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New Advances Bring Fusion Closer to Reality
An anonymous reader writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports on new advances in nuclear fusion research. For years we've been waiting for the technical breakthroughs that would make cost-effective fusion energy a reality. Are we getting close, or are the problems insurmountable?"
"Nuclear Fusion has always been 15 years away, and always will be"
I built a cold fusion device that uses heavy water as its fuel, but my work is being supressed by the hot fusion cabal at Princeton.
One day I'll be famous.
Are we getting close, or are the problems insurmountable?
According to this documentary, we'll have fusion powering our homes and cars within 10 years.
While I believe that fusion will likely be the only sustainable energy source as our current supplies of oil and uranium eventually run out, nuclear fission is about the only 'safe' alternative in the meantime. Generating many orders of magnitude less radioactive waste than current fossil fuel plants, they are inherently better for the environment on a purely objective level.
What I object to, though, is the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements. These things are radioactive precisely because of their tendency to decay and in fact split themselves. They don't even split into other elements. You can't turn uranium into gold, for example, even though it ought to be a straightforward process of splitting off the required number of protons from each atom (if the "we're splitting atoms" camp claims are correct).
We use the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements to fuel our generators. We do nothing like smashing atoms into smaller bits.
Just a pet peeve of mine whenever I see a nuclear power article.
"I know there's a pot of gold for me All I got to do is just believe I'm so happy doin' the neutron dance And I'm just burning doin' the neutron dance I'm so happy doin' the neutron dance I'm just burning doin' the neutron dance"
--The Pointer Sisters
Does this mean I'll finally be getting a Mr. Fusion to put on my Delorean?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
It's not a theological magazine, it's an actual newspaper. The have World/US/Science/etc news.
r .html
http://www.csmonitor.com/aboutus/about_the_monito
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
No, "Christian Science Monitor". It's a newspaper, and a highly respected one at that. You know, newspapers? Those paper things that get delivered to your neighbors and your local library? You should turn off the computer once in a while and check that place out. You'd be surprised what you might learn!
Christian Science is different from Christianity. Plus, Christianity isn't anti-scientific.
"What will happen to the material that stops all those neutrons?"
Assuming you don't use aneutronic fusion, it will get mildly radioactive. So bury it in the middle of nowhere... who cares? We're not talking about 'hot' fission fuel here.
"What is the failure mode for a collapsed fusuion capable magnetic field?"
The confinement vessel warms up by about two degrees C, you fix the problem and restart it. You've been watching too many SF movies if you think that a confinement failure will cause a nuclear explosion.
"Fusuion power will NEVER be safe"
Fusion is extremely safe compared to fission: you appear to be just a typical ill-informed knee-jerk anti-nukleah.
"What is the failure mode for a collapsed fusuion capable magnetic field?"
The plasma disperses and the fusion stops. What do you think happens when they shut the field down now after their tests?
"Wow, these are bad, very very very bad also."
Really? Why?
"The folks that came to our little burg for a 'rah rah' meeting claimed that power would be so cheap, it wouldn't be metered."
And it would have been had the anti-nuclear nutters who stopped the whole thing in its tracks. Yes 3 mile island happened and then chernobyl. So what? When an airliner crashes 400 people die. Do we stop all flight? Tens of thousands of people die in car crashes every year. Do we ban cars? No.
"The situation with nuclear power has not changed just becuase we are looking at 'new and improved' fusion"
If the halfwitted political loudmouths of society can be convinced this new form is "better" than the old form (whether it is or not) then we may get somewhere with it. If it ever works that is.
...on the history of the Christian Science Monitor.
My understanding is that it is one of the oldest and longest running *actual* news sources that has remained rather committed to the *actual* scientific truth, not the false truth pushed by Born Again Christian Fundamentalists.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
The article was so dumbed down it was actually harder to work out what it was saying, but I think it goes like this:
"We still intend to use a donut-shaped plasma contained in a magnetic field. But now we've got better scopes and the latest release of 'budget fluid-model XP' for our souped-up research PCs"
Perhaps the real point of the article is to announce that Christian HQ has finally decided that nuclear fusion isn't blasphemous (and God has presumably decided not to enforce her patents on the sun).
"However, those who worked on the years of clean up at three mile island know how bad these failure modes are."
Oh, and while we're on the subject, the new Chinese fission reactors are designed to be impossible to melt down, and are therefore extremely safe. The downside is that you still need to deal with the hot radioactive fuel afterwards.
Equally, plants powered by conventional fuels pump out a huge amount of radioactive crap into the atmosphere (e.g. coal often contains uranium which will be burnt and dispersed into the atmosphere) and if the 'global warming' nutters are correct then the consequences of continuing to burn conventional fuels would be far worse than those of a few fission reactor accidents.
What you yourself are insinuating is that we do not create any 'unnatural' elements in the proces.
I object: Pu for example is not a natural element - and quite wasteful.
Slashdot: stuff for news, nerds that matter, matter for news, stuff that nerd
Just because we can't do it right now doesn't mean we never will.
100 years ago we would never have dreamed space exploration would be possible. Why's this so different?
Summation 2
>"Wow, these are bad, very very very bad also."
>Really? Why?
Maybe it's better than a fission reactor meltdown, but those plasmas are plenty hot and having them leak out is not good. Things would burn and melt and stuff.
It is not a theological magazine. CSM has been known for decades as a solid newspaper, and has won several Pulitzers for its accurate reporting.
Is this an Ask Slashdot?
If so then my answer is yes! I mean no! err..What was the question again?
IANANE (I am not a nuclear engineer) but if I read that article correctly then it seems some of the many problems have theoretical solutions. In other words, it worked in the simulation. We need to get this thing built and do real tests before we can even think about being "close" to having fusion plants.
They can't even decide where to build it! Why can't I vote to spend my (US) tax money on putting one of these over here. Even as a test bed it will give the contry it's in some home field advantage.
You can use my back yard if you want! Don't listen to my whiney neighbors, they don't know what's good for them!
I don't think, Therefore I'm not.
" I'm sorry, we're looking at a theological magazine for technical articles?"
Let me get this straight... Christians can't invent things, or are ever involved in science?
Look around you. The vast majority of everything you take for granted was invented by someone who happened to be Christian, or was made possible by the FREEDOM to invent only possible with the democratic freedom invented by Christian dominated countries.
The Christian Sciene Monitor is not some church publication. But what if it were? The VATICAN even has scientific institutions, including one of the world's better astronomical observatories.
You know, and I will be modded to hell for suggesting this... But even as our governemnt and courts seem to move to FORCE secularization into all parts of public life and expression, our freedom to invent is being ever more threatened by new IP laws.
These laws are being proposed and imposed by a legally atheistic government, that is divorcing all decision from MORALITY finds no problem with granting multinational corporations intellectual property monopolies and the ability to crush individuals.
Corporatism != Free Market
Where are the four mechnical arms that are impermeable to electricity and magnetism? Then we can just wire them right into our backbones. I mean thats pretty much all we need, right?
That and some jazz about harmonics
"The confinement vessel warms up by about two degrees C, you fix the problem and restart it."
Also, due electromagnetic forces, the sudden absence of big magnetic field excerts a lot of torque to the torus. Not harming anyone, but I'd wager being near when 6-meter-high metal construction just "jumps" may be a bit startling.
And it would have been had the anti-nuclear nutters who stopped the whole thing in its tracks. Yes 3 mile island happened and then chernobyl. So what? When an airliner crashes 400 people die. Do we stop all flight? Tens of thousands of people die in car crashes every year. Do we ban cars? No.
Exactly. Everything has risk, and while we should and do try to reduce the risks, not doing something because it does pose a slight risk, where it could lead to huge benefits is beyond retarded. People just don't take the time to understand.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
that's how all the stars have been working till the beginning of time. and the H-bomb too. the only problem is that we can't make it happen in a controlled and effective way.
in nuclear fission, one atom break into two and spit out neutrons which further trigger other events. Material are inserted to slow the process down so it won't explode.
On the other hand, nuclear fusion merge two atom (hydrogen?) into one. Energy are input to accelerate the atoms as well as confining it. IF it does fail, the hydrogens will escape (from the chamber?) but there won't be further reaction. This won't lead to explosion in power failure.
They are cheaper than fission in the sense that hydrogen are easier to get than uranium. Furthermore, our current source would cease to exist one day and hydrogen are everywhere so they are a more common source of energy
I am harvesting funny/good quotes. Please help by putting them in your sigs
With observations like that in reputable news sources like the Economist it is no wonder that investment in fusion waxes and wanes. People want a return on investment before the next election, not 30 years from now.
use the suns fusion to grow biodiesel. A lot cheaper and it will clean the atmosphere. My understanding is that all carbon in plant is extracted from the atmosphere. Extracting the oil leaves carbon waste, so even dirty engines cannot put more carbon back into air then was extracted. :)
Although we may end up with oxygen pollution
biodiesel home page
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
What is the failure mode for a collapsed fusuion capable magnetic field?
The reaction stops. No, seriously, current fusion reactor designs require the magentic field to cause the fusion to happen. Thats why its currently so expensive, most of the time it takes more electricity to power the magnet than you can get from the fusion.
Current nuclear reactors have a GREAT track record, by any other industry standard. However, those who worked on the years of clean up at three mile island
Guess what, the reactor there wasn't a current design. In fact, I believe none of the reactors in operation in the US is a current design, since instead of replacing them with better designs that have been in use for almost a decade now, little "know it alls" like you complain and prevent new plants from being built to replace the old.
The situation with nuclear power has not changed just becuase we are looking at 'new and improved' fusion.
The situation with nuclear power changed decades ago with the invention of reactors that could burn fuel that would have otherwise been considered "spent", reducing the need for disposal. It changed years ago with the invention of better fission reactors that are resistant to meltdown in emergency situations, and it will change yet again with the invention of fusion reactors that operate by converting small atoms (Helium) into slightly larger ones, rather than using heavy metals like uranium and plutonium.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Geez - those media types are so far behind real science!
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to add 2 liters of fresh Pre Energetic Positively Soluted Ions (PEPSI) to my reactor...
Yeah, I know I'm ill informed. It's true. I've never worked on a tokomak or any other nuclear facility. I do know that it takes more than two degree C from ambient to make fusion happen with known methods. And the product of twenty years of operation is not well understood, there is more than one person in the nuclear field (possibly informed, and/or just crazy) that wonders what happens to materials even if the neutrons are not 'hot'. The argument that nearby materials will not get dangerous appears to be based on statistics (of course because this is all you've got). So who is looking at real failure modes (versus the ones where things get two degrees out of wack and the confinement politly disipates into a safe cloud of well behaved plasma)? Take another look at the density goals for these operations, recalculate the energy moderation outside a confinement, then let me know if you still come up with only two degrees. (I'm also pretty bad at arithmetic, so I get exponents wrong all the time, just by one or two, but hey, a few degrees of magnitude make all the difference, don't they)
"Are we getting close, or are the problems insurmountable?"
Yes.
I'm sorry, we're looking at a theological magazine for technical articles?
I'm a total atheist, but the Christian Science Monitor is an extremely good publication, very independent.
It was apparently originally founded by a wealthy and religious woman about a century back. It is owned by a church, but you couldn't tell from the content. What you can tell is that it's not just another news organization for which profit is the all important thing.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
I think we're getting closer to "cost-effective" fusion, if for no other reason than that the alternatives are getting more expensive. If the cost of fusion just stays constant, fusion will eventually win out. Other energy sources will simply become more expensive, leaving fusion the "bargain" energy source.
"What is the failure mode for a collapsed fusuion capable magnetic field?" The plasma disperses and the fusion stops. What do you think happens when they shut the field down now after their tests? Yeah, just like I 'just shut down' a diesel or spark ignited engine. I don't. You don't. They don't just shut down a mag confinement in normal shut down. Also, plasma density for sustained fusuion, appears to be, significanly more interesting than what is being done today. Personally, I hope it works. Personally, I believe I will not be the only one that holds the utilities to task when it comes to making this public. Nuclear power was sold the citizans of the good old U.S.A. with lies, deciet and the worst examples of representation of the public trust. Having a million degree stuff in your back yard is not usually considered a 'safe' thing. "Wow, these are bad, very very very bad also." Really? Why? "The folks that came to our little burg for a 'rah rah' meeting claimed that power would be so cheap, it wouldn't be metered." And it would have been had the anti-nuclear nutters who stopped the whole thing in its tracks. Yes 3 mile island happened and then chernobyl. So what? When an airliner crashes 400 people die. Do we stop all flight? Tens of thousands of people die in car crashes every year. Do we ban cars? No. "The situation with nuclear power has not changed just becuase we are looking at 'new and improved' fusion" If the halfwitted political loudmouths of society can be convinced this new form is "better" than the old form (whether it is or not) then we may get somewhere with it. If it ever works that is.
Non-belief in a god != Belief God doesn't exist. Atheism is not the same as a religion. How many times must this fallacy be repeated? Not being a football player does not make me an athlete. Not collecting stamps does not make me a hobbiest. Not writing a book does not make me an author. Get it? Not believing in a god/God does not make me religious.
There is such a thing as non-religious. And it has nothing to do with faith. Its called atheism.
That's right. All your base.
No Doc Ock jokes?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
What is the failure mode for a collapsed fusuion capable magnetic field?
...we are looking at 'new and improved' fusion.
Leaves a burn on the rug.
Please stop waiting for fusion power to be our friend.
Who said anything about being friend? We master, fusion slave.
Try going back to the 50's and early 60's
Because, as we all know, science has not advanced one iota since then.
Well, we never had "fusion" as a viable power source (if you discount the sun, of course). You might want to lookup "fission" and then "fusion". Think of it as splitting the atom vs. merging the atoms... fusion gives you a lot more power and a lot less waste. Once we get fusion (if we ever do) fission will go the way of the steam engine and horse drawn cart.
Fusion science has made a big return on this investment in the form of a new universal constant. This constant is the number 30, a figure that has for the past half-century or so been cited almost religiously by researchers as the number of years that it will take before fusion power becomes a commercial reality.
No wonder they can't make the fusion work. Everybody else knows the correct value of the universal constant is 42.
I believe he said we didn't believe it would be possible...not just dreaming of it. Right now I think landing a human on Venus will never be possible just because of the environment. Maybe that will be proved wrong someday. Things are moving at an extremely rapid pace. The first jet engines used as a top secret venture during WW2 and seen over the skies of Germany was only about 60 years ago. Then..what...25-30 years later we land on the moon? That is impressive and I'm betting nobody would have dreamed we would have made leaps and bounds like that 100 years ago. I wanna see whats next!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
IANANP (I am not a nuclear physicist) but a lot of people don't seem to know much about fusion so here are some links which explain a bit more about it:
l / fusion.html f usion
http://www.jet.efda.org/pages/content/fusion2.htm
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/nucene
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_nuclear_
http://www.fusion.org.uk/
http://www.iter.org/
Sorry to be a nathering nabob of negativism, but...
Practical nuclear fusion would be the best thing that ever happened to our planet: we'd lose our dependence on the Middle East for energy, and dramatically cut pollution. If it were up to me, I'd launch a nuclear fusion program on the scale of the Manhattan Project.
However, the Bush family and that crowd will never allow nuclear fusion to become a reality - they make too darned much money on oil, and cash is all they understand.
The sun has that little advantage of mass to create the enormous pressure and heat needed for fusion.
In the absence of a similar free advantage I don't see why you assume we can create a sustainable fusion reactor.
Clear, Dark Skies
"But even as our governemnt and courts seem to move to FORCE secularization..."
Since the rebirth of the new religious dark age some 25 years ago under Ronald Reagan, in the US government, public schools, courts, and just about everywhere else, *IT IS RELIGION* that is being increasingly forced into our lives. I am sickened by the sickness of it all.
"Things would burn and melt and stuff."
Oh boy. Go back to watching your cartoons. This discussion is for grown ups.
"Scientists now say 100 million degrees C is not too hot to handle in this powerful energy-generating process." Correct me if I'm wrong here but we are trying to fuse hydrogen here not helium, nobody need be messing around with temperatures anywhere near 100 million celcius.
vampirical
You can't get something for nothing is one of the fundamental laws of physics. Statements like hydrogen being a nearly limitless source of fuel fails to note that energy (electricity) needs to be applied to water to get the hydrogen out. Also, the statement in the article that the reaction would generate five times the amount of energy it consumes doesn't seem to square with the law of entropy -- otherwise you could just plug the thing into itself and have the equivilent of a perpetual motion machine. Efficiency of power generation is the only thing that will make a difference.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the article meant to refer to SILICON carbide.
Silicon and Silicone are often confused.
OTOH, perhaps this will be the next big thing. Talk about too hot to handle...
-j
France's banning of religious items is really not a form of atheism. They also ban all sorts of aggressive clothing, obscene items and so on. These items that break their general uniform rules are now fitting into that catagory and are therefore banned also.
A religious item of clothing is little different from wearing some form of gang emblem afterall really, it's simply something to identify you as being a member of a particular group. What France wants to do is remove that identification so that whilst in school what you are is a student, no more, no less.
That's not to say I agree with it, though.
Idiot. CSM has won seven Pulizer prizes.
Also, people, don't forget that Atheism is no less a _religion_ than any other. Or that's what my philosophy professor (also doctored in physics) used to say. It is well established that you cannot prove the non-existance of god any more than you can prove his existance. You may only believe one way or another. If you want to be all politically correct and stuff you may say - "I don't know whether god exists or not, but I gonna respect people believing both ways". But the science does not have a lot to do with explaining the world but more to do with describing it - people from Newton (extremely cool guy), Pascal (very smart guy, read their articles, lots of fun!)), and Darwin to (supposedly) Einstein used to understand that pretty clearly, the fact that you figure out a formula describing a gravity force (seemingly right) and name the things ("force", "gravity") does not help explaining _why_ the hell things attract; to put it all in a primitive way. And as for cosmogonics - every story a tribe in African jungle would tell you about the world's creation IMO would be better than "there was _nothing_, it _exploded_, and everything came to be". But maybe it's just me.
BTW, me, I'm Christian (Orthodox).
Hmm, that's not going to help stop people feeling that way, nor do I think your distinction is terribly relevent, especially when you consider that most atheists would say they believe there is no god, and strong atheists would tend to say that it can be proven that there cannot be. That seems like belief in the nonexistance of God to most people. To say "No" in answer to the question "Do you believe in God" and to also say "No" in answer to "Do you believe there is no God" would surely make you an agnostic?
You are auite correct- it does take a lot more than 2 degrees C to initiate a fusion reaction. What the hell this has to do with fusion reactor failure I'm not sure. I think that the reference to 2 degrees temp rise in the parent was another way of saying "not a hell of a lot". If the containment field fails not a lot happens- the reaction stops. As for neutron irradiation, as a consequence of working with fission reactors for a long time now we know exactly what happens to structural materials when bombarded by neutrons. You get a some residual radioactivity and they are more prone to failure (they tend to become brittle). But ,like I say, we know all about this- it's not like you're the first person to think "hey there's neutrons coming out of that thing". By the way, I think they've actually had a few field failures at JET (ITER's precursor) with no dire conmsequences.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
You were oh so close on your post.
The first part was correct but then you had to provide a link to a creationist web site. A web site with the name 'Institute for Creation Research' as if the use of the word 'Institute' provides some legitimacy to the fantasy of Creationism.
So close yet so far.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
It's nucular!
:w!q
Yep, my father quoted that one on his PhD thesis.
Granted, they do have fusion -- but not practical fusion.
But to prove his statement, he pointed out how expensive it is to generate tritium for the DT reaction, and how little there is.
If we're ever going to have practical fusion, it's going to be cold fusion. Use a molecule with an explosive bond that shoves two other molecules on a predefined pathway into a range where you get a 1% chance of reaction between two hydrogen nuclei, by tunnelling, and you could do it.
But that would take a pretty complicated and well-designed molecule.
There may be some ways of doing it once we have better molecular manufacturing, but as for right now, cold fusion is also dead.
For that matter, unless we're using it in space, I hope they don't get cold fusion.
To quote Don Lancaster (www.tinaja.com), if anyone finds a free energy source and manufactures it without also providing a free energy sink, they'll be the worst criminal in human history. Oh, and our planet will glow like a star too.
I think the proper solution to our energy problems needs to be wind and wave. Those take care of the energy source/sink problem. Sorry, just my two cents.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
The Joint European Torus (JET) fusion lab in Culham, Oxfordshire, UK 'jumped' a few years ago. The plasma touched the wall of the reactor vessel and dissipated. The entire reactor 'jumped', and the event is visible on seismograph traces. (The reactor, in total, was quite heavy)
This is not good for the retaining magnets - the magnetic field quenches, and the energy goes into heating up the magnets. Even the superconducting (and therefore cooled) ones warm up - boiling off a lot of refrigerant, and possibly/prbably distorting/damaging the coils..
Afer this event, th reactor was shut down for a long period (I think months), while the coils were checked for damage and realigned.
As for the amount of energy in the plasma itself - it's relatively small. Although the temperature is high, the particle density is actually quite low, so the total energy contained is (relatively) small. It *won't* go up like a hydrogen bomb.
The core lining in JET was lithium. It gets mildly radioactive due to being bombarded by neutrons all the time, but this is not a big deal. The neutron activation of the concrete and steel rebar used in the construction of the core (it has to withstand high mechanical forces from the magnetic fields) is more of an issue.
The plasma isn't meant to touch the tokamak wall, as it causes long and expensive downtime, but it's not as catastophic as (say) setting light to an oil well.
Linked at the bottom of the article. Or does nobody actually read the articles?
Interesting...
If I can't have it now I don't want it, that's how I managed to give up crack.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
I don't agree about atheistic govenments, if you mean the US Bushy govenment then you can think again because he's Born again boyo. no religon is about power over people with what ever lies will convince them to stay under heel.
Wow, do you work for a fusion research team? You sound so educated about it all. I would never have thought to use a Diesel engine as an analogy for a Tokamak. And that incisive, informative thing about million degree "stuff" - just brilliant. Can I have your children?
How about this: if you have concerns about safety, ask questions about the process. If you don't know how the process works, you can't make analyses about the failure modes. When someone answers and you don't understand the answer, that doesn't mean that the answer is wrong.
Or, how about THIS: When you know enough to contribute meaningfully, do. Until then, STFU. K? K.
Atheism denotes a person believes there is no God. In other words, this person has "faith" that there is no God. "Agnosticism" is more the "non-religious", "nothing to do with faith" thing...
If life is a waste of time and time is a waste of life, let's all get wasted and have the time of our lives.
[Grandparent]: When an airliner crashes 400 people die. Do we stop all flight? Tens of thousands of people die in car crashes every year. Do we ban cars? No.
[Parent]: Exactly. Everything has risk, and while we should and do try to reduce the risks, not doing something because it does pose a slight risk [...] is beyond retarded.
The problem is control. Yes, planes crash. If people are scared of that, they can simply not fly. If people are afraid of car crashes they can not drive. If people are afraid of a nuclear power plant melting down and spewing airborne radioactive ash over 2000 square miles, well, there's not a whole hell of a lot they can do about it. That is the problem. That is why it is meeting all this resistence. Society can get over fears which the really paranoid people can choose to avoid, however inconvenient. But when a "risk" comes along that can't be escaped from, well, then we need everyone to buy into it.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Don't get me wrong because I agree, but I am amazed when I see comments like this on a slashdot. This is the most liberal site I have ever seen in my life. Most on here voted for Kerry I would bet and don't even keep track of which party does the most to help things like this or hurt it. Most tree huggers are Democrats. The tree huggers are the ones trying to stop things like this. Bush has dedicated funds to this and I submitted the story in 2003 (rejected of course...was pro-Bush). Here is an html ver of the doc. here or the pdf if you prefer.
From the article: Friday, January 31, 2003By ROBERT STERNPLAINSBORO - After a five-year hiatus, the United States next month will rejoin internationalnegotiations to develop fusion energy as a commercial power source, U.S. Energy SecretarySpencer Abraham said yesterday.
5 year hiatas...who was in office then? Oh yeah democrats.
U.S. participation in construction of the $5 billion project would cost an estimated $500million in constant 2002 dollars over a 10-year period, according to the Department ofEnergy.
And people on here say Bush doesn't do anything to help with alternative fuel research all the time. Articles like this are rejected of course. From it you see:George Bush, an oilman, could wind up a sort of fuel-economy and alternative-fuel president.
He's already boosted mileage requirements for trucks 7%, to an average 22.2 miles per gallon for 2007 models. He's committed $1.7 billion to hydrogen-fuel research. And he has made decisions that helped the ethanol-fuel industry boost production to 3.4 billion gallons this year, double from when he took office.
In a second term, lobbyists and public policy veterans expect him to do even more for renewable fuels such as ethanol, reshape fuel-economy regulations in ways that could require even better mileage, and push a Republican Congress to pass an energy bill with generous tax credits for people who buy especially fuel-efficient vehicles.
So basically, the progress being made on fusion was funded in part by this administration and funding was cut by the previous. Anyone who mods this down is just a Bush basher and I plead to you now, don't hide the truth. The media already does that enough. I don't want a flamewar. I'm only talking about the last 2 administrations and the current topic of fusion.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
The magnetic field contains the plasma within a smaller volume than the containment vessel as part of the process of creating the required energy levels. When the magnetic field is turned off, the volume available to the plasma rapidly expands bringing the pressure down below 1 atmosphere. As a result it no longer has sufficient energy to maintain itself as a plasma and does not have sufficient pressure to transfer its energy to the containment walls.
On a clear day, just look up. ;-)
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
The VATICAN even has scientific institutions, including one of the world's better astronomical observatories.
You're absolutely right. The Vatican is a world leader in science. Why, up until 1992, common sense told us that the Sun revolved around the Earth, but the Vatican broke the story that it is in fact the other way around! Many believe that it was the massive expense of re-writing all the science textbooks in the mid-1990's that led to the unrealistic economic buildup, and inevitable subsequent bust.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Atheism denotes a person believes there is no God. In other words, this person has "faith" that there is no God. "Agnosticism" is more the "non-religious", "nothing to do with faith" thing...
Wrong. Athiesm denotes a person who LACKS a belief in god. It is an absence of a belief, not a "faith." You are spewing typical religious (not to mention logical fallacy) designed to dismiss a point of view you don't agree with. It is not only disingenuous, it is infantile.
Or does your disbelief in Santa Clause living at the North Pole imply "faith" or make you a child?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
When I was a Physics student back in the early 80's, some of us put together a field trip to Lawernce Livermore Labs, and saw the Fusion work going on there.
Back then they said it was 60 years away, not 15. And this was even being stated back in the late 90's, to Congress.
These folks would never make it in Silicon Valley. The best that I can figure is that it was job insurance.
I suspect the quote of 15 years is to make the carrot seem closer, in order to get more money - and has nothing to do
with reality.
In the meantime, I'll believe it when I see it.
Do you mean Cosmogenics?
Everything we are so proud of in our western culture:
Democracy, a legal system with judges, defenders, juries. The whole scientific approach, academies. Parliaments, representative gouvernments, all this origins from pagan ancient Greece and Rome.
The Christian understanding of justice is a priest that condemns and a mob that stones. The Christian understanding of aquiring wisdom is sitting in the desert and letting the sun shine on your head.
Just read the Bible.
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
Is Christian Science Monitor actually tied any religious institution? I have a hard time believing they are controlled by the Pope, but I could see some connections to various Lutheran organizations or even being a completely independent group of non-literal interpretation of the bible Christian journalists.
Ehh...this is the life we chose.
I'm agnostic. I'm not an atheist. An atheist would say there is no God. I say I don't know if there's a God, and therefore lack a belief in God one way or the other. An atheist would hold a belief that there is no God.
Neither of these belief systems are religious, really. And I'd say that my belief that Santa Clause [sic] implies faith, but not in a religious sense. I have faith that when I step off a curb I'm not going to fall through the street and tumble into oblivion, but that doesn't make me a member of the First Church of Street-Worshippers.
That's all I got.
If life is a waste of time and time is a waste of life, let's all get wasted and have the time of our lives.
There is no getting around the need to regulate any form of 'cheep' energy conversion from other sources to human use. The reason? The free availability of energy will result in people moving to locations which are currently unpopular. For example there would be a run of fallow land in Artic regions. Why? Because cheep or free energy will mean that people can move there and heat their spaces for next to no cost. Think of the environmental change that must then occur? Also, the cheep availability of engergy will mean that techniques for converting sea water to freash water and then transporting it to desert regions will mean the possible extinction of deserts world wide! The state of California is mostly desert. They want cars that release water and not carbon-dioxide. It occured to me that if all of their cars were producing water then the deserts in California might become wet and many different speices might be threatened. If we are worried about carbon-dioxide gas, then why would we not worry about the sudden (in geologic terms) release of energy from some cheep source? If we have the ability to convert this new source into some kind of energy that isn't heat, then we will have less problems. My quess is that heat will be one the biggest uses. This will contribute to global warming. In my view the problems and challanges raised by finding a new source of cheep energy will be legion. We need to review all the consequences of this before we rush headlong into a new and unregulated form of global change. I wish that the laws of Thermodynamics were on the top of the list of things to learn for school-aged kids. If we understand these laws than a lot of things that seem wonderful then seem like robbing Saint Peter to pay Saint Paul. It is exciting that we may have this new source, and it will be very useful in space where we don't really care how much energy we burn (yet).
Does anyone else find it dissonant that the Christian Science Monitor, generally a fine paper, is primarily a journal for a community of Americans who shun medicine in favor of faith healing, yet reports other miraculous science like fusion without complaint?
--
make install -not war
.. in the palm of my hand!
:)
Who's been watching too much Spider-Man, me or the Christian Science Monitor?
Some dictionaries use this as an older definition of atheism, but it is not usually the definition that atheists use. A more accurate and literal definition of an atheist is "somebody who is not a theist" or "somebody who is not a person who believes in a god".
The old definition "believes there is no God" is typically used by theists to annoy atheists. And it works.
"Agnosticism" is more the "non-religious", "nothing to do with faith" thing...
An agnostic is literally somebody who simply doesn't KNOW if there is a god, or thinks that it is impossible to know if there is a god. In practice somebody could be agnostic (i.e. doesn't know) but choose to believe anyway. In fact this "belief without knowledge" pretty much defines faith.
Secularism means not being connected with religion or being independent of religion.
"Most on here voted for Kerry I would bet "
I didn't. I'm not american. Neither are lots of people on here. The "management" may or may not be liberal but the people who post have a whole spectrum of views AFAICS.
That should read "Fusion may be cleaner than fission..."
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
I read once that Helium naturally bleeds out of the atmosphere and into space. The only reason that we have measurable quantities of Helium is alpha particle decay within the earth's mantle.
From what I understand, natural gas is the main source of Helium replentishment.
Ok lets go through this step by step:
It can be agreed that:
Believing that a god(s) exists is an act of faith.
Believing that a god(s) do not exist is an act of faith.
Not beleiving in a god(s) does not imply beleiving there is not a god or gods.
Ok so that leaves us 3 groups:
Theists: those that believe deities exist
Agnostics: those that do not know one way or the other (ie are sat on the fence until proof that they personally will accept comes along) - oh and the word itself is derived from Without-Knowlege
Atheists (note the latin form of the word implies opposit of theist IE the negative, not the absense of ie nullification): these believe that deities do not exist.
Ok this wont change what you do or do not beleive in but hopefully it will clarify things so that those of you that
a) swear you are atheist and then
b) get anoyed when someone tells you its is a faith
will actually realise what the word atheist means and that you have been applying it to yourself wrongly and that infact your beleifs are termed agnostic (ie you dont have a beleif one way or the other)
I am not saying that you should change your beliefs, just that you should call them the right thing.
Note through out this I used the word faith as opposed to religion as in general faith is a more encompassing word that religion for beleif systems and tends to exclude politics - but that is another matter really
I'm sure there is a great sci-fi anime involving kids with strange powers in your post, but I'm too lazy to make it up just now...
I wish I could filter out the annoying Pickens articles...
I think you are absolutely correct.
What will have to happen is that people will not PAY for the electricity, they will be allotted an amount based on their projected "need"; above which, the price per kilowatt-hour will be outrageous. This will provide the incentive to design/choose energy efficent houses (like what you'd build in Wisconsin). This will provide incentive to conserve electricity.
We need to do the same thing with fresh water, but I guess you could build a couple desalination plants on the coast, and LA would be just fine in the summer.
The fusion process stops releasing energy when you hit iron. All higher elements on the periodic table consume energy in their production; they do not yeild energy.
The human race if given 'free' energy will have a lot of issues concerned about the piggish use of energy.
I agree it will be wonderful to master fusion. But remember that often times the things we claim to master thus become masters of us. Money and wealth is often a curse.
If people are strong and enlightened and good, then they can overcome these problems. But don'we know that these qualities can be called subjective traits and that in actuality we all have personality challanges. Even if some of us respect this new power (cheep energy), many of us will not.
Please realize that the use of 'free' energy will be a challange. It may result in the extinction of deserts as people can very cheeply irrigate.
The game 'Civilization' has a simulation about irrigation. At the point in the game when you invent, I think, electrictiy, if you have enough workers and you set them on automatic they will irrigate all of the deserts or build mines on them. Do we want the whole world irrigated and people everywhere, at the bottom of the sea?
And so I conclude that there must be regulation on fusion. Totally unregulated fusion is called a star~(lol)
And if a plant were ever to built there would have be maximum security around it. The lord knows that it would be the newest primary target for all terrorist groups. A nuclear explosion without them having to waste the money on buying a dirty nuke....
...with advances in materials science and computer power, a dollar spent on fusion now will outperform a dollar that was spent on fusion 10 years ago.
A sustained effort is better than impulse funding.
Hey smooth wombat - could you be a bigger dick? K Thanks! No need to quip just to see your own writing -
Nuclear fission does split nucleii into fragments. U-235 fission absorbs thermal neutrons (room-temperature kinetic energy) and splits in half, P-239 fission absorbs fast (high-energy) neutrons and splits in half. The resultant atoms form an assymetric distribution called the 'Mae West' curve because it forms two big peaks (mapped # vs Z) that look like mammaries to lonely nuclear engineers that don't see nekkid women that often.
While Uranium/Plutonium do decay naturally (stability of a nucleus is determined by the Nuclear Shell empirical formula, which is a rough analog of the electron shell theory - everybody wants to be Iron Fe/26, the most stable nucleus), there's another form of decay that's an outcome of genuine nucleus splitting. That's is the decay of of these usually-radioactive fragments. This decay is important to the operation of a fission reactor, but only in determining the criticality of a nuclear pile. 'Critical' == exactly as many neutrons are released in any time period as are absorbed, meaning steady power output. Basically, over 99% of the neutrons necessary to keep a steady level of fission events come from 'prompt' neutrons - neutrons that are freed in the splitting of an atomic nucleus. You get one small chunk (which could very well be gold), one big chunk, and a couple free/fast neutrons.
If these 'prompt' neutrons were enough to sustain criticality, then the number of fission events would increase geometrically. Since the time between generations is about a millionth of a section, this means that a reactor core that's 'prompt-critical' would quickly escalate in temperature until the structural integrity of the core failed, and you have a molten slag of Uranium - which is exactly what happened at Chernobyl.
So the way to avoid this, you have to put in neutron-absorbing control rods to keep the number of 'prompt' neutrons below the number necessary to sustain the next generation of fission events. If 'prompt' neutrons were the only neutron source, your nuclear reactor would quickly cool down. But the decay of the fragments (which are ususally radioactive isotopes of stable elements) release additional neutrons. The 'art' of tuning a nuclear reactor is to insert the control rods just enough so that the reactor isn't prompt-critical, but the decay neutrons are just barely enough to make the pile critical.
One of the biggest problems with fusion in general is fuel. The easiest fusion reaction is deuterium-tritium. Deuterium is plentiful - the ocean is full of 'heavy water' where one of the hydrogen atoms in a water molecule has a proton and a neutron. Tritium, however, is radioactive with a pretty short halflife. You have to make tritium by getting Lithium to absorb a neutron, then decay.
Last time I was up-to-date on fusion research, there was only an estimated 300 years of Lithium to sustain the predicted energy needs of the world. However, with fission fast-breeder reactors like they use in France, there would be 5000 estimated years of power. Fission fast-breeder reactors can be built today - it's just that to make them passively safe, you need to use a liquid metal coolant like sodium, and any disaster like Chernobyl (from terrorists, for example) would be catastrophic. Liquid sodium will explode if it gets wet, so it's a huge engineering challenge. Argonne Nat'l Labs has reactor designs like this, but the US population is scared of nuclear power plants (plus, the cost overruns at plants made them economically unfeasible).
[I am a published principal author and presentor of a fusion reactor design (presented at the 8th Topical Meeting on the Topic of Fusion Energy in Salt Lake City), so I have a tiny bit of credibility. I got out of the field specifically because of the 15-year carrot-on-a-stick paradox.]
The standard counter argument has already been written, so I'll add the standard fun counter argument.
The difference between, say, a christian and an atheist is that the christian is atheist for just one ghod less...
That is, very few christians believe in the existence of Ganesh, Oden, Sam-the-god (from Son of Sam), etc, etc. There are literally hundreds of gods that the average christian (and atheist) doesn't believe exists.
The christian doesn't accept the existence of those weird gods because those crazy theories based only on internal feelings and indoctrination of young people at an early age.
The atheist just notes that the description is applicable to christianity, too.
To get religious people, you have to indoctrinate kids at an early age -- otherwise very few become religious. See e.g. Scandinavia. (As a Swede, I can add that most of those people that still go to some church seems a bit less than stable emotionally. They are ... to be kind, seekers.)
The atheist either lack the indoctrination at an early age (that's me) or has the integrity and strength to look beyond the indoctrination inflicted upon him/her.
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
Thanks for the response. We often forget that nukes actually have a good (to excellent) track record. Yes, some of the failures have been spectacular. I think dialogs like this help, people get educated (mostly). It's hard to gain confidence in institutions that, I believe, could have treated the populous to a better dialog (I think folks would have supported nukes if the discussion had been more open). Having lived 'down wind' from the twin sisters at Zion Illinios where, for some years, their operational record was not so good (aec kept them from running to spec and getting 'hot', so that worked pretty well). I certainly don't believe that full fusion power has no potential problems. I also believe that they can be made as safe as our will requires. Again, thanks for the feedback.
Yes, nuclear waste lasts a long time. However, toxic metals in burnt coal ash last forever, they won't decay at all.
m /COAL_VS_N UCLEAR.html
It also takes land thousands of years to recover from strip mining.
The carbon dioxide (millions of tons of it per 500MW power plant) from burning coal is also more or less permanent, and it's a LOT harder to deal with than burying some hundreds of tons of nuclear waste someplace.
It's amazing that you are "satisfied" with the disposition of billions of tons of nasty crud from coal mining, processing, and burning, which is mostly disposed of in the common environment, but can't stand the thought of burying some hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste underground in Nevada.
The world would be *far* better off if *every* coal plant was replaced with nuclear reactors.
More reading:
http://langmuir.nuc.berkeley.edu/~peter
What you're describing is an agnostic. An atheist is someone who believes there is no God. We're talking about semantics here, but I would ask, if the latter is not an atheist, then what is he?
So says a friend of mine up a Columbia who is working on a doctorate in Physics. He also works on their Fusion project. They just HAND BUILT! a plasma containment device. They had a couple of custom magnetic rings made and put together -- thing. INAP, but it looks cool, and they get some sort of plasma going and they are able to do test of some importance. I think there is a big conference coming up at which they will make a hoop-de-do about it.
The big work is in France of course. My friend says the real problem is funding. Because all the michines for research are one offs and super expensive. Of course we laugh at this all a bit too becuase up in the lab where this plasma machine is there is a poster that is like 40 years old that proclaims Fusion will provide enless amount of energy and it has a big How-It-Works illustration that is pretty close to this...
Step 1. Harness Power of the Sun
Picture of glowling fireball with swirly blue and red lines running about it.
Step 3. Endless Engergy
FUSION!
The problem with nuclear power as it exists today is that very powerful people set up corporations that then let go bankrupt. And they leave the radiation that they created and profited from as a gift for future generations.
They made the money. They funneled this profit to themselves through sweet-heart corporate deals. Then they drive their businesses into bankruptcy and leave the mess for the rest of us.
There may be safe ways to deal with the radioactive waste. But what I have seen is that the people who benefit the most from these kinds of dirty sources of energy shirk their responsibility in making sure that the waste is safely contained.
Nuclear waste is stated in many studies as dangerous for thousands of years. In a thousand years will anyone be there to prevent problems from 'archiological' discoveries of nuclear waste dumps?
What should society do to deal with the waste? Your solution must be funded for 30,000 years. Who should pay for this?
and so I hold that nuclear power is a short tern boon with long term drawbacks for the future. It seems to me that currently nuclear power steals from the future to finance the lavishness of today.
"Faith" is stronger than that, it means one is convinced of something regardless of any lack of evidence. Faith is also more emotional than a mere choice whether a fact is taken for truth. Faith is about the opposite of reason, and it is quite insulting to atheists to state that "believing" that no God exists requires the same faith as believing one does exist. "To believe" is just an ambiguous word, which may or may not imply faith.
;-)
Faith is the centrepiece of any religion or sect, while the absence of any faith is the centrepiece of science (in objectivity, lack of dogma). Not that individual scientists can't have irrational faith in their own point of view though...
Agnosts are either cowards, indifferent or honestly ignorant.
Secular states should be indifferent. France just enforces that indifference on its public students.
I would say that I'm an atheist, but I'm foremost a reductionist. Which means I don't believe in voodoo, taoism, souls, bending spoons or life as an entity instead of description either.
Also are those numbers pre' or post' stack scrubbers? Coal burning technology has grown up. From efficient burning, to fuel modification. To good stack scrubbers. This is not your fathers coal-plant anymore. Maybe the arguments against need to grow up too?
And that 'projected need' is determined by somone else, thus REMOVING and NULLIFYING my FREE WILL to USE ENERGY at MY discretion. That's why we BUY it, and don't ASK for it, or allow it to be alloted. Sounds alot like Soviet Russia.
It's this sort of insane and arbitrarily forced regulation that will be the downfall of our society.
Incentive to conserve energy? Give me a break, it's no incentive, it's MANDITORY. Incentive implies choice.
I thought he was calling himself an idiot for replying to flame bait. Yndrd1984
My wife's grandfather is still sharp as a tack and remembers pretty much everything (including the Hoover election as a kid) and was talking about this the other day.
He went from the family first getting a tractor instead of a horse to today. A little perspective can often be awe inspiring. If I live only as long as he has, I can't even imagine the changes that will happen.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
It sure sounds like someone is facing a funding decision and attempting to garner public support.
I am still optimisic about fusion energy in my lifetime being cheaper than oil. Energy cost drives our standard of living. I have a need to beleive that our standard of living can be raised. Also we have some great proofs of concept and significant progress demonstrated.
It is so sad to see a religous flaming errupt because the words nuclear or christian. Fusion is just another fire. It has its place. Too much is bad, none might be worse.
The Christian Science Monitor is wonderful place to get a view that you won't get from mega corporate media. Every news source has the potential for bias. I considerate a favor that they are so up front about it to use a name that declares a perspective.
"Also, people, don't forget that Atheism is no less a _religion_ than any other."
Bullshit!
Why is it that you deny the existence of all the thousands of gods besides your "One True God (TM)"? Are you are simultaneously involved in all the religions which deny the existence of Baal, Zeus, Ganesh, Isis, Ra, the Rainbow Serpent etc?
An atheist just believes in one less god than you do.
And as for cosmogonics - every story a tribe in African jungle would tell you about the world's creation IMO would be better than "there was _nothing_, it _exploded_, and everything came to be".
We know pretty much exactly how and when 'the world' was 'created', but if you're talking about the universe as a whole, then it's spelled 'cosmology'. In that case I can't see how a lie can be better than 'we dunno (yet)'. Why do you think it is better to believe a lie than to be unsure?
Cthulhu loves you.
... an effective power plant of High energy thermonuclear reactions, or the low energy chemically assisted nuclear reactions (also know as cold fusion, which apparently does INDEED exist, type chemically assisted nuclear reactions in your firefox address bar and see for yourself).
The high energy folks could well debate locations for installations until their little project is irrelevant.
I agree that there are a good number of non-US citizens here. I think his point, however was that it appears that the majority of /.ers supported Kerry, based on comments from around election time, poll results, etc.
I agree with the grandparent (to this post), that Bush has done a fair bit to support these types of research, and is still painted as anti-environment/anti-progress.
I think the point of said post was that it is ironic that many people who seem to be liberal in their support for Kerry also seem to be supporting a position that has traditionally opposed to the pro-environment folks--that of nuclear power.
Here's my take--I honestly think that anyone who has taken the time to REALLY research the issues will see that despite all the froth, most scientists see nuclear power (fission or fusion) as a relatively safe method of producing electricity. It is less damaging to the environment, and CAN be cheaper. The only drawback to fission is the waste product, and I still maintain that we can safely store it in various locations until such a time as we learn how to decontaminate it/dispose of it.
In the mean time, we SHOULD be working on getting fusion to work. It is possible--all that remains to be seen is if the costs of the safeguards required to appease those who knee-jerk oppose it will be low enough to make it feasible.
Personally, I think that in the US this will first turn up as a new method of powering sub-marines or other naval vessels, where fission has been used for decades. It is VERY likely that this will turn up in military uses first, then specialized commercial settings, then finally as a method of powering electricity generators. Finally, we will get cars and other vehicles based on the technology.
Of course, the presumes that some nut-job out there doesn't get hold of a dirty bomb (or an honest to goodness nuke) and start a nuclear war before we can get all this working. I'd say we have about a 50% chance of getting fusion first.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
I often notice that cranks or trolls get modded up. Or people who are promotting some agenda, like a lot of hollywood movie nerd types.
Has someone learned how to cook the moderation system? My quess is yes.
I have a lot of respect for /.
I hope that I am wrong in thinking that the moderation is meaningless and that there is a lot of corporate and marketing agenda-mongering going on here.
and yet there is still a lot of interesting things I learn as I sift through the posts.
My original comment has been modded down as a troll, which gives some idea of which way the wind is blowing on Slashdot today.
However. I will stand by my statement that atheism is a belief system. Given that any god or gods are divine by definition, their existence is unlikely to be proven by physical science - therefore ANY statement about their existence or otherwise must be a leap of faith of some sort.
Personally I have no strong religious leanings and neither know nor care whether god exists or not. If there IS a god, then he/she/it/they would seem to be capricious and unkind, given the general evidence of the world around us - I'm quite happy muddling along without their approval or assistance, ta very much.
Where have you been?
There has been a seriouslack in quality of the trolls as of late.
according to Alex Gabbard
For comparison, according to NCRP Reports No. 92 and No. 95, population exposure from operation of 1000-MWe nuclear and coal-fired power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants. Thus, the population effective dose equivalent from coal plants is 100 times that from nuclear plants. For the complete nuclear fuel cycle, from mining to reactor operation to waste disposal, the radiation dose is cited as 136 person-rem/year; the equivalent dose for coal use, from mining to power plant operation to waste disposal, is not listed in this report and is probably unknown.
For a large number of coal samples, according to Environmental Protection Agency figures released in 1984, average values of uranium and thorium content have been determined to be 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively
And a 1,000 megawatt plant uses 4 million tons of coal a year, resulting in the release of 5.2 tons of Uranium and 12.8 tones of thorium.
A 1000 megawatt light water nuclear plant of the type used in the USA uses about 25 tons of uranium a year.
If you're willing to use breeder reactors and their ilk, you can actually get more power out the the uranium in the ash than you got burning the coal!
I don't read AC A human right
There have been no real incentives to make fusion work. Twelve years ago, these guys has a chance and they blue it. The lawyers in congress refused to create sane incentives-and now are risking their own lives due to that failure. The world would be a very different-and imho better-place if viable fusion now existed. The middle east would not be a hotspot like it is now for example. The problem is that the kinds of people that run congress love centralization of power-more than they love life itself. In their eyes, the only suitable role for technical people is as obediant servants that like doing what they are told. What the last 20 years has shown, you just can't run a technological society that way.
"An atheist just believes in one less god than you do."
Note you used the word "believes." Atheism still requires an act of faith, because there is no way to scientifically prove or disprove the existence of any diety.
I had Cold Fusion going in a pickle jar in the fridge, but a Mormon ate it...(
Academic physics has found a way to mine the government for money for the foreseeable future: make spectacular promises of future scientific breakthroughs with no scientific evidence to support the funding.
Hey, it's worked for decades for fusion research and now is working for string theory.
Someone, somewhere, imagined - this individual was promptly denounced by those who supposedly knew better, yet that someone got the idea across to others with imaginations, who said "What if...?" - more denouncing took place, some few are still in denial, yet the advances happened, and continue. As long as the masses want cheaper, more easily available and immediately applicable power and energy, we'll move forward.
Take the 90-Day Challenge! http://rwmurker.bodybyvi.com/
We need to get this thing built and do real tests before we can even think about being "close" to having fusion plants.
I wonder if China will be holding a monopoly with their "build your own" fission reactors by then.
Are you saying that if fusion became practical, then everyone would build and operate their own personal reactor? Unless you are, your hypothesis makes no sense.
The Bushes have made a lot of money from selling energy. Although it happened to be in oil form, oil was never their core product. Any energy producer that wants to convert from oil-era millionaire to fusion-era billionaire will be selling off assets as fast as possible to raise money to build fusion plants all over the place.
If you think that ending the predominance of oil will bankrupt energy companies, then you're in for a surprise.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
wouldn't spinning something around (like those g machines astronauts train on) do the trick, or would they be not fast enough/consume more power than would be made?
So you imply that
Hate to tell you, but you are wrong on all three points.
Ah the wonders of a contextless statistic. Wow, America has spent more than $17 Billion on nuclear fusion in the last fifty years without producing a commercially viable reactor?! Damn those profligate scientists and their free-spending ways! We must put a stop to this before they bankrupt us!
Oh wait. $17 billion divided by 53 years is... $320 Million a year.
In Federal budgeting terms, $320,000,000 is LINE NOISE. It's more than the National Endowment for the Arts gets, but that's about the only thing I can think of that's smaller. In comparison, check out these fun numbers from Table S-3 of our current federal budget:
Department of Defense: $401,000,000,000 (that's FOUR HUNDRED BILLION, and please note that that specifically doesn't include any money we are spending in Iraq)
Department of Homeland Security: $68,200,000,000
Department of Housing and Urban Development: $31,000,000,000
Executive Office of the President: $300,000,000
Yeah, you read that right: the "keep the White House bathrooms stocked with toilet paper" budget is roughly the same as the fusion budget. Oh wait, maybe we haven't been breaking the bank on fusion research after all...
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
"he was confrontational about it and suggested that his work contradicted Catholicism and the Bible. "
No, he didn't contradict anything in the Bible, only the "work" of Aristotle, work that, for some reason, the Vatican accepted as part of Catholicism outside of the Bible.
Not to mention that he was supporting the findings of Copernicus, someone who did not take a "confrontational" view with the Church (being a member of the clergy himself and publishing only on his deathbed). After all, Galileo specifically got in trouble because he was supporting Copernicus' model.
"Second, the Catholic Church admits that it is not an expert or authority on science"
Except when it comes to contraception and/or preventing the spread of sexually transmitted disease? If the Church doesn't think its an expert or authority on science, where exactly does it get off telling us that condoms don't prevent the spread of AIDS?
"Third, the Church did not teach or hold pre-Gallilean notions until 1992."
So when did they stop?
Alright, maybe a different analogy will help clarify. My original point was a response to your assertion that belief in God and non-belief in God both require faith, cause you can't prove he exists, and you can't prove he doesn't. Try this: A: I believe in Foo, because I have faith in Foo.
B: I don't believe in Foo, because there is no evidence in Foo.
One of those viewpoints requires faith. The other doesn't.
That's right. All your base.
Hey AC, wake up from your fantasy world.
The Garden of Eden and Noe's Arch, are not just stories from the Bible, they fit into the creationist history of the world.
Science does contradict religion. Don't lie to yourself.
I assert that invisible unicorns don't exist. Does this statement require less, the same, or more faith than the statement that invisible unicorns exist?
That's right. All your base.
Why not develop and build the prototype here in the US?
We need a Home Grown "Killer Application" / National Project to jumpstart the US economy and help eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. The loss of jobs resulting from manufacturing and High Tech operations moving off-shore, and the outsourcing of both technical and non-technical services in recent years is killing the US economy. We need to get back on track and reverse this loss.
The whole project would probably cost less than 1 year of war with Iraq.
If we had endless fusion power, we could manufacturer as much hydrogen as we liked.
You're obviously not aware that standard, internal combustion engine automobiles can be cheaply adapted to burn hydrogen instead of gasoline. Currently, a very similar modification is available. Aftermarket installers will adapt your regular car to run on natural gas for two to three thousand dollars. Those costs would plummet if cars were built to hydrogen spec by the auto manufacturers. Building a car to exclusively burn hydrogen would likely make cars even cheaper. Because all those expensive components designed specifically to clean up gasoline emissions could be left out.
No, burning hydrogen in internal combustion engines is not as efficient as hydrogen fuel cells. But with an endless supply of hydrogen, it wouldn't matter so much. Fuel cells would eventually take over the market. But direct burning would allow for a relatively easy migration to the newer technologies.
"Plus, Christianity isn't anti-scientific."
Really? I hope someone mentioned that to Galileo...
Well said.
Perhaps I should have posted as an AC myself, as my original posting has been labelled a troll...
Never mind...
Christianity isn't anti-scientific.
Yeah: Raising Lazereth from the dead, Changing water to wine, walking on water, resurrection: All of these make perfect scientific sense.
Christian Science is an oxymoron.
Like Computer Jock,
Sanitary landfill,
and the Skinny Oprah.
Good point.
If you look here:
http://www.jet.efda.org/pages/chronology.html
You'll see the rather coy description in the timeline of JET's first "vertical displacement event", i.e. 'jump', due to plasma disruption in 1984. It was rather embarrassing.
I consider myself to be an agnostic atheist. Strictly speaking the two aren't incompatible. I am an atheist because no religion I have encountered has a plausible, non-circular, non-paradoxical definition of god, and therefore, I don't believe any of them can actually plausibly exist (that's the atheist part). However, I concede that I cannot prove that some kind of greater being or beings we might call gods do not exist. I can only say that I think it is extremely unlikely that they do, and I can also say with some certainty that if such beings do exist, they are a hell of lot different from the fairy tales told to us by religion to make us feel better (that's the agnostic part).
Perhaps it is all semantics, but when your religious neighbor that you were on friendly terms with starts calling you a devil worshipper, and all kinds of other other untrue things, and isn't interested at all in learning anything about what you believe because you are either "with them or against them," its hard not to get bent out of shape over such things.
Shop Smart, Shop S-mart!
[I am a published principal author and presentor of a fusion reactor design (presented at the 8th Topical Meeting on the Topic of Fusion Energy in Salt Lake City), so I have a tiny bit of credibility. I got out of the field specifically because of the 15-year carrot-on-a-stick paradox.]
What exactly is that?!
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
The paper here: (warning - PDF)
http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/FTI/pdf/fdm1148.pdf
talks about designing tokamaks to cope with the stresses induced by plasma disruption and makes oblique reference to the damage done to JET by these 'vertical displacement events'.
It's great how scientists replace the "I screwed up and made the severl hundred ton reactor jump by a foot" with the anodyne 'vertical displacement event'. I guess we should all worry when a scientists says "Oops!".
Interesting... Everything you are referring too either happened in the Old Testament and was done by the Jews, or happened in the New Testament and was done either by the Jews or by the Romans themselves. "Christians" by definition beleive that CHRIST (Jesus) was the Son of God, Jews do not. Therefore Jew Christian. Thusly everything you just heaped on "Christians" is actually Jewish behavior, NOT "Christian". I don't find anything in my bible about Jesus gathering a mob together to stone someone, quite the opposite in fact. I _do_ find quite a few instances of Jews doing that though. Please note that I am not making any value judgements on religion or people, neither is my comment Anti-Semitic in nature. This was a point of clarification for the poster only.
Bahhh, I should have used the preview button. Doggone default HTML formatting...
Sorry for the hard to read post.
I believe the point the poster was making is that once the magnetic field fails, the plasma touches the wall of the container. This causes the temperature of the plasma to drop considerably, to a point where it is no longer stable. The heat transfer to the wall of the vessel is small, lets say about 2 degrees C.
Français:
J'ai doit le reacteur le plus de Japan! Japan est trop petite et en plus ils ont les yeux le bizzare. En va dire que France a les grandes egos, mais ego est une mot d'allemange et Freud. Les personnes français n'ont pas un ego.
Japaneese:
Give us a break you over-brearing French bastards!
Japan should get the reactor because of its neutrality in all of this matter to Britain, US, Germany, etc. France (M. Jaques Chirac) wants to create a new power to challenge the United States called the European Union... the only problem is that in his vision, France IS the king and lord of the EU.
You are splitting hairs. The coal was buried underground to begin with.
>>the new Chinese fission reactors are designed to be impossible to melt down
Of course, they have to be (inherently!)
After all, if there was a melt down,
where would it melt down to?
(you see, it's in China and...)
Agreed. Nuclear fusion would probably be one of the safest ways to get energy.
It takes precise conditions just to get fusion to occur. The minute those conditions fail, the reaction stops.
The plasma densities aren't high enough to cause any damage.
~X~
~X~
Atheism is not a lack of a common type of belief system. Buddhism in the strict form is atheistic, too, yet I would argue that it is a religion.
If you structure your belief system around the idea that no deity exists, then you are atheistic. If you base it upon a deity, then you are theistic. It has nothing to do with a lack of a belief system, that would more properly be areligious.
I hate when people say oil isn't a renewable resource. Of course it is, if you just wait long enough.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
Regardless, christians can be scientists, but only so far as they know how to separate their "beliefs" from the scientific process... heck even Isaac Newton believed in astrology... but he also knew not to base his physics or calculus on the positions of stars...
"The vast majority of everything you take for granted was invented by someone who happened to be Christian, or was made possible by the FREEDOM to invent only possible with the democratic freedom invented by Christian dominated countries."
Democracy was invented by the ancient Greeks, who were polytheistic, not Christian, and some of the greatest thinkers and inventors of their (or any) time. Try again, and this time go further back than 1776, OK?
"The VATICAN even has scientific institutions, including one of the world's better astronomical observatories."
So why did it take so long for them to recognise that Galileo was right, and rescind the excommunication order on him? Answer: the church finds it politically damaging to admit a mistake, even if the mistake is blindingly obvious. Why should the church be more concerned with politics than the truth about God's universe? Answer: power.
"But even as our governemnt and courts seem to move to FORCE secularization into all parts of public life and expression..."
This is a common mistake made by those who can't understand the concept of seperation of church and state. There is no law that prevents you observing your religion! There are laws that prevent you forcing your religious beliefs down other's throats, and in turn the same laws protect you from being forced to accept other's beliefs. A law that protects Synagogues or Mosques does not force you to become Jewish, understand? Public institutions are NOT THERE TO PUSH YOUR BELIEFS AT THE EXPENSE OF THE BELIEFS OF OTHERS; this kind of thinking is the basis of the kind of mindless fundamentalism we decry in the middle east.
"These laws are being proposed and imposed by a legally atheistic government..."
They might be legally atheistic, but George W. "We invade Iraq to protect Christian values" Bush certainly isn't, nor is the rest of the current administration. They invoke the name of God almost daily, yet they are the very people you blame for "crushing individuals"; so either (a) they are consistently lying about their religious beliefs (but Christain America is so gullible they'll accept it as true), or (b) Christianity, in teaching dependence on the church for all moral decisions, allows one to escape personal accountability (the "devil made me do it" defence).
"...that is divorcing all decision from MORALITY finds no problem with granting multinational corporations intellectual property monopolies and the ability to crush individuals."
Secularism has nothing to do with being amoral, any more than the highly religious governments in countries like the Phillipines, Greece, Italy, Mexico, and just about any South American country, are immune from corruption. In fact, if you care to look at current global politics, you'll find the more actively religious a government is the greater the chance that individuals in power act immorally, contrary to your theory.
Power and wealth corrupt, regardless of religion; how many disgraced tele-evangelists, paedophile priests, and bible-thumping but corrupt politicians will it take to convince you of this?
For example, in the article DOE Warms to Cold Fusion, Physics Today, look at the comment by chemist Allen Bard:
Isn't this basically a smoking gun? New fundamentl physics is often revealed by results that differ by as little as one part in a million from preditictions of current theory, or one part in whatever. If there is any discrepancy, whatsoever, within the statistical and systematic errors, that is enough. Your old theory is incorrect. This is completely bonkers. He is saying that consistent excess heat production is not enough, unless it is bigger than before.
Personally I suspsect the writer of this article, Toni Feder, intentionally tricked Dr. Bard into revealing this on the record. That last bit -- about phenomena that you can't just "explain away" -- seems as though Dr. Bard thinks he is speaking to a member of the group that is sympatico to repressing cold fusion research, doesn't it?
There is known to have been disputes between editorial staff and management at Physics Today over the coverage given to less mainstream areas of research. The following exerpt from a letter to the American Institute of Physics, which publishes Physics Today, protests the treatment suffered by a past editor, Jeff Scmidt:
By the way, Jeff Schmidt is the author of Disciplined Minds [disciplined-minds.com], and I think this book includes more coverage of this editorial dispute at Physics Today.
Back to the question of how anomalous the results have to be, we move from the comments of scientists to the behavior of the reporters, in this case Gary Taubes, with What If Cold Fusion Is Real?, Wired, November 1998:
I think what he means by this is that the general consensus is "15 years from now, we'll have the technology to do such-and-such" and 15 years later people are saying the exact same thing. 15 years ago, everyone thought we'd have fusion down by now. Obviously not the case. I'd bet we figure it out during our lifetimes, however, anyone reading this might end up old and gray before it happens. I'm not gonna argue with this guy though, cause he either knows a lot more about this than me or is a much better bullshitter than I, so I'll buck the trend on slashdot and not make a fool of myself.
A: I believe in Foo, because I have faith in Foo.
B: I don't believe in Foo, because there is no evidence in Foo.
This is beeing agnostic, not atheist.
rm -rf /home/leia
Everyone (except the far-left, and the RIAA) knows that you'll make far more money by embracing and investing in new technology then by trying to suppress it.
I don't reply to ACs
Since the time between generations is about a millionth of a section, this means that a reactor core that's 'prompt-critical' would quickly escalate in temperature until the structural integrity of the core failed, and you have a molten slag of Uranium - which is exactly what happened at Chernobyl.
What you're describing here is a "meltdown," sometimes known as a China Syndrome. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I was under the impression that Chernobyl did not experience a meltdown. An explosion and fire occured at Chernobyl due to operators disconnecting various safety systems, but I don't recall any problems with a meltdown, critical mass slag, or failure of the reactor vessel due to some sort thermal event. Meltdowns don't cause explosions (witness that Three Mile Island, which underwent a partial meltdown, didn't blow up) but an explosion is exactly what happened at Chernobyl.
Now, if an actual meltdown ever occurs, it's highly probable the critical mass would sink right down through the floor, through the ground, and eventually hit the water table in a catastrophic explosion of steam. This, however, has never happened in human history as far as I'm aware.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The parent post says nothing whatsoever about the Bush family being the root of all evil, nor does it say anything in regard to Clinton, etc.
It simply suggests that the Bush family and their buddies are in the oil business, are extraordinarily greedy, and play hardball. All of these things are perfectly consistent with history.
What we see in SnarfQuest's response is the typical fringe-right tactic of attempting to refute reality by somehow changing the topic to something that they can attack. How utterly unhelpful.
You'll get a fusion powered tractor???
Fossil fuel burning causes lot more than respiratory illnesses. Among many ecological/environment problems, I'll just mention global heating. This is a huge problem, and not just a question of saving for an air conditioner next summer. Climate is a very nonlinear systems, and heaven knows what can happen when you heat this planet up. It could take 2-3 degrees without much trouble (just a flooding here and there, you know) and then completely blow off at 4-5 degrees.
I find it amusing that you end your post with a quote from a movie that features the explosion of a big fusion reactor.
Don't blame me, I voted for Durga.
However, with fission fast-breeder reactors like they use in France, there would be 5000 estimated years of power.
I'm afraid the only fast-breeder reactor (Superphenix) has been shutdown definitively, because of anti-nuclear lobbying.
We don't need a term like agnosticism just so we can cover the prevalent misunderstandings of what the term atheism means!
It's a-theism, not anti-theism, for a reason.
An excellent source on this topic is wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
"The literal meaning of the term is therefore "lack of belief in a god"." In other words, atheists lack a belief in god, they do not believe there is no god. Also, they do not believe there could or couldn't be a god, "because we don't know".
These are all very different things.
Now, granted some atheists may claim they actually believe there is no god, much like you may find a republican that really wants to balance the budget.;-) The Wikipedia definition refers to that as positive or strong atheism. But according to the root of the word *a*theism, it really should correspond to "weak" or negative position as defined by Wikipedia, namely the absence of a god-belief.
Correct me if I'm wrong here
correction
The way I see it is that an Atheist believe that there is not nor could there be god/gods, that there is nothing "out there" or greater than us, Where an Agnostic may believe in god/gods but rejects religion doctrine or that there is something "out there" and greater than us, but we don't really have a clue what it is. If you are going to define faith : "to choose to believe in something that cannot be proven" then both Atheists and Agnostics have faith since you cannot prove god/gods do exist but also that they do not exist...................Ergo faith.......
"Scientists, meanwhile, are chafing to loose the bulldozers."
/. so many times, at first that sentence made no sense to me. Finally, somebody got it right!
I've seen "lose" spelled incorrectly on
Depends very much on what you mean by "fusion."
Fusion in the sun has happened for 15 billion years.
Controlled nuclear fusion has been around since the 50's, in the H-bomb.
Controlled laboratory fusion has been around since the 70s(?)
Laboratory fusion that has more than breakeven power generation has been demonstrated in the 90s (??)
ITER will provide another step toward demonstrating nuclear fusion above break-even on a commercial scale.
There are many steps still remaining:
- demonstrating commercial-scale electric power extraction using a fusion reactor vessel
- commercial-scale nuclear fusion that can be sustained for the life of a power plant (decades)
- commercial scale support for the nuclear fuel and nuclear waste issues for fusion
It is quite optimistic to claim that in 15 years we would be able to build a commercial-scale fusion power plant which would have better return on capital than a coal-, gas-, or fission-fired power plant. *That* is what is far away. ITER will not change the commercial reality, just the technological knowledge; i.e., knowing how to build a power plant does not make it commercially viable.
You really believe that within 15 years one could plug a computer into a home wall socket and be running on fusion-supplied electricity for the same or less cost than gas- or coal-fired electricity?
Why ask such a question here? Like ANYONE here knows more about what will make fusion work or not work than the scientists working on the problem?
:)
Though I can already see dozens of people that think they do... Nicely done
I'm not sure what hair you are attempting to fission here, but don't you have something better to do? Let's review your contribution to this thread:
What I object to, though, is the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements. These things are radioactive precisely because of their tendency to decay and in fact split themselves. They don't even split into other elements. You can't turn uranium into gold, for example, even though it ought to be a straightforward process of splitting off the required number of protons from each atom (if the "we're splitting atoms" camp claims are correct).
[...]
Just a pet peeve of mine whenever I see a nuclear power article.
You ignore, of course, that humans have increased this natural atom splitting rate by several of magnitude through various means described quite well by the prior enlightened poster. Ie, due to our actions many nuclei are being split now that wouldn't have split for millions if not billions of years. So then you forge on with this irrelevant comment:
While I can agree with you on substance, Sometimes high levles of self-sustaining radioactivity do occur. Granted, not with the frequency of artificial creation, but Fission isn't a creation of Man.
While technically a true statement, it's irrelevant since the statement has nothing to do with the thread. No argument depended in any way on the hypothesis that fission is a "creation" of Man.
Now to fulfill the title of this article. The problem with the thread appears to be the existence of your "pet peeve" mentioned in your first post. I think if that were removed, then it would fix the problems I see in the thread.
Here's my recommended fix. I suggest for a few weeks you wear a rubber band around your wrist. Then whenever you feel these strange urges to inject irrelevant and superficial pseudo-philosophical points (eg, that "pet peeve") into a conversation, just pull back the rubber band and let her go. Your brain will come to associate these trains of thought with the stinging snap of pain on the wrist and these urges will diminish and go away. Conditioning is a wonderful thing. Soon your quality of life will improve and you'll be able to talk to people again and as a bonus post I'll be able to read your posts on Slashdot without squirming or gnawing on my valuable furniture.
That'll be 5 mod points please. I don't accept checks.
Yes, theist means having a diety (more literally: with god), atheist means not having a diety (not with god). Like the words moral and amoral:
Amoral: Not admitting of moral distinctions or judgments; neither moral nor immoral.
According to the original definitions, agnostics are a subset of atheists, though 'athiest' has been moving toward your definition. If a person is using the original definition, I could see them getting quite frustrated with you. :)
Believing that a god(s) do not exist is an act of faith.
That just seems odd to me. Do I need to have faith the believe that hobbits (chakras, dragons, hobbits, invisible pink whatevers) don't exist? Then everyone has faith in the non-existance of a great number of things, even things they have never heard of before!
Do you believe that aliens will attack tomorrow? You can't say you know for sure that they won't, but you aren't ready to pack up survival gear and head for the hills (just in case the do), either. So you really aren't completely 'without knowledge'.
Note that there are some faith-based athiests (just like most theists, it's the way they were raised), I just think most of them (the other 90%) aren't basing their beliefs on faith.
The same is true for theists, but I think the percentages are reversed.
Yndrd1984
OMG! That's precisely what's happening. For example, the common by-products of splitting Uranium-235 atoms are Iodine, Caesium, Strontium, Xeon and Barium.
Know I'm not too up on this, but...
- Iodine gets absorbed into your thyroid (nasty), and if it's radioactive, then you're probably in a bad place
- Caesium exists naturally in sea water
- Strontium is chemically similar to Calcium, and thus ends up in your bones and will probably give you Leuikemia
- Xenon is a noble gas, so trace amounts of radioactive isotopes probably aren't harmful
- Barium is highly reactive, and most of it's isotopes have very short half-lifes. Don't know what the biological consequences are of Barium waste.
You can't turn uranium into gold, for exampleUranium-238 and Uranium-235 naturally turn into lead
A few years ago I saw a decay chain from Uranium to Gold, but I can't remember the isotopes involved.
We use the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements to fuel our generators. We do nothing like smashing atoms into smaller bits.
Radioactivity is spontaneous and considered genuinely random. You can't control it, you can't create a chain "decay" reaction etc. Radioactivity and fission/fusion are related because they are both topics of nuclear physics (or chemistry), and because fission/fusion reactions often involve radioactive isotopes. That is not necessarily the case... combining two Deuterium atoms into Helium atom involves no radioactivity.
The mass of a nucleus is less than the mass of it's parts, and the difference is the "binding energy". For example, the mass of two protons and two neutrons is greater than the mass of a He nucleus that contains two protons and two neutrons. Iron has the "smallest" mass per proton/neutron, and thus the least binding energy.
When you split a Uranium nucleus into two smaller nuclei, the mass of those two nuclei is always less than the mass of the original Uranium nucleous. Mass is not conserved in this reaction. The difference in mass is converted into energy according to Einstein's well known formula: e=mc2.
The heat generated from a controlled fission reaction is used to boil water that turns a generator.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Sorry, that was an incredibly dumb movie, but I just couldn't resist.
We /were/ doing this, decades ago. But something like 80% of the money that was budgeted for it got "misdirected" onto other projects and the US effort languished to death. Now it is up to someone else to finish what we could not, rather /would not/ do. :(
Currently we are gladly letting other spend the money now and as of just this year, completely dismantled plans for any more US based research in this area, even though we are one of, if not the, worlds largest energy user.
I hope they really kicks our ass on it too. With something like 20 years of a head start, the hobbling of the US fusion research effort by the all too political "Energy" department is yet another of our great shames.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Christianity (or any other religion for that matter) is not anti-scientific. Gregor Mendel is a perfect example of clergy who were also capable, rational scientists. In the Catholic Church, Pope Pius XII stated back in 1950, that evolutionary theory does not contradict Christian beliefs. Back in 1996, Pope John Paul II, reiterated this, and stated that evolution is more than a hypotheis. Just because there are a number of redneck, poorly educated, dumbasses that think the world is only 5000 years old and dinosaur bones are God's way of testing the faithful, doesn't mean that all religious people are idiots.
New Advances Bring French Closer to Reality
New Advances Bring Fusion Closer to Old People in Japan
You just don't hear about them as often as you hear about the red faced screaming "for Jesus" types that are so commonly heard from these days.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
"...don't forget that Atheism is no less a _religion_ than any other. Or that's what my philosophy professor (also doctored in physics) used to say."
I would strongly disagree with your professor on this (and further criticise him for not teaching you the importance of the "paragraph". Its a single key stroke, it won't kill you). Look at the definition of religion: does atheism qualify? I would contend that it doesn't, since it has no specific teachings or doctrine, no places of worship, and no hierarchy. I can't get tax-exempt status to promote atheism, so it clearly isn't a religion by any official definition.
"It is well established that you cannot prove the non-existence of god any more than you can prove his existence."
You cannot prove the non-existence of elves, faeries, naiads, dryads and sprites either, yet the church teaching is that THEY don't exist; care to explain this paradox to a practising Celtic Druid? Or do you think Christianity the only religion that deserves the benefit of doubt?
The only reason it is impossible to disprove the existence of God is because the goal-posts keep shifting. First, He lived in the clouds, and trying to reach Him caused catastrophe (tower of Babel?). Then, we flew above the clouds, and saw...the top of clouds. Did that make Christianity (particularly the Old Testament) wrong? Oh no, now Heaven is in some parallel dimension, and God's invisible anyway.
Seems to me that every time a Christian theory is debunked by verifiable evience, the theory is re-devised to be ever more impossible to disprove. Classic con-artistry; water diviners and psychics use exactly the same technique when they fail scientifically devised tests.
"But the science does not have a lot to do with explaining the world but more to do with describing it..."
True, in principle. However, the evidence we have gathered through scientific means points to most of the Bible being completely inaccurate (or "metaphoric", to use the goal-post shifting term). So you can either spend your time cooking up wierd theories about the speed of light slowing since the universe was created 4500 years ago, or accept that maybe, just maybe, the Bible wasn't supposed to be a physics textbook...
"...every story a tribe in African jungle would tell you about the world's creation IMO would be better than "there was _nothing_, it _exploded_, and everything came to be". But maybe it's just me."
Unfortunately it isn't just you. But you totally misunderstand current cosmological theory, which states that there was an explosion, but because the laws of physics break down the closer in time to that explosion you get it becomes impossible to determine with any accuracy what existed (if anything) before, and what caused the explosion. In this regard, science is as much engaged in pure speculation as religion.
However, you do raise an interesting point (even if your implication was belittleing): African tribal creation myths are every bit as valid as Christian creation myths, both being based on an equal amount of verifiable evidence. What makes you think that out of all the creation myths, the one you happen to believe in is correct? You might be making Kali very angry...
"These laws are being proposed and imposed by a legally atheistic government, that is divorcing all decision from MORALITY finds no problem with granting multinational corporations intellectual property monopolies and the ability to crush individuals."
-Yo, this is excellent. Mod this up!
It's my understanding that reactors are designed so that if the reactive material melts it will drain off into a multitude of paths, so that no path will have sufficient material to maintain a high level reaction. No melting through the ground until it meets the water table.
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Catholicism or Secular Humanism cover enough ground to be 'belief systems', but I have trouble calling something a 'system' when it can be completely described by a single sentence.
ANY statement about their existence or otherwise must be a leap of faith of some sort.
What if the intelligent design creationists are right, and we can prove that the complexity of the universe requires that a 'higher power' exits? That wouldn't exactly be faith, would it?
Just so you know, I don't think you should have been modded as a troll. I just don't quite understand where you're coming from, as you're using word in ways that are new to me. :)
Yndrd1984
Many reactors were redesigned with these "drain pathways" after Three Mile Island. People do learn...
Landing a human on Venus is not terribly difficult. The problem is keeping him alive after he reaches the surface, and the very difficult task of getting him back off the planet again.
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In THREE HUNDRED YEARS if we still do not have a better energy plan than fission, then I say we use it, by then we will still have at least 4700 years of fission material left. In the mean time fusion is a greatly useful technology.
is the graph at he end of the article labeled "How Fusion Works." Apparently we just need to find a way to combine some little grey and black billiard balls into a bundle and we've solved the energy problem! I guess plasma physics ain't rocket science.
"Personally, I think that in the US this will first turn up as a new method of powering sub-marines or other naval vessels, where fission has been used for decades. It is VERY likely that this will turn up in military uses first,"
Where fission reactors are very easy to make into small size, fusion (esp Tokamak) isn't. So I doubt you're going to see anything mobile too soon. Bar spacecrafts, maybe.
Points on military use, though. The first fusion bombs were detonated in... sixties or so. Now we're in the part where it's supposed to get civilian use and so on.
"Note you used the word "believes." Atheism still requires an act of faith, because there is no way to scientifically prove or disprove the existence of any diety."
A more accurate description of atheism is "not believing in the existence of God(s)", rather than "believing in the non-existence of God(s)". This is an absence rather than an act of faith, and justifiable based on current physical evidence (ie: there is nothing in the universe that does not have a more rational explanation than "an invisible man in the sky made it" except the Big Bang itself, and there is no evidence to support the "act of God" theory for that over any other).
"The chance of a resonance cascade is extermely remote..."
Now that they've done such a good job with containing fusion reactions... Why not go the next step to controlling and containing Anti-matter reactions. I mean 100% energy conversion beats the pants off of fusion. I'll admit that Fusion is a step but there are other steps that can be made too.
Burning hydrogen in air won't stop the production of oxides of nitrogen.
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The amount of pressure you need to initiate fusion is orders of magnitude greater than those super anvils they use to make artificial diamonds.
Remember - the sun is driven by a process where gravity is crushing atoms - nothing made out of atoms could survive such pressure.
The way the experimental reactors work is to use a combination of magnetic fields and high power lasers to create the pressure needed for a few milliseconds. The problem is that the energy required to create the lasers and fields is greater than the energy produced by the momentary fusion reaction they create.
Clear, Dark Skies
that you're a bigot who stereotypes the vast majority of Americans as anti-science?
Clear, Dark Skies
That explains why railroads own all the airlines. Oh, wait ... nevermind.
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Actually, the biggest problem isn't creating pressures (via magnetic bottles and lasers primarily), but maintaining the high temperatures. If the plasma is allowed to interact with the walls of the containment vessel, it cools down too much for the reaction to continue.
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
These things are radioactive precisely because of their tendency to decay and in fact split themselves. They don't even split into other elements.
Incorrect.
Radioactive elements do turn into other elements. Radon is formed by the decay of other radioactive elements.
You can't turn uranium into gold, for example, even though it ought to be a straightforward process of splitting off the required number of protons from each atom (if the "we're splitting atoms" camp claims are correct).
Uranium naturally decays into lead, and you can transmute lead into gold in a particle accelerator. It has been done before.
You're not going to make any money by doing that though due to the amount of energy required.
Since 1951, America alone has devoted more than $17 billion (see chart) to working out how to fuse atomic nuclei so as to generate an inexhaustible supply of clean, safe power.
The US spends more than a billion dollars a day on fossil fuels. Oil alone is 20 million barrels. And that's not counting subsidies and hidden costs.
If you spent some time on the Energy Information Agency's site I'm sure you could come up with a number on how much we've spent on fossil fuels since 1951, corrected for inflation. I'm sure the number would be staggering - I'm just not sure how many orders of magnitude higher than $17G it would be.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You appear to believe that environmental change is always for the worse.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Does personal electric rail really require new power sources? I can't see how transmission losses would lower power plant efficiency down below the inefficiency of current gasoline engines (perhaps down below diesel efficiencies...)
Not really, but I imagine that we'd need a few more (preferably clean) power plants if we started putting the pod system practically into people's garages.
I was mostly thinking of systems that would change the way we do business if power became uber-cheap. Ideas like hydroponic farms slipped my mind.
I like the rest of your idea. I don't particularly care for driving myself. It's fun sometimes, but during the north dakota wintertime, I'd love to be moving by a system that doesn't happily let you slide into various things...
I don't read AC A human right
You may want to consider that the last addition to what today is called the Christian Bible was made well over 1500 years ago. The oldest parts of the book are much older than that even.
Could you consider (as a science fan) that people's outlooks, prejudices, superstitions, beliefs, modes of expression, culture, where a bit different then than they are now?
Would you also consider that the purpose of the Bible was NOT scientific expression but rather moral teachings?
So if the Book doesn't conform to your standards or current standards of scientific expression.. maybe there is an obvious reason for it??
Maybe the meaning of "raising the dead", "water to wine", and "resurrection" are deeper than you think.
When people criticized Jesus for what He said in His parables, He said that you need "eyes to see" and "ears to hear", meaning that a superficial literal interpretation doesn't get you the message you seek. It is the deeper meaning that gets you to the Truth.
True, but it doesn't eject all of that into the atmosphere. At least, not if something doesn't go horribly wrong. ;-)
Some of the sources said that a gigawatt light water plant only produces 1 ton of high level radioactive waste a year. That takes up so little room that nuclear plants are able to store thirty years of waste onsite.
And actually, breeders do use Uranium, but one of the side products is Plutonium, which is also used as a fuel in the system, which helps to explain why they're so efficient. Also, you can burn plutonium in them, making them usefull for getting rid of nuclear bomb material.
I don't read AC A human right
Yes, and interestingly this was revived by Muslim scientists from whom it was later propagated into the West thus ending the Dark Ages.
I am just curious how long all the Limbaugh devotees are going to keep urinating all over themselves about the Clintons.
They are out of the White House.
Hve been for years.
Grow up.
Atheism is as much a religion as baldness is a hair color or not stamp collecting is a hobby.
I find it dissonant that a poster who obviously is shooting off their mouth about "christians" as a whole, despite the narrow focus of my post on *Christian Scientists* and their contradictory beliefs about *science*, is so full of HATE. Christians are compassionate, focused on forgiveness, and look for opportunities to understand their fellow humans. You just call yourself "christian" to be part of a "majority" that would make Jesus work overtime. Hypocrite.
--
make install -not war
Maybe they need to nullify the weak-force, in order to initiate fusion. String theory may just provide a way. Or maybe we'll skip the whole thing and just go to a zero potential energy source.
"We'd be less than human if we weren't looking for a new hole to poke a stick down."
Well that explains the porn industry.
I don't know, extremely safe compared to a process that has provided 20% of our electricity for 50 years and never killed anyone in the US? That's pretty safe.
However, be a little careful claiming that a fusion reactor is completely safe, considering that nobody has yet to build one. That's the same thing the fission guys said, and if a fission reactor is constructed carefully, it is safe, but there have always been careless and stupid people around. I'm not really sure what your rationale for claiming a fusion reactor cannot explode is, as a fusion reactor appears to me (a mere physics major admittedly, not a nuclear physicist) to have both very low thermal inertia, and also a very strong positive feedback with increasing temperature. I'm not claiming that a fusion reactor could go all mushroom cloud, but "catastrophic power surge" similar to the one that destroyed Chyrnoble (spelling, I know), seems well within the realm of possibility.
Fission reactors are primarily safe because they are not critical on propmt neutrons alone, so the "cycle time" between each generation of reactions is on the order of seconds, long enough that mechanical control systems and passive safety can come into play. The cycle time between generations in a fusion reaction seems to be on the order of microseconds to me, so a catastrophic power surge could spin out of control long before the plasma could dissipate, on those timescales the inertia alone of the plasma could act as sufficient containment to maintain the reaction if the reactor isn't designed carefully.
If there are a literally infinite number of possible theories about something, to believe in a given possibility -- without better reason than Son of Sam had -- is a religion.
What I as an atheist say is that the possibility of one of a small subset (out of the infinite number possible ways that reality can be) to be true is so close to zero that I round of the trivial possibility to be the same as the chance of a pink invisible unicorn reading this over my shoulder. Dismissible.
You might argue that I use sloppy language and I will answer that after you discuss the self contradictions among those theories.
I get your trivial point, please answer mine if you answer -- or I'll think you deserved the Troll mods...
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
As someone who is already old and gray, in my lifetime isn't looking like such a good bet.
"If these 'prompt' neutrons were enough to sustain criticality, then the number of fission events would increase geometrically. Since the time between generations is about a millionth of a section, this means that a reactor core that's 'prompt-critical' would quickly escalate in temperature until the structural integrity of the core failed, and you have a molten slag of Uranium - which is exactly what happened at Chernobyl. "
I doubt Chernobyl went prompt critical. The power output surged to more than 100 times the rated capacity when the Xenon burned off, but it still didn't go prompt critical, it just had a "catastrophic power surge". If it had gone prompt critical it would probably have been a multi-kiloton explosion, at least.
Anyway, good response, though I think a lot of liquid metal reactors would want to use Lead as well.
And it never occurred to you that the dark ages were caused by the fall of Rome?
Sheesh. It was the collapse of society that brought about isolationism, and subsequent knowledge was lost such that Christianity and everybody else in the region descended into that same superstition and fear of the unknown. The germanic barbarian tribes weren't any more advanced for their lack of Christianity.
Does anybody else find it interesting that here on slashdot, this post was moderated flamebait? And that if it had been anti-Christian and pro-whatever-the-majority-of-you-godless-but-fello w-geeks-are-for then it would have been moderated insightful? It has nothing to do with the logic or structure here: it's entirely a function of what point of view somebody's espousing.
- Israel is the outpost of "freedom and democracy in the middle east"?
- Zionists control the middle east US foreign policy?
- The US needs middle east oil?
Or do you deny the US is any more involved in that local dispute than it is in any other dispute?PS: If you read the letter from Bussard at the provide link you would see the erroneous fusion energy policy of attempting to get a big Apollo or Manhatten style government program going extends at least to the early 1970s.
Seastead this.
There's a line people sell regarding global warming. They say that the natural release of CO2 dwarfs all man-made activity. Not true, for various reasons, so I hate to even bring a point like this up lest I be misunderstood.
That said, the amount of heat put off by human activity is so completely miniscule beside the solar input that it's not worth thinking about. The sun puts many, many orders of magnitude more heat into Earth's atmosphere than any energy source we have will ever do.
CO2 is only an issue as regards trapping solar eenrgy. There is no issue of trapping the energy let off by our own manufacturing and lighting. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
There is an issue, as it happens, with covering so much of the planet in concrete and asphalt. That is seriously changing the heating characteristics of many areas, which spills over to change the nearby vegetation, and may have some impact on the overall climate in the end. That's only because the concrete modifies the solar dynamics, though, not because we're releasing energy ourselves.
"If you're willing to settle for a gravity-containment reactor burning protons, with 1 AU inverse-square shielding, fusion power has gone far beyond proof-of-concept and into commercial production in many fields."
-Conrad Hodson on rec.arts.sf.written
Perhaps better project engineering is required.
Energy is never released when a bond is broken. Energy is released when bonds _form_. Energy is released by a reaction when the amount of energy required to break the bonds in the reactants is less than the amout of energy released when the bonds in the products form.
and this
The phrase "the fuel rods began to melt" is not the same thing as "the fuel rods melted and formed a critical mass which caused the reactor vessel to fail." The latter is the accepted definition of a meltdown, so clearly Chernobyl did not experience a catastrophic meltdown as outlined in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.
This may seem pedantic, but the distinction is important. Claiming something underwent a "meltdown" means something much different than "the reactor sustained internal thermal damage." Most critically, the reactor vessel was not ruptured due to thermal events (as in a meltdown) but due to a buildup of steam pressure beyond containment structural limits. A meltdown also results in a critical mass of slag literally burning its way through the floor of the reactor vessel, building foundation, and everything else on its way down to the water table. This did not occur, so Chernobyl did not, in fact, experience a catastrophic meltdown. Three Mile Island came closer to this than Chernobyl did, but due to Chernobyl's inferior design (or TMI's superior design, whichever) it blew up before it could meltdown.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think.
Where did you get this quote? Just curious.
As an addendum, I will say that if the Chernobyl reactor had not blown up, it most likely would have melted down catastrophically, as it was generating significantly more power during the accident than it was rated for and had lost the capacity to cool or control the reaction.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Working with a highly experimental technology, and after seeing what happens when a fission reactor goes wrong, isn't it perhaps a better idea for European scientists to suggest it be put it on a large Island, far, far away from home?
I'm surprised they're not fighting over where it's *not* going to be put.
Remember "Bring 'em on"? *sigh
They're already seen Fission. I say we give it to the french. If something catastrophic happens, nobody will feel bad about it. Well. Except the French.
And it would have been had the anti-nuclear nutters who stopped the whole thing in its tracks.
Maybe, just maybe anti-nuke people are the ultimate utilization of FUD techniques.
Seriously, dude, whether all that's true or not, you just blew my fucking mind on -sooo- many levels.
--
Your [albiet stoned] and fully freaked out friend in the UK.
No, agnostic would be "I don't if know Foo exists of not".
That's right. All your base.
For example, it now looks as if laser techniques will allow us to build "tabletop" particle accelerators - see this report and this one. (You may not want a particle accelerator, but Intel might buy a whole bunch.)
So my bet is that the next breakthrough in fusion will be "Inertial" fusion, done with lasers. And our money would be better spent by dividing up ITER's six billion dollars, and instead giving 60 megabucks each to a hundred different research groups.
Some links:
http://www.llnl.gov/nif/icf/icf.html
http://www.lanl.gov/ICF/exp_campaigns.shtml
You can't prove invisible unicorns exist. Does it take faith to say they don't? No, it is a perfectly reasonable and logical statement:
1) There is no proof that invisible unicorns exist.
2) There is no evidence that invisble unicorns exist.
3) Assuming invisible unicorns exist adds nothing information wise to the existing understanding of the universe.
It doesn't take faith to state they don't exist. Assuming invisible unicorns exist requires faith, and if they did exist, they are inconsequential, because they change nothing. Why believe they exist, other than wishy-washy fantasy or self-delusion?
That's right. All your base.
Operate your own Tokamak reactor
As far as putting it on an island, it's supposed to be the first commercial plant. IE, net positive energy, long running, so that they can sell the power from it. You stick it on an island you wouldn't be able to sell all the power.
Besides, a fusion plant doesn't have enough hydrogen at any one point to penetrate the containment.
And properly designed fission plants aren't that dangerous.
I don't read AC A human right
The curve for natural U is continuous with a bump at low (thermal) energies and another bump at high (fast) energies. Bohr figured out this was caused by two isotopes, one that absorbs neutrons only at thermal and fast (> 1MeV) energies (U238), and another that absorbs all neutrons (U235).
U238 does not fission when it absorbs the thermal neutrons, only when it absorbs fast neutrons. U235 will fission when it absorbs any neutron (due to some strange dynamics caused by an odd number of nucleons -- note Pu239 is also odd.) 235 absorbs better at lower energies.
Neutrons released by U fission are mostly in the thermal absorption range of U238, so a chain cannot occur in natural uranium: too many neutrons get absorbed to sustain the reaction and it has no critical mass.
In pure U235, all neutrons released can cause other fissions, it has a critical mass.
Reactor fission is accomplished by using a moderator to slow enough neutrons out of the U238 absorpion range so they can fission the U235. US PWR reactors use water (the H in the H20) as a moderator. H actually absorbs some of the neutrons so a sustained reaction won't occur unless the percentage of 235 is increased (enrichment). CANDU reactors that use the D in D20 leave more neutrons in play so no enrichment is needed.
Of possible interest, D/T fission releases 15 MeV (!) neutrons, in some fission bombs these are used to fission natural U (the so-called fission/fusion/fission reaction). In the Mike shot (10.5 MT), most of the energy came from the U shell, not the fission part of the bomb.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Wow. My R-U-SMART stupidity detector bounced right off you.
sorry but you're wrong. this melted down enough for you? How about this? Perhaps this is molten enough for you to deem worthy of "meltdown" status? THE CHERNOBYL CORE MELTED DOWN. end of story.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Try and tell that to Galileo...
In a melting reactor even without the control rods, even with enriched U, the material just doesn't stay packed in tightly enough for long enough to explode nuclear-wise. A chemical explosion is another matter.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
"The new method involves running electricity through water that has a very high temperature. As the water molecule breaks up, a ceramic sieve separates the oxygen from the hydrogen. The resulting hydrogen has about half the energy value of the energy put into the process, the developers say. Such losses may be acceptable, or even desirable, because hydrogen for a nuclear reactor can be substituted for oil, which is imported and expensive, and because the basic fuel, uranium, is plentiful.
w .discover.com/issues/jul-04/features/any thing-into-oil
7 /6 900038_SolarHydrogen/ (http://www.pureenergysystems.com)
The idea is to build a reactor that would heat the cooling medium in the nuclear core, in this case helium gas, to about 1,000 degrees Celsius, or more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit. The existing generation of reactors, used exclusively for electric generation, use water for cooling and heat it to only about 300 degrees Celsius.
The hot gas would be used two ways. It would spin a turbine to make electricity, which could be run through the water being separated. And it would heat that water, to 800 degrees Celsius. But if electricity demand on the power grid ran extremely high, the hydrogen production could easily be shut down for a few hours, and all of the energy could be converted to electricity, designers say.
The goal is to create a reactor that could produce about 300 megawatts of electricity for the grid, enough to run about 300,000 window air-conditioners, or produce about 2.5 kilos of hydrogen per second. When burned, a kilo of hydrogen has about the same energy value as a gallon of unleaded regular gasoline. But fuel cells, which work without burning, get about twice as much work out of each unit of fuel. So if used in automotive fuel cells, the reactor might replace more than 400,000 gallons of gasoline per day."
- http://www.ceramatec.com/
But, we can get the high heat for hydrogen from TCP,
http://www.changingworldtech.com
http://ww
Not sure how close ceramatec.com is? They seem closer than
http://www.pureenergysystems.com/news/2004/08/2
Who are working on the same kind of thing, using ceramics to get hydrogen.
So, is the Thermal Conversion process a workable alternative?
>Landing a human on Venus is not terribly difficult. The problem is keeping him alive after he reaches the surface, and the very difficult task of getting him back off the planet again.
And a nice highlight of gov vs biz for space exploration - gov would be obligated to get him back, a late-mission board of dir meeting would result in a interplanetary memo telling the crewman he has, due to protection of shareholder value, been 'downsized' and if he doesn't return the company's ship they'll sue him.
What if it does? How much effort do you expend in actively disbelieving the Tooth Fairy? That's about how much effort I put into disbelieving any of the other mythological entities, and I fail to see how that can qualify as a religion.
Maybe it's just that the religious attach a lot more significance to the word 'faith' than others. I think it's a fairly meaningless concept, even in the positive sense. To say that lack of belief in something requires faith is just silly IMHO. I don't believe in any deities in exactly the same way that I don't believe some guy in Nigeria has $10,000,000 to transfer to my bank account.
Cthulhu loves you.
What the hell happens when this becomes so economical that some stupid fool puts one in his delorean and crashes the sucker?
Atheists (note the latin form of the word implies opposit of theist IE the negative, not the absense of ie nullification): these believe that deities do not exist
You have your languages mixed up. The word is Greek in origin. theos is Greek for 'god'. The 'a' is the alpha privativum, expressing 'want' or 'absence', like Latin in-. See your Liddel & Scott.We use the heat generated by the decay of radioactive elements to fuel our generators. We do nothing like smashing atoms into smaller bits.
Nonsense. In spontaneous radioactive decay, a large nucleus (say of Radium or Uranium), spontaneously emits a particle of some sort. The emission of an alpha particle (two protons and two neutrons) reduces the weight of a nucleus by 4. The emission of a beta particle converts one neutron into a proton, thus changing one element into the other. For example, a common natural decay chain for Uranium-235 goes: U-238 (emit alpha) -> Thorium-231 (emit beta) -> Protactinium-231 (emit alpha) -> Actinium 227 (emit alpha) -> Thorium 227 etc., eventually leading to Lead-207, which is stable.
In nuclear fission, by contrast, the emission is NOT spontaneous, but is induced by the impact of a moderately high-energy neutron into the atomic nucleus. This disrupts the nucleus causing it to break into smaller nuclei called fission products. The fission products of Uranium-235 generally include isotopes of Iodine, Cesium, Strontium, Xenon, and Barium, none of which appear in the natural decay chain of U-235.
So, you are in fact 100% incorrect. In a fission reactor, the capture of neutrons by nuclei does in fact "split atoms", and those reactors are most definitely not fueled by "the decay of radioactive elements", if by decay you mean natural decay. It is an induced chain reaction, and is a very different
process with very different products.
A power source which generates energy from the heat produced by radioactive decay is called a radioisotope thermal generator and is a very different beast from a fission reactor. They are commonly used on spacecraft, and are generally fairly small.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
and you're all doomed to hell for eating beef.
Take a look at some of the research and data on how much naturally radioactive particles are released into the atmosphere through burning of fossil fuels, you'll probably be surprised. I believe it's a few orders of magnitude more than the amount generated in current fission plants.
That comparison makes an assumption: That the radioactive waste leaked by the plant DURING its operation is the ONLY radioactive waste that will be released as a RESULT of its operation. That the other stuff will be contained until it is no longer radioactive.
Now consider how much radioactivity was released by the Chernobyl incident alone. How many coal plants operating for how long producing how many megawatthours would it take to match just that one?
Then there's the waste dump in the Former Soviet Union (TM) that had a chemical explosion blasting much of its radioactive crud into the air.
Then there's the stuff that's leaked out of various other nuclear sites already. And the stuff that's working its way through the bottoms of the tanks in Washington state. And that English reactor that released the radioiodine all over Gernsey(?). I could go on.
And the ones that I missed.
And the ones that none of us have heard about because they haven't happened. Yet.
Yes, much of it is overblown. (Like Three Mile Island, which didn't let all THAT much out.) And reactor technology is getting much better. And waste disposal and/or recycling may be getting better - and has lots of opportunities for further improvement.
But when you're comparing Nuclear and Fossil Fuel plants let's be fair about it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You note the lack of Tritium, and the long range problem of using lithium - what about Helium3? Last I heard there was like 1.1 million tons of the crap on the moon, which would last us all about 25,000 years or so.
I think that's why the Bush Junta is interested in a moonbase - to start mining the He3...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Stuff that matters my ass. If so many of you idiots don't know what the christian science monitor is how am I supposed to believe that this is new for nerds? or News that matters. The CSM is the only independent newspaper left that does real reporting. If you want to know what is really happening in Afghanistan or Iraq go to the CSM, then again I doubt that most of you are really that curious. The brutal wisdom of the real world doesn't fit well with the easy coastal Academnic Philosophies. The CSM is a solid newspaper, maybe the only really independent newspaper left.
What profitable applications do you see for these incremental steps in the development of fusion in the absence of government funding?
"How much effort do you expend in actively disbelieving the Tooth Fairy?"
The agnostic troll in me wants to point out that there's little empirical evidence catagorically disproving the existance of a tooth fairy.
Of course what I meant was about 70 generations (I just looked it up and the accurate number is about 82). There would be n^81 fissions where n is the average number of neutrons produced per fission that cause other fissions (around 2 in a bomb) and you get about 180 MeV energy released per fission to the environment. 2^81*180 Mev gives about 20 kT.
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Why not develop and build the prototype here in the Germany?
We need a Home Grown "Killer Application" / National Project to jumpstart the German economy and help eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. The loss of jobs resulting from manufacturing and High Tech operations moving off-shore, and the outsourcing of both technical and non-technical services in recent years is killing the German economy. We need to get back on track and reverse this loss.
Our goal should be to have commercially useful fusion energy in operation by the end of the 21st century
We don't have that much time. Way too much of the world's economic infrastructure is based upon the availability of easily extractable oil. Visit http://www.hubbertpeak.com/ for more details.
Yep, and there's absolutely no evidence disproving the idea that my dog created the universe last Wednesday. But that doesn't mean the idea has any greater or lesser basis in reality than Tooth Fairies or Jehovahs.
Cthulhu loves you.
Feeling a bit snippy this morning? Jeez. A simple link without the attitude would've sufficed. I've never seen these pictures, and all the info to date I've heard led me to believe the core did not suffer a meltdown. I thank you for pointing this info out to me. Now go be a jerk to someone else if it makes you feel better.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I will point out, however, that even if the fuel rods did melt, the floor of the reactor vessel did not fail, which means Chernobyl didn't "meltdown" any more than Three Mile Island did, and TMI most certainly didn't meltdown. It experienced a partial meltdown, where fuel rods and other internal reactor components got hot enough to melt, but the reactor vessel never experienced thermal failure. TMI successfully shut down. Chernobyl's pressure vessel failed due to excess steam pressure, a consequence of its inferior design. Neither accident resulted in a critical mass of fuel rod debris burning a hole in the reactor vessel.
Getting back to the original poster, he described a catastrophic meltdown. Neither Chernobyl or TMI fit that description.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
You are incorrect. How could that be? Evolution would not have happened if there weren't change. It is only because of radiation that we have mutation. I point out that envronmental change will be a given with free energy. Did I put a value judgement on it? If the oceans flood up 100 feet and all of the cities on the coasts loose a lot of their land, that would be a bad thing. I know that is a value judgement, but call me compassionate. Environmental change is a given, you can't get away from it. I am trying to point out that 'free' energy is only free in one sense. We still need to use it responsibly! We are never free to ignore that new technologies often have devastating effects. For example the internet allows semi-anonymous people to sound off about anything at all. And do you agree that most of it is just bored people with stupid comments? That is why there is the moderation system. I have a lot of time lately, so I am reading a lot of these blogs and commenting when I feel compelled. Your statement about what I seem, to me, is an attempt by you to ignore the fact of the need for regulation. The rich and powerful hate to be regulated because they want to do as they will. But the facts of human society has always been that when the rich and powerful are out of control and unregulated that we have revolution and pain and horrer. That is bad. And if you don't think so then you have issues that I can't help you with. And if desserts world wide all turn into forests, then what happens to all of the dessert creatures? If we are going to do this should we not at least set up some way of protecting the wildlife, much of which is very useful to us? Money and power brings a lot of responsibility for a muture adult. Unfortunately so many are just given everything and they never worked for it. So they are like children and they hate the suggestion that anyone else should ever have a say about anything. 'free' energy is not free in that in enslaves us to the consequences of it's piggish use by people who don't consider the effects of what they do. You can deny it and fight it all day long, but it will be regulated. Either by the legislatures or through law suits.
Hey great, thanks for yet another inaccurate history lesson. I hate douchebags like you who claim to know anything about everything on slashdot and are WRONG 90% of the time. you're an ass.
Heh. We have endless fission power, if we had the desire and capacity to build it. However, we don't. Why do you think that we would suddenly build enough plants or that what plants we build will be capable of producing energy that is endless? Keep in mind that 'endless' is the idealist talking, and cost is what is looked at in the real world. Supply and Demand.
But that's ok.
Meh, the military use part is EASY--most new tech (in the US) goes there first if it can possibly be used for such (with a few exceptions).
At some point, however, there will be a use for fusion reactors in a mobile setting. Most likely, that will be in a sub or other naval vessel. Possibly spacecraft, but most likely naval.
"We don't know what we are doing, but we are doing it very carefully,..." Wherry, R.J. Personnel Psychology (1995)
Actually, from the studies I've read, school funding actually has no to negative correlation with how well the school does. Believe it or not, you don't often need the latest textbook to teach a subject. A math textbook from the '60s is as good today as it was back then. They usually contain harder problems, too.
What really affects the quality of education? Parental involvement.
There are far, far more students that *need* grants than there are grants to get.
I haven't seen it. I've seen scholarships go unfilled because of lack of applications. Then you go and say Did you actually mean public colleges? These are mostly run by the town/cities, and are free or very close to it.
I'm in a track where I get a two year degree. Then I can apply those credits straight to a four year degree. Many of the courses transfer. Prove you can handle the two year college, do well, and you'll be able to get grants. Or at least loans.
I don't read AC A human right
According to the Uranium Institute, known resources of economically recoverable U-235 are "enough to last for some 50 years" at today's rate of consumption. If prices go up significantly, we could mine other sources, but even so, "all conventional resources are considered - 14.4 million tonnes, ... is over 200 years' supply at today's rate of consumption"
Today, fission supplies 16% of the world's electricity. If we converted the world to using nuclear power for all our electricity, we would use up the uranium six times faster, so all known supplies would last somewhere around 35 years.
To go beyond this, we would need to resort to more exotic technology, such as breeder reactors or extracting uranium from seawater and phosphate deposits.
Long before fusion becomes a practical source of electric power or steam, it will be a source of energetic neutrons. My worry is less about any accident with a fusion reactor than the ability of anyone having a fusion reactor to have gobs of neutrons to transmute whatever they want and generate the raw materials, plutonium and tritium, for nuclear bombs of various kinds.
how amazing it was for us to exist utilizing only sticks, stones, and athletic ability to provide food and nature to provide shelter. Oh.. wait.. what was I thinking... this is slashdot... we wouldn't have survived too long at that existance.
Two cents more. II Peter 3:7 But by the same word the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire, by being kept for the day of judgment and destruction of the ungodly. OT? I don't think so. Wind and wave are derivative from solar, so why not "focus" on PV (photovoltaic) and skip one layer of energy conversion? We need to spend as much on PV efficiency research as we do on, oh say, catfood. Then put an array on every roof. We're way late on this.
So why choose such a name then? Could confuse some people into believing they're a bunch of fools who thinks religion and science are somehow on the same level, or something.
That was something one of my professors mentioned as well - the He3 supply on the moon is enormous, based on samples brought back. Getting enough materials to the moon (up the gravity well) to build a base would be prodigiously expensive, though.
And all the corrections others pointed out are valid - I hadn't checked on the shutdown of the fast breeder program. There was an interesting link I came across recently that said Jimmy Carter banned US reprocessing of spent uranium fuel because the amount of plutonium in it was only statistically predictable, and so it would be too easy for terrorists/rogue nations to skim off enough to make a bomb. He hoped that other nations would follow suit, which evidently happened.
The passively-safe liquid sodium design was something Argonne Nat'l labs was working on a while back, but was also never implemented commercially. The liquid sodium could absorb enough heat from a runaway reaction so that the core wouldn't lose structural integrity. But the operator-induced incident at Chernobyl showed that while intelligence is finite, stupidity has no upper limit.
have you noticed that hot glowing orb in the sky then?
The reason wind and wave are better, is because the energy collectors are huge (all your land mass, and all your water surface area) and free (preexisting).
In other words, Wind power *is* solar power, with the entire surface of the continent being your collector. Wave power *is* wind power, with a giant turbine collector the size of the ocean.
Yeah, the collection efficiency is terrible, but the cost efficiency is great.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's