we have enough computer power to do it now. It's also quite possible that we'll never have enough computer power with a conventional computer to do it. And, finally, there's no guarantee that we'll ever figure out what's going on in the brain.My key point, however, is the claim that super-intelligent AI systems will be the inevitable result of faster computers was wrong when it was first made in the 1960's, was wrong when it was made again in the late 1970's in all manner of popular books, was wrong when Kurzweil made it in the 1990's, and it's still wrong now.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The experience with geothermal energy in New Zealand (Rotorua to be precise) is that tapping geothermal sources disrupts natural groundwater flows, with the accompanying problems associated with lowering water tables in a geologically unstable area. There have been efforts to replenish ground water reservoirs, but the pumping systems increase the costs significantly; geothermal certainly isn't "free" power in the long run.
Geothermal power by itself isn't a viable replacement for fossil fuels. Likewise, there is a limit to how much energy can be extracted from other sources (wind, tidal) before the loss of energy in the natural system creates environmental repurcussions. Not on a global scale, perhaps, but it doesn't take global climate change to cause extinctions, just significant changes in local conditions. Putting all our eggs in one basket will simply shift the existing problem somewhere else.
Fusion potentially offers the greatest efficiency in terms of energy output versus waste products (I'm including thermal pollution and other direct environmental effects in the definition of waste; greenhouse gasses are not the only problem associated with power generation). Thats not to say there aren't problems with fusion, but like any small artificial system the problems are more predictable than exploiting a convenient part of a large, chaotic natural system; our ability to predict environmental change at all levels is simply not developed enough. Going out on a limb, I predict that we will have working fusion power plants before we have accurate seven-day weather forecasts.
looking from a distance, a fusion maschine so far ... ...
...
looks to me like a oven you're putting sumething
into, say hydrogen, then heating it, and hoping
that it stays hot longer then it acctually should
of course this depends if we can measure
energy correct
anyways, the cool part really kicks in, when you
get the plasma, since like with a cathode ray
tube, confronting the plasma with a plain 'ol
magnet will make it "twitch"/move.
there sooo much cool things you could do with
magnets, electrons and "i-don't-have-electrons
-anymore"-stuff.
what i don't understand, i why is fusion not
scalable, meaning, why can't i make fusion reactor
the size of my thumb? is it a confinment problem
(the mag-field can't be strong enough at this
size) -OR- a FORM problem; meaning just like when
they invented flight, it didn't work until they
figured out the FORM/SHAPE of a wing (you know:
bottom straight, top curved).
i really really hope it's not a FORM/SHAPE
problem -else- shame on you!
oh and yah, please also explain, why decreasing
entropy should yield more energy, like take
two and make one
But you're ascribing a position to me that I didn't take. My position is better stated thus: advances in hardware *and* advances in AI research will lead to the first super intelligent computer. We've made some progress since the 60s. For instance, for a long time, neural net models did not take the time to propogate a connection as a factor in the equations. Adding that factor has improved voice recognition tremendously.
Furthermore, even if Penrose was right about the nature of consciousness, it doesn't necessarily need to conscious to be smart.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
So, yes some claims from the past have been far to unrealistic. They wanted the funding and it is hurting us now.
Each fusion reactor lasts about a generation of researchers. Say 25 years.
The next reactor - Iter - is to prove more energy can be extracted then must be put in. time: 30 years. you still need to build the thing and get approval for it.
After this comes DEMO. This one is planned to generate electricity. Another 30 years.
I feel confident in saying 50 to 60 years. I just hope the politicians don't keep stalling.
Where to build ITER should have been decided a year ago, if not sooner.
Didn't check my info. Sorry.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
1) electrons should read neutrons 2) I meant to be logged in to post parent comment.
Eat at Joe's.