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."

Comments

Re:No matter..

[drinkypoo]

Using Chernobyl as an example of why nuclear energy is stupid and I wish you people would cut it out. (By "you people" I mean the people who keep doing it.) Chernobyl was an antiquated design by the time it was built and they were testing what would happen if they did several stupid things at once. Compounded with the stupidity of operating such a crappy old reactor design, this causes a catastrophic accident which, as you point out, made many people unhappy.

Should you do several stupid things at once in a modern reactor, the reactor will fail in such a way that it shuts down. It doesn't melt down. The reactors are designed such that they must constantly be maintained just to keep the reaction going, and if they fail, they fail to a cold state.

This is not to say that it's impossible to have a horrible catastrophic failure with a newer design, but consider this: Coal burning power plants have put more radioactive material into our atmosphere than all the nuclear fission accidents combined.

Fusion would be the clean and safe way to go if it were here, but it isn't. It's going to be a while before we have a reactor that has any output beyond sustaining itself and it's going to be even longer than that before we have a fusion reactor which is actually profitable on a reasonable time scale. As such, I think it's worth it to build a few fission plants now. We can always decommission them when we finally get fusion working meaningfully.