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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"
"nuclear fission is about the only 'safe' alternative in the meantime. Generating many orders of magnitude less radioactive waste than current fossil fuel plants,"
I completely agree with you , but try telling that to the kneejerk reaction anti nuclear fanatics who can't see the wood for their own foolishly planted trees. Mind you, I've met some of these people and half of them couldn't even spell "radioactivity" never mind tell you what it was. They work purely on a fevered emotional level and no amount of rational discussion will convince them otherwise. They are the same sorts of people who dunked old women in ponds back in the 17th century because they talked to their cat and someone got ill in the village shortly afterwards.
"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.
My favourite peice of braindead kneejerk quasi-science claptrap has been the reaction to mobile phone cell masts here in the UK. I've seen masts which have been graffited with an "Ionising Radiation" warning sign, neatly confirming what I had suspected for some time; The people who scream the loudest are usually the most clueless.
I object to the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements
Well, fine. But you can say that by refining the uranium, and bringing sub-critical amounts of together in a pile, or supercritical amount together in a bomb, we are utilising the nucleus's innate tendency to split, and to thereby trigger a chain reaction in nearby uranium nuclei, in order to generate a self-sustaining level of radioactivity that would not have otherwise occured.
You could also say when making tea that we are not the ones boiling water, we are merely allowing electricity to flow through a restisting metal rod, which generates heat which when transfered to the water causes a rise in temperatre to boiling point that would not have otherwise occured. But that would be very, very pedantic.
My Karma: ran over your Dogma
StrawberryFrog
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
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.
Decay?
You mean all those extra neutrons flying about dont have anything to do with it? Those neutrons traveling at carefully determined energies intended to impact the nucleus of the U238 atoms and cause it to become unstable and break apart into two smaller ones that are usually highly radioactive?
As opposed to the normal decay which merely sheds a single alpha, beta or gamma ray, leaving the original nucleus largely intact. This results in less radioactivity, not more.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
"... They don't even split into other elements." Uhhh, wrong. My physics was a bit rusty, so I did a google on the fission process and found this on world-nuclear.org: "The number of neutrons and the specific fission products from any fission event are governed by statistical probability, in that the precise break up of a single nucleus cannot be predicted. However, conservation laws require the total number of nucleons and the total energy to be conserved. The fission reaction in U-235 produces fission products such as Ba, Kr, Sr, Cs, I and Xe with atomic masses distributed around 95 and 135. Examples may be given of typical reaction products, such as: U-235 + n ===> Ba-144 + Kr-90 + 2n + energy U-235 + n ===> Ba-141 + Kr-92 + 3n + 170 MeV U-235 + n ===> Zr-94 + La-139 + 3n + 197 MeV " So you can see that U-235 is indeed split into other elements. The full articles can be found at: http://www.world-nuclear.org/education/phys.htm
since when does a fossil fuel power plant produce radioactive waste? :)
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.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
Why are you proud of her for abandoning that idea? That attitude is pretty damn good, actually.
To have any sort of industrial area near your house lowers the property value significantly. Even if there were no pollution, you'd have to make the concession of having a big, honking nuclear power plant right next door with its hundreds of employees showing up every morning in their cars or on the bus and generally crowding the roadways in your area.
No, keep the power plants somewhere else far away from the livable areas. The reason for NIMBY is not always irrational fear of nukular power. Sometimes it's a result of just not wanting to have an eyesore as a neighbor. You talked to your neighbors lately?
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.
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.
Well, it might be that state-of-the art reactors are quite safe, but that still leaves the problem of handling the resulting nuclear waste. It is a fact, that however safe a reactor might be, it produces very long lasting nuclear waste; there are no satisfying solutions on how to deal with that waste IMO/AFAIK.
"By contrast, at least fossil fuel products are largely recycled in the natural environment, and what radioactivity they introduce isn't much different from what is already there naturally (compare: radioactive cesium and iodine)."
Yes , all that CO2 is being recycled and isn't really building up in the atmosphere. As from the radioactivity not being different, well outside of a partical accelerator ALL radioactivity is natural - uranium ore is extracted from the ground just like coal, oil gas. I'm not sure what you're point is. And you're forgetting about the huge slag heaps that a lot of fossil fuel stations (mainly coal) produce which just get dumped or used in building material.
"But is cheap and messy nuclear really the right choice to make if we care about the future, and not merely ourselves?"
Frankly , who cares about what happens in 100,000 years time? Either our technology will be so advanced that nuclear waste be a non issue or we'll have gone back to the stone age in which case a bit of radioactivity will make little odds as there won't be many people about anyway. Besides which , right now short term solutions are better than maintaining the status que vis-a-vis fossil fuels given the state of the climate!
The amount of radiation *generated* by burning coal and oil may indeed be less than the amount *generated* by nuclear fission, for the same amount of energy produced. But, ALL of the fossil fuel radiation is *released* into the atmosphere, whereas the nuclear fission radiation is *contained* unless containment is breached in an accident. Therefore, as long as containment holds, nuclear fission is cleaner and safer than fossil fuels.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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
I think you are missing the point the writer was making. The 30 is a constant, ie we are always 30 years from fussion. This is not a return in 30 years, but a return an infinite amount of time in the future.
Now, I think the fusion experiments are worth funding because they are fun. I think it's a shame that the political environment is such that the scientists need to pretend there is gold at the end of the rainbow, when the rainbow is so beautiful itself.
We aren't talking big money here in government terms. Eg IIRC the proposed ITER budget is 10 billion Euro over 30 years. The EU pours approximately 100 billion into the common agrecultural policy every year and I presume the USA is operating on basicly the same level, just to prop up buisinesses who produce food no one wants to eat.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Well, to get two hydrogen nuclei to fuse, we need to get them close enough. Two ways of doing this are, to either pack them real tight (very high pressure) or to make them move around really fast (high temperature). Since we don't have the means to replicate the immense pressure within a star's core, we compensate by raising the temperature to a much higher level, that achieves the desired result. Hope that clears things up...
OK, here's your correction. Sure in the Sun the core temperature is nowhere near the quoted 100 million degrees celcius, but the Sun has the enormous advantage of having a starload of pressure piled up on its core because of its mass. With the atoms already quite close together, the energy required to force the atoms to fuse is low, and just a few million degrees is required. But when you have the tiny amount of pressure generated by laser confinement, you need lots more energy, i.e. high temperatures. BTW IAAP (I am a physicist)
Except that you would need pressures as high as the core of the sun to bring the tempature down. It's pressure and temperature, and when you can't have one you just increase the other.
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
It is true that Uranium does decay naturally and emit radiation. This decay, however, is the emission of one or very few particles, rather than splitting the nucleus into two large pieces:
U-235 -> U*236 -> Th-231 + alpha
U-238 -> U*236 -> Th-234 + alpha
In nuclear reactors used for power production on Earth, we use the neutrons emitted in radioactive decay to split nuclei of Uranium-235. These two new nuclei are indeed new atoms. A couple common fission processes are:
n + U-235 -> Xe-140 + Sr-94 + 2n
n + U-235 -> La-139 + Mo-95 + 2n
The masses of the two nuclei that come off tend to be between 72 and 160 AMU. Gold is not typically produced, as it's atomic mass is 197 AMU--too heavy to be made in the usual U-235 fission. I think that spontaneus fission might occur, but if it does it is at a much lower rate than is useful.
Energy derived solely from radioactive decay without any fission is sometimes used, but to my knowledge only on deep-space probes such as Voyager and Cassini. IIRC they use the natural heat decay of Plutonium, which is produced from U-238 in reactors.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
I for one, wouldn't make any guarantees that the nuclear waste is safe down there for an practically unlimited amount of time.
These sediments haven't moved in hundreds of millions of years, and nothing is going to disturb them for similar periods of time into the future. This is a disposal method which promises to hold the materials safely out of the way for millions of times longer than the materials will be at all dangerous to anyone.
I think its just plain irresponsible behaviour to produce something that imposes such a long-lived danger.
That is a statement of opinion, built on a set of invalid assumptions. Open your mind and educate yourself on the issues, and you'll see things differently. Particularly when you compare fission to the available alternatives.
Conclusion: Say no to fission energy, however safe reactors may be.
That's not your conclusion, that's your starting point.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
Thanks for the link. I read that some time ago here on /. but forgot all about it, and it should have been brought up when people were moaning that "why don't other science diciplines besides aviation and rocketry have prizes?" i.e. the X-Prize and related groups.
Nuclear Physics is no longer the glamour major it was in the 1950's and 1960's, and while there are a few new minds going into the profession, there are many other more cool things to do now and are taking up the energies of young minds. Nuclear Engineering is in even worse shape, and in many ways resembles some of the worst examples of government research gone amuck. Big budgets and not much to show for it. In some ways even worse than NASA over the past five years with manned spaceflight.
There is private research that is occuring, but it tends to be cranks and folks doing stuff on cold fusion or Farnsworth fusors... mostly treated as cranks even if they have a PhD from a respectable university.
I will agree with you about the centralization of power issues as well. If it turns out that something like a powercell can generate a lifetime supply of power for a home without the need of overhead powerlines, it would destroy a balance of political power that has huge amounts of money and no real reason to allow it to occur...even if it meant a substantially better life for ordinary citizens.
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.
That was probably the case years ago, but there have been significant advances in creating these reactions in a controlled environment. The problem now is not controllability, it has been sustainability. Super-heated plasma would be used to generate the heat necessary to start the reaction, but inconsistencies would arrise in the flow of this plasma. Eddies would form and "cold spots" would form making the reaction stop. Apparently, they have used simulations to determine the best way to control these eddies and the plasma flow, thus making the reaction sustainable. I'm sure we'll see a working plant within 10-15 years or whenever a country decides they actually want to have one on their soil.
The foundation of the EU has nothing to do with France though, it was created by Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxumburg. As for France being the king and lord of the EU, Germany is the largest economy, and so largest power in the EU, not France.
As for your rediculous racist attitude towards France, that is disgusting. There isn't any neutrality from anything to come into play here. This is an INTERNATIONAL effort.
Anybody who can become an investment banker, professional athlete or star attorney would have to be either foolish or extraordinarily dedicated to go into nuclear physics instead. The "goodies" that American society offers are largely bestowed own individuals who are at best useless-and at worse downright sociopathic. The existing social order in the US seems intent on self destruction.