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First Plasma on the Levitated Dipole Experiment
deglr6328 writes "In light of recent, somewhat disappointing news in the world of nuclear fusion research, it is worth noting that there are still reasons to keep up hope that some breakthroughs are yet to be made. At 12:53 pm on the 13th. of this month the Levitated Dipole Experiment achieved its first plasma. The Levitated Dipole Experiment(LDX), built at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center as a joint project of Columbia University and MIT, is a magnetic confinement fusion research device, that unlike all previous stellarator, reverse-field pinch and tokamak like experiments, uses a superconducting levitated torus to confine its plasma. The LDX's achievement of first plasma is, in a way, about 17 years in the making even though it has only been in construction since 1999. The concept for LDX was first considered by Akira Hasegawa as he was studying the data coming in from the Voyager missions which flew through the (dipole) magnetospheres of the outer planets. He noticed that unlike laboratory confined fusion plasmas which tended to be unstable, difficult to control, and which lost energy quickly, the plasma of a magnetosphere is intrinsically more quiescent, stable and actually reacts favorably (increases its density/temperature) to outside perturbations such as ie. bombardment by a solar storm. A highly informative and interesting video of operations on the day of first shot can be found here. Congratulations to the scientists and engineers who have worked very hard on getting the project to this point and here's looking forward to the possibility that LDX will reveal fundamentally new physics in the arduous quest for clean fusion energy."
No matter how well it will work. No matter how safe they can make it. No matter how efficient it will be. No matter how clean the process is.
Greenpeace et al will still behave like this is the beast of apocalypse.
Just as they do with nuclear power. Such a horror. Clean energy replacing coal/oil plants spewing hundreds of metric tons of fossil fuel waste into the atmosphere each and every year? Surely it must be evil.
We already have a working fusion reactor in our solarsystem - why don't we just start using that?
IMO there are 2 major drawbacks with this type of artificial fusion reactor:
1) The sun transforms 600 million tonnes of Hydrogen into Helium and energy every second. Why do we have to add to that number? If it is free hydrogen left in the inner solar system - lets save that for something else - like fuel for a future fusion reactor used in interplanetary travels, expeditions to the outer parts of our solarsystem (ie places far away from a natural fusion reactor). Or maybe we can use the nearby hydrogen to transform the carbondioxide in Venus atmosphere into water and graphite using the Bosh reaction.
It seemes too me as a waste to use the hydrogen here on earth as a powersource - where we already have the ability to use the nearby fusion reactor.
2) We go from depending on oil, which we have limited amounts of, into being dependant on tritium that is also rare. What is the gain for humanity?? - However I do see the gain for energy corporations - non-commodity stuff rocks, wee.
(please enlighten me if I have misunderstood something)
We don't have to buy out tritium from people
who hate us. That's a benefit right there.
Pons and Fleischmann style cold fusion does not and never has worked -- the excess heat the observed was an artifact from their calorimetery equipment caused by the fact that neither of them knew how to properly use it....and the pseudoscientists have been running with the idea since.
Show me an independantly verifiable cold fusion experiment that gives a positive result, and _then_ it might be worth funding. Until then, so-called "hot" fusion is the way to go.
Got mead?
It's the equivalent of using Rockets underwater verses using fins.
Bad analogy; squid, octopus and cuttlefish have no problem whatsoever utilizing a propulsion system that acts on the same principles as a rocket.
Regarding the main thrust of your post, please could you outline the salient points of the conspiracy which currently stands in the way of the cheap, eco-friendly, limitless power which you describe? Extra points if you use the phrase 'zero-point energy'!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
- Is there some substance in the universe we should be using OTHER than hydrogen? I mean, it is the most abundant element in the universe.
- Solar power is a good point, but not workable any time in the forseeable future to meet humanity's energy needs. You could cover entire deserts with modern solar stuff, at astronomical cost, and not come near to meeting our current energy demand.
- We, as humans, want to be able to go place that are inhospitable to us.. place where the sun don't shine. The bottom of the ocean, deep space, the polar regions. Solar power won't help there.
"Greenpeace et al will still behave like this is the beast of apocalypse."
The bile spewed by supposedly intelligent people when it comes to atomic energy is simply staggering. Greenies don't object to nuclear power on principle - the problem is safe transport and storage of fuel and waste. Take away that problem (as future fusion reactors could do, correct?) and I'm all for it.
Enjoy your karma, whore.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
>If even 1% of that money were spent on cold fusion research, we would probably be having much more interesting results by now.[emphasis added]
[...]There is no theoretical model considered valid in which cold fusion works.
[...]Show the world a reasonable calculation proving from physics as we know it, that this is possible,
You don't get interesting results but working from what we "know" (as witness hot-fusion's rather dismal track record). You get interesting results by closely examining phenomena which aren't explicable by "physics as we know it". That's how we went from Newtonian physics to relativity and quantum theory.
Suppose the variation in Mercury's orbit had been dismissed as observational error or some drag effect of the solar atmosphere? Or that the odd lines and steps observed in hot-body spectra were dismissed as some filtering effect of the atmosphere or the spectrographic apparatus. They didn't fit within a Newtonian universe, after all.
Enough diverse experiments that involve packing deuterium nuclei together in a metal crystal lattice (whether by electrolysis or high pressure) have showed odd results to be worth pursuing further. Semiconductor effects were observed decades before the invention of the transistor, we just didn't have the materials science or the theory to understand it properly.
-- Alastair
Perhaps I miscalculated in thinking that slashdot would be a good place to submit this news to. I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than, judging from comments here, it clearly is, and who would be a group which would enjoy hearing detailed news of an albeit small step toward a possible clean and infinite energy source of the future. Here we are ~150 posts in, and most are along the lines of "why are we wasting our time on this", "cold fusion is being suppressed", "it'll never work, we're wasting money", "ugh, too much reading" and all manner of other pseudoscientifically inclined rubbish. It's not merely that these posts exist that's depressing, it's that it's being MODDED UP.
Is this truly the state of disaffection and ignorance that exists in the general public (and this is slashdot!) today toward fundamental scientific research and technological achievement? I simply can not imagine that this is actually the case and I stronly hope that what is seen here is not merely a product of intellectual laziness but is, instead, a result of a deep failure on the part of the scientific community to excite and educate the public about its pursuits. At least I HOPE this is the case, then perhaps something might be done to remedy the situation.
Though, a small part of me suspects that this is not the case and that in the ever richer and more comfortable "west" we truly are slowly but surely slipping down a slope of scientific indifference and even hostility; and that subsequent generations may curse our graves for allowing a wide margin of the public to consistently indulge in such shameful, wilfull ignorance.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
"Against the odds" doesn't really cover it (figure them out, they whizz right past "insane" before you're really even started adding factors). If that structure turns out to be built right into the basic properties of the universe anyway, that represents a far greater miracle than anything conventionally religious.
You need an organising principle of some kind, even if it's one of the bizarre "Gaia"-style hypotheses. Materialism excludes itself; that is, if you start with materialist axioms, you quickly discover that you're many kinds of impossible.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Just about every power plant uses steam to power turbines, thus this accident could have happened at any of them.
Only types that don't use steam that I can think of off the top of my head is wind and hydroelectric. Most solar plants use mirrors to direct the light to a central point, using the collected light to make steam...
A better link would be Don't Mix Uranium in a Bucket
This was not a power plant accident, but a processing accident where the workers were, in my opinion, darwin award candidates. "Let's bypass safety procedures and rather than using the machine provided and doing it in small batches (to keep the uranium from going critical), we'll hurry it up by dumping it in a bucket and stirring it!"
It should be noted that more people die each year in coal mining/transportation accidents. But since these deaths happen so regularly, they're not reported in the news. It's like the fact that flying is safer than driving, but people pay lots of attention to plane crashes, because they're unusual.
I should be noted that the BBC makes some scary statements, like more than 300,000 people in the surrounding area were placed in danger. Other articles point out "Hundreds evacuated", which makes me think that the BBC is exagerating in their statement. Like most industrial accidents, the dilution needed to reach that many people would render it mostly harmless. The workers were harmed because they were right there.
Anytime industry gets big enough, accidents will happen occasionally. Especially with the universe conspiring to come up with bigger fools...
I don't read AC A human right
I had thought that the community here would be so much more scientifically literate and skeptical than
The lack of serious comments might in part be due to skepticisim. I'm coming from more of a medical perspective, but I'm sure in all fields that getting 'too' excited about promising initial results is a sure way to spend a huge amount of time severly let down. Aside from that, as the AC below mentioned, it's Saturday. I think many reading are doing so as a quick fix, rather than getting ready for serious reading.
And for someone lacking in background on this, such as myself, it looks like a significant amount of reading to get the background needed to really appreciate this. You provided ten different links, some of which themselves require additional reading to first determine which links there need to be read in order to grasp their significance to the topic. The general information link on the Stellarator page didn't even work. Yes, I just proceeded to look up Stellarator on wikipedia. But I'm also blessed with an abundance of free time today. That said, I know it is difficult to properly gauage the amount of background information any group is going to have. Assume too little and it can come off as insulting 'plasma is a really hot thing, and would burn you if you tried to eat it!', too much and the audience might wind up too intimidated and just crack jokes instead of doing a little background reasearch in order to catch up. Also, while slashdot does have a scientific nature, it's 'very' heavily skewed to computer science. The further away from that, the more the main audience is going to be out of the area they have the most confidence speaking about. Many people won't speak up if they find themselves in a topic where their lack of knowledge is very apparent.
That said, I hope you don't become too disheartened. While I came to this with very little understanding of the topic, I found a preliminary read of some of the information quite interesting and intend to look further into it. And if I am, I'm sure many others who are as ignorent of physics as myself will be doing so as well. We'll probaly just not comment, as there's little someone in our situation could really add to the discusion.
I in part agree with your view of the moderation. I loaded the comments up hoping for additional clarification by people knowledgable on the subject, and instead most of the moderation was for funnies. I wouldn't be too disdainful of the cold fusion moderation though. Personally, I'm grateful it was moderated up just because it also brought the conflicting replies to my attention as well.
Everything will be taken away from you.
And the reason money gets wasted on fusion is that the program is on continual life-support due to being cronically underfunded. Sure, if you pay the absolute minimum you can get away with over a long time, you can spend an impressive sum without getting very far. The vast numbers of americans who struggle with credit-card debt could tell you as much. It says nothing about the value of the program.
At the end of the day, we need fusion if our civilization is going to survive. Fossil fuels are limited, and will run out in a relatively short timescale. Fission is nice, but there isn't really all that much in the way of fuels sitting around on Earth, so we'd just run into the same problem. Alternative energy sources like wind and ground-based solar are stopgaps at best, and are ultimately limited in the amount of power obtainable from them. even if you could create a closed system which supplies our needs for today, the 2nd Law says there will always be losses and wastage, and the end is that we all live in little thatch huts. If we haven't nuked each other out of existence earlier than that.
Bottom line, if we don't get fusion working in 50 years or so (and we probably will, at the rate we're going), you're going to see the nastiest wars over diminishing oil supplies you've ever seen, followed by population collapse, and if we're not lucky, the collapse of whatever passes for civilization these days.
If we fall now, there won't be any second chance for our descendants in a few hundred years --they won't have the easy access to oil that we enjoyed. We'll be back to pre-industrial days, with whatever tiny bits of tech we can hang onto and keep running with 'renewable' energy sources until it all breaks and can't be replaced because the assembly plant doesn't run.
So yeah, I think fusion is important.
> The stuff shown by quantum mechanics is entirely physical, and you can see its effects quite easily.
Not all of quantum physics can/has been seen. For example tachyon particles.
>mathematics can describe things which don't/can't exist in this universe.
Yet do we discount what mathematics is saying just because we can't experiment it in some lab?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
there have been numerous advancements in transport which have made the relocation of nuclear waste less dangerous than the floating ecological disasters in wait we call oil tankers. a quick google search reveals as much, i invite you to do some research.
that said, there are granite statues littering washington, dc which emit more radiation than the yucca mountain storage facility's (where the US puts all their nuclear waste) radiation levels or that it is even allowed to come close to. in addition to this, as has already been pointed out, current coal burning spews radiation into the atmosphere an order of magnitude greater than the combined effect of any and all nuclear mishaps.
it was only a few months ago when James Lovelock, patron saint of the greenies, jumped ship with the backwards logic of greenpeace et al and himself stated that nuclear energy is the only real and present solution available to us to save ourselves from the eco-disaster to come from our current and past energy production means. it is greenies who cling tightly to the far off dreams of pure energy production that are now the greatest danger. the energy industry wants to move to nuclear, we *need* to move to nuclear. antiqueted and baseless fears that halt implementation of modern, safe, and more effecient nuclear technology are holding the human race back from making real progress towards keeping us and the environment productive to our survival stable enough to have the time to develop the fabled pure energy technologies of green dreams.
That article was possibly the worst, most uncritical, emptyheaded, factually incorrect, fearmongering, inaccurate, buzzword slinging, biased, scientifically illiterate piece of absolute shit that I have ever read. Makes me feel even more glad I cancelled my subscription when I did, when I was THIRTEEN YEARS OLD!