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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."
Step away from the car... This is a fusion research reactor, not a reactor to be used as a power source...
If anyone is interested there is a wealth of information on JETs website
Including some pretty cool pictures of their kit.
50-100 years is nothing, and it's not the fuel or exhaust that you need to worry about, only the parts of the reactor itself that become radioactive from neutron bombardment. So, we only need to store retired reactor parts for 50-100 years, which is much less mass and much less duration than what we currently produce from nuclear plants, and massivly less environmental impact when compared to the equivilent fossil fuel usage.
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.
No, but you can get helium-3 out of the regolith, where it's been collecting in small quantities for a few billion years out of the solar wind.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
I think perhaps you don't grasp the fundamentals of what a magnetically confided burning plasma reactor really means. While a reactor of this sort aims at providing net power production via nuclear fusion, you have to be aware that a significant amount of energy is used to create the magnetic fields, and other auxillory control mechanisms like nuetral particle beams and radio/microwave power used in controlling the plasma to get the very precise conditions under which net power can be achieved. You turn off any of these control systems..the plasma start under performing. Unlike fission, you aren't trying to control a run-away process by slowing it down. In terresterial magnetic confinement fusion reactors..you are doing everything you can think of to produce the very specific conditions that maximize the amount of nuclear reactions. And if the plasma conditions change or your control system fails, plasma performance quickly degrades on its own because of naturally occuring instabilities in the magnetohydrodynamics that govern bulk plasma behavior.
Nothing like a world ending 'meltdown' can happen, a magnetically confided plasma has so many different ways to dissipate energy. The trick has always been and always will be to get enough nuclear reactions out of this plasmas to make it worth while to build them as an energy source, becuase running them invovles using lots of energy just to create the plasmas conditions at all.
Exactly. Let me spew some physics for a moment.
The temperature of a gas is related to how fast the particles of the gas are moving. The hotter the gas, the faster the average kinetic energy. However, not all the particles move at the same speed. There is a distribution of speeds, with most of the particles at or below the average speed. However, a very thin "tail" of particles travels at speeds much, much higher than the average. In the Sun, it is these very high-speed nuclei, way above the average kinetic energy of the plasma, which collide and fuse.
So, why can't we get fusion with temperatures equivalent to the center of the Sun? Pressure. We can't hope to achieve pressures anywhere near that in the Sun. In the sun, the pressure is so immense that the particles are squeezed extremely close together. Imagine these particles moving at insane velocities, in such close quarters. They will collide with each other extremely often. This extremely high collision rate allows fusion to occur, because it brings the super-high-energy nuclei together more often.
On Earth, at very low pressures (at least relative to the core of the Sun), the particles are moving fast enough to fuse, but they just don't collide often enough. They aren't close enough together. Thus, to make up for this, we must increase the temperature so that a larger fraction of the particles are in the kinetic energy realm where fusion can occur. In other words, we make up for the lack of pressure by increasing the temperature.