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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?"
Fusional Penis !
Smile, don't click...
Maxis are always correct
IhateSCOmodmeup
The problems are 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.
Maybe they'd better pray for a new energy source, rather than inventing one..
..just get my wife to talk at the materials for 1/2 hour that should get it up to temparature
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Stuff with the word 'nuclear' is bad, let's BAN IT!!!!
Scientists, meanwhile, are chafing to loose the bulldozers.
If they loose the bulldozers, how will they ever find them to finish the fusion research?
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.
It told me, "Dude, more chocolate and Jack Daniels is the answer to everything."
I'm really not sure my body can be considered a reliable source of information.
KFG
I'm sorry, we're looking at a theological magazine for technical articles?
"Stumble before you crawl"
Nuclear Fusion, eh?
I have a truly marvellous demonstration of of how to make this possible which this post is too narrow to contain...
"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.
You want to split an atom? Fsck it real good, then just simply /. it!
Why would anyone think fusion will be 'clean'? What will happen to the material that stops all those neutrons? What is the failure mode for a collapsed fusuion capable magnetic field?
It's not good!
How about intertial confinment failures?
Wow, these are bad, very very very bad also.
Please stop waiting for fusion power to be our friend.
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 know how bad these failure modes are.
Fusuion power will NEVER be safe, and, consequently never cheap.
Try going back to the 50's and early 60's and look at the literature/propaganda being put forth to get approval for current nuclear power plants. The promises were "Cheap", "Abundant", "Clean". 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. There would be so much power we could never use it all and would only have to pay a yearly subscription.
The situation with nuclear power has not changed just becuase we are looking at 'new and improved' fusion.
Sorry.
...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).
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
Was meant to be a reply to another comment...
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.
H.G. Wells, among many other writers, was writing about exploration of space about 100 years ago.
Thousands of years ago, the Greeks were also dreaming of it.
I would call you a troll, but I hate to attribute malice to what could better be explained by stupidity.
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
In Korea only old people use nucelar Fission
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.
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
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...
Atheism is as much a belief system as any other religion. Just as there's no way to conclusively prove the existence of God, so there's no way to conclusively disprove it - an atheist is essentially making a leap of faith in decided that there is no God.
Secularism is, or should be, different. A secular government is effectively stating that religion is irrelevant to its duties - its citizens may be Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, Satanist or whatever they please, and the government will give them the same rights and protection as anyone else.
There's a huge gap between theory and practice though, as evidenced by the recent moves in France to ban students from wearing any religious items. THAT is a variety of atheism - declaring that someone's beliefs will not be respected in government sponsored institutions because it suits the government of the day.
"Are we getting close, or are the problems insurmountable?"
Yes.
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.
No Doc Ock jokes?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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.
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.
"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
Mod parent up you morons. "Flaimbait?" WTF?! Parent is absolutely right. Fusion is not 15 years away because we don't understand it (that was in the past). Now it is 15 years away purely for *polictical* reasons.
The parent post hits it right on the nail. The parent's parent post doesn't really know what he/she is talking about and contains false facts.
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
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.
WTF is this ???? I miss the age where these mother fucker was eaten by lions in rome !
On a clear day, just look up. ;-)
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
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?
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.
The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand!
I want my anti-matter/matter reactor.
Please choke to death on your conspiracy theory. It is *NOT* fucking helping.
I have to love how anti-Catholicism has become the only politically correct form of bigotry. If you are going to attack the Catholic Church, please get your facts straight, and get some new material. I'm getting tired of refuting the same worn-out arguments over and over.
While the article your comment is amusing, it has little basis in reality. First, Gallileo was not censored by the church merely because he showed that the earth was not the center of the universe. Instead, he was censored because he was confrontational about it and suggested that his work contradicted Catholicism and the Bible. Second, the Catholic Church admits that it is not an expert or authority on science, nor is the Bible, therefore scientific inaccuracies of the Church or the Bible have no effect on the validity of the Church or the Bible. Third, the Church did not teach or hold pre-Gallilean notions until 1992. 1992 is merely the year that the Church publicly apologised for censoring Gallileo.
Finally, if you are willing to look at things rationally, you must acknowledge the amount of church sposored science that occurred. One of the more famous examples is the case of a priest, Gregor Mendel, who is commonly considered the father (groan) of genetics.
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?
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.
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.
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.]
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
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.
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.
... 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Good point.
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!
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.
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...
"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.
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.
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong here
correction
"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
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.
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!
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?
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.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Many reactors were redesigned with these "drain pathways" after Three Mile Island. People do learn...
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.
"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.
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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
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
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
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!"
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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