Posted by
michael
on from the now-I'll-never-get-a-mr.-fusion dept.
Chuck1318 writes "The US is halting its national nuclear fusion energy project, FIRE, and pinning its hopes on the internation fusion research program ITER. However, ITER is stalled over a dispute on where to locate the facility. The dream of fusion power is getting no closer..."
Re:Good news in a way
by
jkrise
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It is a bit difficult to understand the role of money in taking decisions impacting national security. Surely, the US will have more control if the project is within it's own boundaries?
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-- If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
This is actually a very good option
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Considering Tokamak based fusion plants will almost certainly not be commercially viable in the near future ITER seems like a waste of money, wasting time talking is a very good alternative to actually building the thing IMO. As they say, they basically have the science needed to build it. It is just about engineering and acquiring knowhow, not fundamental research.
Personally I find spending that much money to acquire the knowhow to build something you wouldnt want to build commercially a waste of good money. Give more money to La Sandia instead for their pulsed fusion research (yeah yeah, I know it hasnt produced anything worthwhile either... but it is comparitively cheap at least, it will be interesting to see how MTF turns out).
It seems these days there is a battle of EU vs US (and others). One side wants France. One Japan. Science waits.
I say, pick a desolate area in Asiatic Russia. Land will be cheap (if not already polluted), and the scientists will have less outside distractions. And the EU faction can claim victory even though it will be geographically closer to the Japan land area.
The goal is to get clean, enconomically viable fusion WORKING. Not to see who has the facility.
Both camps (Japan and France) have offered to take up half the costs to build in their locale. Answer is obvious. Take the original planned investment, and give half to each camp, and build 2. We'd probably learn alot more from having them both, and we could explore different options in the building process. And we could finally get to work and start seeing news on slashdot about the progess instead of the squabbling
Re:Good news in a way
by
ecklesweb
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Put the $2 million/year annual budget for FIRE towards ITER? And ITER wants to build a $5 billion plant? That'll work. We'll have that baby paid off in 2500 years flat!
If that $2 million figure really is the budget for FIRE, it probably costs that much just to send delegates across the pond to argue about where they're not going to build the reactor.
Jay
Re:Put it on the Moon.
by
amh131
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, it seems to me that having a black hole eat the moon wouldn't be *so* bad. I'll miss the thing, but the resulting singularity shouldn't cause massive gravitational changes since it will have the same mass as the moon and the same orbital velocity. Might even be sorta handy as a bottomless garbage pit.
More to it?...
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Hey, maybe this has something to do with the DOE's current re-evaluation of cold fusion...or the much-discussed sonofusion results...
Would it be simpler in natural vacuum?
by
Morgaine
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Put it on the Moon.
It's worth examining this proposition at face value for pros and cons, rather than immediately discounting it.
The first question that comes to mind is, does plasma research benefit from being carried out in a natural vacuum environment rather than needing apparatus to create one artificially? How does the degree of evacuation inside a fusion containment vessel compare with that in LEO, far orbit, or on the Moon? Is there any benefit to be gained from ever-better vacuums, such as freedom from plasma contamination?
Questions like those are probably more likely to be of interest than any handwaving about danger from black holes.
-- "The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Re:Would it be simpler in natural vacuum?
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Progman3K
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Even if you build it on the moon, you still have to transfer the power back towards consumers on earth, and THAT'S a big problem.
Microwaves? Too dangerous. Space elevator relay? Theoretically possible, but practically impossible to build, and costly...
-- I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Don't be hasty.
by
Mukaikubo
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I see this possibly as the DOE saying to Congress, "Okay, you neoluddite twits, go ahead and deny funding to ITER. I dare ya. Then the US will be the only country save freaking TOGO that doesn't have fusion reactors and plentiful, cheap power in 2040."
Probably won't work, Congress is too short-term-focused, as elected officials tend to be. But it's a spirited attempt.
Fusion = Waste of Money, Time, etc
by
BigAlexK
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· Score: 0, Interesting
What a big fat waste of time fusion research is, what a white elephant, what a dead end road.
Projects that have proven future potential such as Zero Point Energy should be pursued far more vigorously, and railroaded past those hopeless 'scientists' who still think such things aren't possible.
Cold Fusion's another one with bad press but proven real world results (go and actually check it out rather than believing the big-media stories).
Dismiss this as lunacy and mod-me down? - just remember this as an 'I told you so' when it turns out to be valid all along...
AlexK
clean??
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I know this is US-centric slashdot. But why has fusion to be called clean? It will generate large amounts of radioactive waste. (Show me a single concept that will not need the reactor chamber get replaced every dozen years because the radioactivity has weakened the material too much, the concepts currently in planing seem to even shorten that as they get energy out of neutrons)
It is a nice concept to finally have when mankind does extrastellar travels or on far away planats when the sun is too far away. Nothing to actually use on out planet.
This might be an unpopular opinion here ...
by
CaraCalla
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· Score: 1, Interesting
... but is anyone here actually aware of the fact that fusion, should it ever work, is not going to solve any of our problems?
It produces even more radioctive waste than fission, because you have to transform the all the neutreons and other radiation coming out from the reaction, to heat.
The number one problem of humanity is that we are consuming too much natural resources. The availability of a power-source like fusion would increase our consumption even more instead of reducing it.
Please everybody stop dreaming of fusion and use your resources (intellectual and monetary) on techonlogies like solar power,....
My 2 cents.
Actually, no
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
From the article, it'd seem US is not abandoning its own fusion program, just its try at magnetically confined fusion.
Actually, main target for US fusion research has been inertially confined fusion, while the rest of the world has been studying mostly magnetic confinement (Tokamak et al). The big deal with inertia confinement is the fact it's actually a bit like exploding a series of miniature fusion bombs to produce energy, whereas magnetical confinement doesn't have any resemblance to weapons.
Now, ask yourselves: which technology you'd rather see made available to most industrialized countries when fusion becomes feasible?
I think that the grandparent meant that any exploitation of solar energy is historical, incidental, and non-technological. In other words, if plants hadn't had photosynthesis for something approaching a billion years, we'd consider getting oxygen that way a long-shot, and look for a way to extract it from oil. (insert irony emoticon here)
The point being that solar energy efforts get a pittance of money compared to oil exploration. In the past, that has probably been justified. But within the last 10-20 years there have been numerous technological breakthroughs that could really make a difference, and deserve better funding.
-- The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Re:Vested Interests
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
What is a decent level of funding? How much is needed and how do you come to that number? Here is a link to the spending on fusion by the U.S. What would spending more money get us? How would it be spent and what result would be expected?
www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/pma/fusione ne rgy.pdf
How much more energy do we need?
by
bigberk
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Although I think it's a good thing that the US is willing to work with an international effort, I am becoming more skeptical as time passes about the need to pursue new power sources. The assumption being that Fusion power won't so much replace oil, coal, and nuclear but rather just become a new way to generate power.
We already generate enough power world-wide. The reason we worry about power needs is because, (1) development perpetually accelerates industry's demands, and (2) we don't take energy conservation seriously.
The clue that something is wrong is in the words "perpetually accelerates". How can one earth, a closed system, sustain ever-increasing amounts of wastes produced by industrial throughputs? This is obviously not a sustainable practice. In other words it's not the lack of energy that's going to kill us, but rather the byproducts of what we process using that energy.
If we could just replace all 'dirtier' power sources with newer cleaner technologies, that would be great but I suspect that the more practical direction will be to just add new power facilities on top of existing ones. More power for the world means quicker resource consumption. This is not something we should be happy about, because it compromises our ability to live on earth in the long term.
Exploiting the sun
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
we have a massive fusion plant in the center of the solar system that's been operating maintenance free for eons and we're barely even exploiting it.
Why isn't private enterprise operating massive solar farms in the many extremely sunny desert areas of the US, and selling power to the national grid? It's not as if the US had an excess of power currently, quite the opposite.
You'd think that solar power would have great earning potential, since like hydroelectric there is no fuel cost, and the lack of continuous output must have been solved already or there would be no wind farms. Unlike either of those two though, it has extreme potential for growth. Why no takeup?
Re:Exploiting the sun
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Baki
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Therefore exploiting solar energy must go hand in hand with introducing hydrogen as "fuel", that is as a means to store the energy retrieved from the sun.
Use solar energy to separate water into oxygen and hydrogen, which can be done by a number of means. Solar cells is one one, but solar power can also be used in huge turbines instead (more efficient) to generate AC current. In either way the electricity can be used in the neighbourhood directly, and be used for electrolysis for large scale use and storage.
There are empty areas enough (deserts come to mind, especially deserts that are quite near seas and oceans) that can be used. Yes it will require huge investments (to transport the water to the dry and sunny areas for example) but the oil industry also has required an enormous infrastructure (refineries, oil tankers) and wasn't built overnight. It is doable and necessary, and at some time one must start to invest in it for the long term.
Re:Exploiting the sun
by
danharan
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· Score: 4, Interesting
OK, I call BS.
Efficiency doesn't need to go up to make solar cost-effective. The most efficient PV modules are insanely expensive to build; give me 10% efficiency for a dirt cheap thin-film that I can put on my roof and I'll be happy. The sector is growing some 30% a year, and each doubling in production brings prices down. Modules are now around $4/watt, and the Japanese, with their solar roof program, have taken a leadership position and created a huge market. With that comes more incentive to find break-throughs in thin-film technology.
We likely won't have massive farms of the stuff any time soon. Building-integrated photo voltaics (BIPV if you want to google for more info) is one of the more promising avenues. Solar energy and consumption is distributed, as should be its conversion to electricity.
In a distributed generation system, local variations even out on a larger scale so you won't get massive drops as clouds pass over. Even in overcast days you can get 70% of the energy of a bright day, so the energy produced is not going to suddenly drop anywhere. In places where energy use is highly correlated to air conditionning, this is a very useful addition to the power mix.
Solar is a fascinating field, if much smaller than wind. I wish/.'ers would stop it with the over-the-top FUD, and get a bit better informed on the topic.
-- Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Re:Solar power is still vastly underutilized
by
sql*kitten
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· Score: 4, Interesting
No doubt they've bought other technologies to slow development.
I've heard this asserted many times. But, the patent database is online, Slashdot refers to it all the time. I've very curious to know if you can post a patent number for an oil-alternative that is currently owned by an "oil" company for the purpose of suppressing its development.
Re:Solar power is still vastly underutilized
by
Remlik
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Don't be so quick with the black helicopter theorys about oil companies lobbying against distributed solar power. Fact is less than 25% of all oil is consumed to fuel our cars and power our homes. The other 75% goes directly to manufacturing, and thus demand will not be significantly reduced by simply adding solar.
Second, the technological challanges are minimal. We have solar panels today nearing the theoretical maximum effeciecy of the substrate used to convert it. No they are not cheap and that is the only restriction to distributed power. No one can afford it up front, and it could take 20 or more years to pay for itself (not including maintaince or replacment costs). On top of that some areas (like oh I dunno where i live in MN) are not Optimal for solar power production. Up here it could take more than 50 years to make my money back on the initial investment...course the panels are only rated for 30 years use.
FUD is fun, and everyone likes to hear about how big bad corps are ruining the world and how its all the presidents fault because he has money invested in oil but the fact of the matter is right now oil is cheaper and easier. Until that changes, you will NOT see solar. Oh and one more thing..DO NOT RAISE MY DAMN TAXES TO SUBSIDIZE SOLAR FOR THE WORLD. Instead, give the money in grants to schools and companies to make the tech affordable/better.
Nuff
-- Apple free since 1990!
Re:Put it on the Moon.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The big deal isn't who has to house it, but who gets to.
I, for one (speaking as a future fusion researcher) would rather spend my time on coast of France than on windy north island of Japan.;)
Of course, there are all those things like the benefits to local economy and science everyone is out to get.
Re:No closer
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MultiModeRb87
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· Score: 3, Interesting
While it's true that fusion has been "15 years away" for over 30 years, one must keep in mind that the 15 year estimate assumed that fusion would receive full funding.
Unfortunately, politics being what it is, the fusion research (more engineering, really) program has never been fully funded. If you were to look at the original projections for fusion development, and compare the amount of money estimated as needing to be spent to the amount that has actually been spent, you'll see that the state of the art in fusion is just about the same fraction of the way towards a reactor as the fraction of money which has been spent on it.
Entertainingly enough, the one single, solitary thing I like about the Bush administration is that it has really pushed to fund fusion research during its term in office. Makes me wish Kerry would publicly promise to do the same, so I could at least think about that when I vote for the lesser of two evils...
They should build it in...
by
arakon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Canada, or the Sahara Desert.
WAY out in the middle of the sticks.
That way if it goes boom, not as many people need to translocate. If they get it working, Canada could definately benefit from the power sales.
It just wouldn't work that well here in the US. Too many shady businesses and Unions to ever even get the project off the ground.
-- "If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
Re:Vested Interests
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Jodka
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It seems to me that fusion research in the US is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that the Whitehouse is full of people with millions of dollars invested in oil companies.
Vice President Dick Cheney, head of the presidential task force studying our energy needs, favors building new nuclear power plants..
So much for your theory that cutting back on fusion research is part of a secret righ-wing plot to protect oil profits.
It took me 12 seconds (I timed it) to google that up. New tab, "Bush Nuclear Power", first link, first sentence, here.
Is is too much to ask that moderators spend 12 seconds before modding up crackpot propaganda such as the parent post? Of course it is. It's an election year, so you need to use your moderation points to advance your political prejudice that George Bush is public enemy number one. That's justified, because we have the proof: If he backs nuclear power, then that is proof that he is environmentally reckless. If he does not back nuclear power, then that is proof that he is conspiring to protect oil profits.
-- Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Cold fusion works fine
by
rlglende
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The high-energy guys don't want to admit this, and very little mainstream academic research has been done.
However, a lot of professor emeritii have been working on it. The papers don't report affiliations.
There are good reviews available via Google, convincing to all but the seriously ideological.
Lew
-- "The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
Cold Fusion
by
absurdist
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Interesting that the DOE is cancelling the FIRE program only a couple of months after finally deciding a review of the substantial research in the past decade into cold fusion. (And yes, before you flame me or accuse me of hitting the crack pipe, look it up - there's been some very interesting research going on outside of the US.) And for the tinfoil hat brigade, the fact that the editor/publisher of Infinite Energy magazine was recently found murdered adds just the right dash of conspiracy.
A different Hobbes, sort of...
by
FlyingOrca
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· Score: 2, Interesting
...given that Hobbes the tiger was named for Thomas Hobbes, in the same way that Calvin was named for John Calvin.
I hope you know what I'm on about, because if I have to explain about the best comic strip in history, I'll know I've suddenly become much older than I thought I was. Cheers!
-- Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Re:break-even "around the corner" since 1960s
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
Breakeven occurred in japan a couple of years ago. The problem is cost.
The cost of producing electricity the way that the Japanese did was about 10 times higher than what the average price of electricity was in Japan.
The reason it was so expensive was because the reactor used tritium + dueterium. Tritium is fairly rare, but was necessary for their reaction to start. Once they started, they could only get pulsed power for one or two pulses before having to reload, which meant that you had to wait several milliseconds for the magnetic field to die off. By the time the magnetic field died off, they had to basically restart the whole reaction.
During my graduate studies, I took part in the design of a fusion reactor for a spacecraft engine. Two major conclusions were drawn: 1) The technology is here to make fusion propulsion real... some stuff is pretty exotic (liquid lithium coolant, magnetic scrubbers on your exhaust that are at least 500 meters in length), but the idea of a fusion engine for interplanetary travel is feasible. 2) The specific impulse we used to derive our fuel requirements was for a direct mission to Europa and we used a Hohmann transfer as our baseline (absolute min), added 20% for maneuvering, and redid the fuel usage for more direct transfer orbits. We also ran a calculation on the side for a trip to Mars. We got a round trip travel time of 44 days, using the same amount of fuel as would be needed to go to Europa and burning at a higher rate.
Personally, I think no one has proposed a fusion reactor for a spacecraft engine because of cost. Once people can say that a fusion reactor powered a spacecraft, they could seriously look at making a power plant on earth (after engineering for the toxic chemicals and radioactive shells that would arise from a fusion plant). Yes, those fast neutrons both make the reactor conductive shells brittle and radioactive. Fortunately the half life is 30 years... just a bit longer than the time it takes for copper shells to become unusable.
Re:Put it on the Moon.
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WhiteWolf666
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It's not that hard.
You throw things at it.
Other than the whole nothing able to leave the event horizon thing, it's just an object, with momentum, mass, etc . ..
If you have a 1000Gg singularity (yes, thats absolutely tiny, but it might be what we would create in a laboratory), you could 'hit' it with objects, and they would 'push' it.
That's assuming it's not so small as to simply pass through anything.
The idea of a teeny-weeny laboratory singularity is not, actually, totally crazy.
Just mostly crazy. Extremely high desity != high mass.
Remember, density = mass/volume. You get a blackhole when you smash something hard enough to overcome the positive neutron pressure.
Which is pretty high, high enough that I'm not certain we'll get there anytime soon, but definetely within the realm of possiblity.
After all, if we made a blackhole (singularity), it's not probable we'll manufacture it with a mountain's worth of material, or a planet's worth.
More likely, it would just be a few errant particles we smashed together.
Kind of a neat thought, eh?
-- WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Re:Yeah,"Energy companies" that own lots of oil we
by
sean23007
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, seeing as how I'm not in charge of any "energy" (oil) companies, it is not my responsibility to make the decision. But I can point out that in the last year Exxon Mobil's profits increased by 39-40% due to decreasing gas prices. "Decreasing gas prices?" I hear you asking. Well, they're not decreasing in price at the pump, just at the barrel. These companies are now paying what they used to pay for oil, a couple of years ago, but those decreased prices have not led to consumer gas prices returning to normal levels....
Let me reiterate. Their profits went up 40% in a year. They're making a killing.
--
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
That quip about the massive fusion plant is no joke. For all the money we've blown on fusion development efforts, we could have had a thriving solar industry by now, with electricity predicted to be "too cheap to meter"... and even though it would've turned out to be just as expensive as the standard fuels coal, oil), those standards have been thrown into suspicion due to pollution and war. In short, solar energy would have been on-line in time to short circuit the intense social problems that the standard fuels have brought us.
We are even further ahead on wind turbine technology, considering generation capacity, than we are on solar. That's why I cheered once the Superexpensive Superconducting Supercollider was killed off. Those programs are boondoggles from the word go, hence pathetic. Culturally, we've no willpower to see a technology through to the end result: installed plant servicing consumers. Culturally, we have too many academic parasites who want to study things endlessly.
-- [You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Re:Yeah,"Energy companies" that own lots of oil we
by
mwood
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Point that out to your representatives in Congress. Last time gas prices started zooming up, they zoomed right back down again, as if by magic, when Congress started making noises about finding out why.
For thoroughness, I should point out that "profits are up 40%" needs some context. If ExxonMobil earned $100 last year and $140 this year (out of umpty-ump billion dollars of revenue) then profits are up 40% but they only made enough more to throw a pizza party for the Directors. They *could* have been taking unusually low profits to hold pump prices down and prevent massive interest in (say) hydrogen, thinking they'd make it up again when their costs decreased.
If your grocer was making 1% of sales last year (and he'd be thrilled to get that much) and this year is making a killing at 1.4% of sales, his profit is up 40% too, but in context, some days it must be hard for him to remember why he opens the doors at all.
This Demonstrates The US Energy Priorities
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Long-EZ
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Energy is such a fundamentally important aspect of the US economy, yet the solutions seem restricted to digging up coal and drilling oil wells. Burning carbon based fuel was OK for the short haul, but there are a lot of bad consequences in the long term that are being ignored. I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist, but if anyone has a better theory than, "powerful oil companies don't want better energy sources", I'd sure like to hear it. I think the problem is, technology based solutions, especially renewable energy solutions, are difficult to monopolize and therefore difficult to control for profit. Anyone up for an open source energy solution?
Energy is so important that the US should richly fund a US fusion initiative AND the international initiative. As it is, the basic science looks promising, and attainable in 20-50 years if we were serious, but all we have now is the international fusion project, and they've been arguing for YEARS over where to build it. All politics, no science.
The US should also be promoting solar power. Yeah, it's diffuse, but it can make a HUGE difference in US energy imports and balance of trade. And solar power could greatly benefit from much larger scale. Imagine highly automated factories cranking out cheap and easy-to-use click-together solar panels for every roof surface. Every structure needs a roof, why not generate power at the same time?
And what about electric cars? The GM EV1 (aka Impact) was VERY popular with the people who leased them, but they were withdrawn by GM when they announced their long term hydrogen powered car initiative. To those who want cleaner and more efficient cars that don't require foreign oil, this looks like a decision to pacify people while cozying up to Big Oil, when a very good solution exists now.
The planet is going to run out of oil someday, and fairly soon given the rapid increase in consumption. We should be planning for that, and doing the research now, but we aren't. The US is in a position to lead in this initiative, but chooses to wait until the oil crisis is upon us, and then try to act. It's going to get very ugly within a decade or two. And that's frustrating when we could have solar power and very good electric cars today, and fusion power in 30 years.
I'm still trying to decide how much of the planet's energy problems are caused by plain old human short sightedness, and how much is Enron-style corporate greed and manipulation.
-- >> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Re:Solar power is still vastly underutilized
by
Urkki
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm a proponent of fission power. I know it's pollution-free, the reactors are vastly safer than any other method out there, and the anti-nuke crowd is very much to blame for a continued reliance on coal. However, fission is not an end-all solution. Uranium is not a limitless resource and reactor-safety, while not as critical as some have made it out to be, is an issue that needs to be regulated, which adds to inefficiency.
Check out breeder reactors. They can solve a lot of problems, including availability of fuel, and waste-disposal. Only real show-stopper is that it's hard to develop a breeder cycle that doesn't produce easy bomb material..
How would something with the mass of an asteroid become a singularity in the first place? Don't you need something an order or two of magnitude more massive than the Sun to curve the space enough to form a singularity? Or am I missing something completely here?
Gravitational collapse can only create holes above about 3 solar masses, but other methods of formation can produce smaller holes. Shortly after the big bang, fluctuations in density of the primordial plasma should have produced regions dense enough to generate event horizons. This would have created black holes of all sizes, including ones far below the normal formation limit, and perhaps ones small enough to have evaporated by now or be emitting Hawking radiation strongly enough to detect. There have been searches for the gamma rays these holes should be producing, but they've so far come up empty, which places constraints on how many small primordial holes formed. Dark matter limits place constraints on how many large ones formed.
The second way is to accelerate a particle to the Planck energy. As it gains energy, its wavelength gets shorter and its mass gets larger, until its wavelength is small enough to be inside its event horizon. This gives you a black hole with a radius equal to the Planck length. Nobody's sure what happens then, but the most likely scenario is that it immediately evaporates in a burst of Hawking radiation. Accelerating particles to this energy is not practical, but it's remotely possible that some natural processes will do it, and the temperatre of Hawking radiation right over a black hole's event horizon is close to the Planck temperature (i.e., particles have close to Planck energy). The lower energies we see are the result of a very impressive gravitational redshift.
Lastly, we don't have to propose formation mechanisms for small black holes to be able to talk about them:). There are many fun things they're useful for.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a bit difficult to understand the role of money in taking decisions impacting national security. Surely, the US will have more control if the project is within it's own boundaries?
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Considering Tokamak based fusion plants will almost certainly not be commercially viable in the near future ITER seems like a waste of money, wasting time talking is a very good alternative to actually building the thing IMO. As they say, they basically have the science needed to build it. It is just about engineering and acquiring knowhow, not fundamental research.
... but it is comparitively cheap at least, it will be interesting to see how MTF turns out).
Personally I find spending that much money to acquire the knowhow to build something you wouldnt want to build commercially a waste of good money. Give more money to La Sandia instead for their pulsed fusion research (yeah yeah, I know it hasnt produced anything worthwhile either
Yet Another Pissing Match?
It seems these days there is a battle of EU vs US (and others). One side wants France. One Japan. Science waits.
I say, pick a desolate area in Asiatic Russia. Land will be cheap (if not already polluted), and the scientists will have less outside distractions. And the EU faction can claim victory even though it will be geographically closer to the Japan land area.
The goal is to get clean, enconomically viable fusion WORKING. Not to see who has the facility.
Both camps (Japan and France) have offered to take up half the costs to build in their locale. Answer is obvious. Take the original planned investment, and give half to each camp, and build 2. We'd probably learn alot more from having them both, and we could explore different options in the building process. And we could finally get to work and start seeing news on slashdot about the progess instead of the squabbling
Put the $2 million/year annual budget for FIRE towards ITER? And ITER wants to build a $5 billion plant? That'll work. We'll have that baby paid off in 2500 years flat!
If that $2 million figure really is the budget for FIRE, it probably costs that much just to send delegates across the pond to argue about where they're not going to build the reactor.
Jay
Well, it seems to me that having a black hole eat the moon wouldn't be *so* bad. I'll miss the thing, but the resulting singularity shouldn't cause massive gravitational changes since it will have the same mass as the moon and the same orbital velocity. Might even be sorta handy as a bottomless garbage pit.
Hey, maybe this has something to do with the DOE's current re-evaluation of cold fusion...or the much-discussed sonofusion results...
Put it on the Moon.
It's worth examining this proposition at face value for pros and cons, rather than immediately discounting it.
The first question that comes to mind is, does plasma research benefit from being carried out in a natural vacuum environment rather than needing apparatus to create one artificially? How does the degree of evacuation inside a fusion containment vessel compare with that in LEO, far orbit, or on the Moon? Is there any benefit to be gained from ever-better vacuums, such as freedom from plasma contamination?
Questions like those are probably more likely to be of interest than any handwaving about danger from black holes.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I see this possibly as the DOE saying to Congress, "Okay, you neoluddite twits, go ahead and deny funding to ITER. I dare ya. Then the US will be the only country save freaking TOGO that doesn't have fusion reactors and plentiful, cheap power in 2040."
Probably won't work, Congress is too short-term-focused, as elected officials tend to be. But it's a spirited attempt.
What a big fat waste of time fusion research is, what a white elephant, what a dead end road.
Projects that have proven future potential such as Zero Point Energy should be pursued far more vigorously, and railroaded past those hopeless 'scientists' who still think such things aren't possible.
Cold Fusion's another one with bad press but proven real world results (go and actually check it out rather than believing the big-media stories).
Dismiss this as lunacy and mod-me down? - just remember this as an 'I told you so' when it turns out to be valid all along...
AlexK
I know this is US-centric slashdot. But why has
fusion to be called clean? It will generate large
amounts of radioactive waste. (Show me a single
concept that will not need the reactor chamber
get replaced every dozen years because the radioactivity has weakened the material too much,
the concepts currently in planing seem to even
shorten that as they get energy out of neutrons)
It is a nice concept to finally have when mankind does extrastellar travels or on far away planats when the sun is too far away. Nothing to actually
use on out planet.
... but is anyone here actually aware of the fact that fusion, should it ever work, is not going to solve any of our problems?
Please everybody stop dreaming of fusion and use your resources (intellectual and monetary) on techonlogies like solar power, ....
My 2 cents.
From the article, it'd seem US is not abandoning its own fusion program, just its try at magnetically confined fusion.
Actually, main target for US fusion research has been inertially confined fusion, while the rest of the world has been studying mostly magnetic confinement (Tokamak et al). The big deal with inertia confinement is the fact it's actually a bit like exploding a series of miniature fusion bombs to produce energy, whereas magnetical confinement doesn't have any resemblance to weapons.
Now, ask yourselves: which technology you'd rather see made available to most industrialized countries when fusion becomes feasible?
I think that the grandparent meant that any exploitation of solar energy is historical, incidental, and non-technological. In other words, if plants hadn't had photosynthesis for something approaching a billion years, we'd consider getting oxygen that way a long-shot, and look for a way to extract it from oil. (insert irony emoticon here)
The point being that solar energy efforts get a pittance of money compared to oil exploration. In the past, that has probably been justified. But within the last 10-20 years there have been numerous technological breakthroughs that could really make a difference, and deserve better funding.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
What is a decent level of funding? How much is needed and how do you come to that number? Here is a link to the spending on fusion by the U.S. What would spending more money get us? How would it be spent and what result would be expected?
e ne rgy.pdf
www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/pma/fusion
Although I think it's a good thing that the US is willing to work with an international effort, I am becoming more skeptical as time passes about the need to pursue new power sources. The assumption being that Fusion power won't so much replace oil, coal, and nuclear but rather just become a new way to generate power.
We already generate enough power world-wide. The reason we worry about power needs is because, (1) development perpetually accelerates industry's demands, and (2) we don't take energy conservation seriously.
The clue that something is wrong is in the words "perpetually accelerates". How can one earth, a closed system, sustain ever-increasing amounts of wastes produced by industrial throughputs? This is obviously not a sustainable practice. In other words it's not the lack of energy that's going to kill us, but rather the byproducts of what we process using that energy.
If we could just replace all 'dirtier' power sources with newer cleaner technologies, that would be great but I suspect that the more practical direction will be to just add new power facilities on top of existing ones. More power for the world means quicker resource consumption. This is not something we should be happy about, because it compromises our ability to live on earth in the long term.
we have a massive fusion plant in the center of the solar system that's been operating maintenance free for eons and we're barely even exploiting it.
Why isn't private enterprise operating massive solar farms in the many extremely sunny desert areas of the US, and selling power to the national grid? It's not as if the US had an excess of power currently, quite the opposite.
You'd think that solar power would have great earning potential, since like hydroelectric there is no fuel cost, and the lack of continuous output must have been solved already or there would be no wind farms. Unlike either of those two though, it has extreme potential for growth. Why no takeup?
No doubt they've bought other technologies to slow development.
I've heard this asserted many times. But, the patent database is online, Slashdot refers to it all the time. I've very curious to know if you can post a patent number for an oil-alternative that is currently owned by an "oil" company for the purpose of suppressing its development.
Don't be so quick with the black helicopter theorys about oil companies lobbying against distributed solar power. Fact is less than 25% of all oil is consumed to fuel our cars and power our homes. The other 75% goes directly to manufacturing, and thus demand will not be significantly reduced by simply adding solar.
Second, the technological challanges are minimal. We have solar panels today nearing the theoretical maximum effeciecy of the substrate used to convert it. No they are not cheap and that is the only restriction to distributed power. No one can afford it up front, and it could take 20 or more years to pay for itself (not including maintaince or replacment costs). On top of that some areas (like oh I dunno where i live in MN) are not Optimal for solar power production. Up here it could take more than 50 years to make my money back on the initial investment...course the panels are only rated for 30 years use.
FUD is fun, and everyone likes to hear about how big bad corps are ruining the world and how its all the presidents fault because he has money invested in oil but the fact of the matter is right now oil is cheaper and easier. Until that changes, you will NOT see solar. Oh and one more thing..DO NOT RAISE MY DAMN TAXES TO SUBSIDIZE SOLAR FOR THE WORLD. Instead, give the money in grants to schools and companies to make the tech affordable/better.
Nuff
Apple free since 1990!
The big deal isn't who has to house it, but who gets to.
;)
I, for one (speaking as a future fusion researcher) would rather spend my time on coast of France than on windy north island of Japan.
Of course, there are all those things like the benefits to local economy and science everyone is out to get.
Unfortunately, politics being what it is, the fusion research (more engineering, really) program has never been fully funded. If you were to look at the original projections for fusion development, and compare the amount of money estimated as needing to be spent to the amount that has actually been spent, you'll see that the state of the art in fusion is just about the same fraction of the way towards a reactor as the fraction of money which has been spent on it.
Entertainingly enough, the one single, solitary thing I like about the Bush administration is that it has really pushed to fund fusion research during its term in office. Makes me wish Kerry would publicly promise to do the same, so I could at least think about that when I vote for the lesser of two evils...
Canada, or the Sahara Desert.
WAY out in the middle of the sticks.
That way if it goes boom, not as many people need to translocate. If they get it working, Canada could definately benefit from the power sales.
It just wouldn't work that well here in the US. Too many shady businesses and Unions to ever even get the project off the ground.
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
It seems to me that fusion research in the US is never going to get decent levels of funding all the time that the Whitehouse is full of people with millions of dollars invested in oil companies.
Vice President Dick Cheney, head of the presidential task force studying our energy needs, favors building new nuclear power plants..
So much for your theory that cutting back on fusion research is part of a secret righ-wing plot to protect oil profits.
It took me 12 seconds (I timed it) to google that up. New tab, "Bush Nuclear Power", first link, first sentence, here.
Is is too much to ask that moderators spend 12 seconds before modding up crackpot propaganda such as the parent post? Of course it is. It's an election year, so you need to use your moderation points to advance your political prejudice that George Bush is public enemy number one. That's justified, because we have the proof: If he backs nuclear power, then that is proof that he is environmentally reckless. If he does not back nuclear power, then that is proof that he is conspiring to protect oil profits.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
The high-energy guys don't want to admit this, and very little mainstream academic research has been done.
However, a lot of professor emeritii have been working on it. The papers don't report affiliations.
There are good reviews available via Google, convincing to all but the seriously ideological.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
Interesting that the DOE is cancelling the FIRE program only a couple of months after finally deciding a review of the substantial research in the past decade into cold fusion. (And yes, before you flame me or accuse me of hitting the crack pipe, look it up - there's been some very interesting research going on outside of the US.) And for the tinfoil hat brigade, the fact that the editor/publisher of Infinite Energy magazine was recently found murdered adds just the right dash of conspiracy.
...given that Hobbes the tiger was named for Thomas Hobbes, in the same way that Calvin was named for John Calvin.
I hope you know what I'm on about, because if I have to explain about the best comic strip in history, I'll know I've suddenly become much older than I thought I was. Cheers!
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
Breakeven occurred in japan a couple of years ago. The problem is cost.
The cost of producing electricity the way that the Japanese did was about 10 times higher than what the average price of electricity was in Japan.
The reason it was so expensive was because the reactor used tritium + dueterium. Tritium is fairly rare, but was necessary for their reaction to start. Once they started, they could only get pulsed power for one or two pulses before having to reload, which meant that you had to wait several milliseconds for the magnetic field to die off. By the time the magnetic field died off, they had to basically restart the whole reaction.
During my graduate studies, I took part in the design of a fusion reactor for a spacecraft engine. Two major conclusions were drawn:
1) The technology is here to make fusion propulsion real... some stuff is pretty exotic (liquid lithium coolant, magnetic scrubbers on your exhaust that are at least 500 meters in length), but the idea of a fusion engine for interplanetary travel is feasible.
2) The specific impulse we used to derive our fuel requirements was for a direct mission to Europa and we used a Hohmann transfer as our baseline (absolute min), added 20% for maneuvering, and redid the fuel usage for more direct transfer orbits. We also ran a calculation on the side for a trip to Mars. We got a round trip travel time of 44 days, using the same amount of fuel as would be needed to go to Europa and burning at a higher rate.
Personally, I think no one has proposed a fusion reactor for a spacecraft engine because of cost. Once people can say that a fusion reactor powered a spacecraft, they could seriously look at making a power plant on earth (after engineering for the toxic chemicals and radioactive shells that would arise from a fusion plant). Yes, those fast neutrons both make the reactor conductive shells brittle and radioactive. Fortunately the half life is 30 years... just a bit longer than the time it takes for copper shells to become unusable.
It's not that hard.
.
You throw things at it.
Other than the whole nothing able to leave the event horizon thing, it's just an object, with momentum, mass, etc . .
If you have a 1000Gg singularity (yes, thats absolutely tiny, but it might be what we would create in a laboratory), you could 'hit' it with objects, and they would 'push' it.
That's assuming it's not so small as to simply pass through anything.
The idea of a teeny-weeny laboratory singularity is not, actually, totally crazy.
Just mostly crazy. Extremely high desity != high mass.
Remember, density = mass/volume. You get a blackhole when you smash something hard enough to overcome the positive neutron pressure.
Which is pretty high, high enough that I'm not certain we'll get there anytime soon, but definetely within the realm of possiblity.
After all, if we made a blackhole (singularity), it's not probable we'll manufacture it with a mountain's worth of material, or a planet's worth.
More likely, it would just be a few errant particles we smashed together.
Kind of a neat thought, eh?
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Well, seeing as how I'm not in charge of any "energy" (oil) companies, it is not my responsibility to make the decision. But I can point out that in the last year Exxon Mobil's profits increased by 39-40% due to decreasing gas prices. "Decreasing gas prices?" I hear you asking. Well, they're not decreasing in price at the pump, just at the barrel. These companies are now paying what they used to pay for oil, a couple of years ago, but those decreased prices have not led to consumer gas prices returning to normal levels. ...
Let me reiterate. Their profits went up 40% in a year. They're making a killing.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
That quip about the massive fusion plant is no joke. For all the money we've blown on fusion development efforts, we could have had a thriving solar industry by now, with electricity predicted to be "too cheap to meter" ... and even though it would've turned out to be just as expensive as the standard fuels coal, oil), those standards have been thrown into suspicion due to pollution and war. In short, solar energy would have been on-line in time to short circuit the intense social problems that the standard fuels have brought us.
We are even further ahead on wind turbine technology, considering generation capacity, than we are on solar. That's why I cheered once the Superexpensive Superconducting Supercollider was killed off. Those programs are boondoggles from the word go, hence pathetic. Culturally, we've no willpower to see a technology through to the end result: installed plant servicing consumers. Culturally, we have too many academic parasites who want to study things endlessly.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
Point that out to your representatives in Congress. Last time gas prices started zooming up, they zoomed right back down again, as if by magic, when Congress started making noises about finding out why.
For thoroughness, I should point out that "profits are up 40%" needs some context. If ExxonMobil earned $100 last year and $140 this year (out of umpty-ump billion dollars of revenue) then profits are up 40% but they only made enough more to throw a pizza party for the Directors. They *could* have been taking unusually low profits to hold pump prices down and prevent massive interest in (say) hydrogen, thinking they'd make it up again when their costs decreased.
If your grocer was making 1% of sales last year (and he'd be thrilled to get that much) and this year is making a killing at 1.4% of sales, his profit is up 40% too, but in context, some days it must be hard for him to remember why he opens the doors at all.
Energy is so important that the US should richly fund a US fusion initiative AND the international initiative. As it is, the basic science looks promising, and attainable in 20-50 years if we were serious, but all we have now is the international fusion project, and they've been arguing for YEARS over where to build it. All politics, no science.
The US should also be promoting solar power. Yeah, it's diffuse, but it can make a HUGE difference in US energy imports and balance of trade. And solar power could greatly benefit from much larger scale. Imagine highly automated factories cranking out cheap and easy-to-use click-together solar panels for every roof surface. Every structure needs a roof, why not generate power at the same time?
And what about electric cars? The GM EV1 (aka Impact) was VERY popular with the people who leased them, but they were withdrawn by GM when they announced their long term hydrogen powered car initiative. To those who want cleaner and more efficient cars that don't require foreign oil, this looks like a decision to pacify people while cozying up to Big Oil, when a very good solution exists now.
The planet is going to run out of oil someday, and fairly soon given the rapid increase in consumption. We should be planning for that, and doing the research now, but we aren't. The US is in a position to lead in this initiative, but chooses to wait until the oil crisis is upon us, and then try to act. It's going to get very ugly within a decade or two. And that's frustrating when we could have solar power and very good electric cars today, and fusion power in 30 years.
I'm still trying to decide how much of the planet's energy problems are caused by plain old human short sightedness, and how much is Enron-style corporate greed and manipulation.
>> My ultraviolent Linux switch video.
Check out breeder reactors. They can solve a lot of problems, including availability of fuel, and waste-disposal. Only real show-stopper is that it's hard to develop a breeder cycle that doesn't produce easy bomb material..
How would something with the mass of an asteroid become a singularity in the first place? Don't you need something an order or two of magnitude more massive than the Sun to curve the space enough to form a singularity? Or am I missing something completely here?
:). There are many fun things they're useful for.
Gravitational collapse can only create holes above about 3 solar masses, but other methods of formation can produce smaller holes. Shortly after the big bang, fluctuations in density of the primordial plasma should have produced regions dense enough to generate event horizons. This would have created black holes of all sizes, including ones far below the normal formation limit, and perhaps ones small enough to have evaporated by now or be emitting Hawking radiation strongly enough to detect. There have been searches for the gamma rays these holes should be producing, but they've so far come up empty, which places constraints on how many small primordial holes formed. Dark matter limits place constraints on how many large ones formed.
The second way is to accelerate a particle to the Planck energy. As it gains energy, its wavelength gets shorter and its mass gets larger, until its wavelength is small enough to be inside its event horizon. This gives you a black hole with a radius equal to the Planck length. Nobody's sure what happens then, but the most likely scenario is that it immediately evaporates in a burst of Hawking radiation. Accelerating particles to this energy is not practical, but it's remotely possible that some natural processes will do it, and the temperatre of Hawking radiation right over a black hole's event horizon is close to the Planck temperature (i.e., particles have close to Planck energy). The lower energies we see are the result of a very impressive gravitational redshift.
Lastly, we don't have to propose formation mechanisms for small black holes to be able to talk about them