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France Will Be Home To Fusion Plant
ScentCone writes "After years of politicking, France has won the right to be the location for a $12 billion fusion research facility. The plant will use deuterium-from-seawater and a huge electromagnetic ring to produce the 100-million-C conditions in which researchers hope to produce viable fusion. The debate over whether this is even possible continues to rage. The ITER project started in 1985, and there has been a running fight over money and location since. France indicated that if Japan (one of the holdouts) didn't see it their way, they'd build a coalition of the willing and do it anyway. With financing and contracting agreements in place, the 10-year construction can begin." Coverage also available at MSNBC, the NYTimes, CNN, and the BBC.
Will this fusion plant usher in the foretold era of unlimited energy? I remember when those claims were made about nuclear power, about how it would be so cheap that it wouldn't be metered. That didn't happen with fission power, but perhaps it will happen with fusion power.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
From TFA:
Greenpeace, for one, stated that "at a time when it is universally recognized that we must reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, Greenpeace considers it ridiculous to use resources and billions of euros on this project."
I swear, I think Greenpeace is more concerned about making sure nobody builds any new powerplants than they are about protecting the environment.
They are against new coal plants with modern scrubber technology, they are against fission plants, now they are against this expiremental fusion plant. Do they realize that humanity needs energy to live and thrive? Do they realize that by not building new more efficient powerplants they are forcing people to rely on older, more polluting powerplants more heavily?
It seems counterintuitive to me, it's like they would rather stick their thumb in the eye of corporations than actually help the environment.
France had to threaten unilateral action to get this thing the way they wanted it. The Japanese participation was going to hinge on spending less money, given the location the French wanted. The French said they'd just build a group of participants who did see it their way and do it without those that were objecting because they knew it was the right thing to do, and it had to get started... um... huh. This sounds so oddly familiar. But I just know the French would only use such rhetoric if they didn't mind other people doing the same.
Still, as much as I like to rib the French, I'll cut them some slack just because they're so good at pissing off Greenpeace.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
I have nothing against France (only some French), but I was warmly hoping that Japan gets the project. In my view, Japan is so perfectly suited, technology and mentality-wise, to pull this off.
Still, France is OK, because they are one of the countries with highest % of nuclear energy. So much so, in fact, that they make a lot of good money exporting it.
And get this: one of the largest importers (the largest?) offrench electric energy is Germany, who have outlawed and disbanded their nuclear plants due to Green misguided pressure, and are now
a) polluting themselves with coal plants, which actually produce more radioactive waste than nuclear plants of same energy output (not to mention other pollutants).
b) paying for el. energy to France, which is produced by nuclear plants which are close enough to Germany, that if a meltdown happened, they would be just as affected!
There is something humorous in all this.
Sigged!
As a sign of good will towards mother nature, i propose ALL members of Greenpeace be given the honour of being the first visitors to the INSIDE of the reactor when it's finally operational... and OPERATING...
That said, Greenpeace isn't an enviormentalist movement. It's just a movement of people who are mental... Heck, many real enviormental movements want to have NOTHING to do with Greenpeace.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
There are actually several french green politicians and activist who are pro nuclear fission (yes the old nukes!) because they see it as the only realistic way of cutting CO2 emissions in the short term.
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Fusion is supposed to be much cleaner and safer. If the contaiment field fails, it just stops going. I think there is still the issue of the surrounding structures becoming radioactive themseves and then we would have to dispose of that. But the fusion process itself is very clean. Overall you take deuterium (a type of hidrogen where there are two neutrons instead of only one) and you make them smash hard enough to make a helium molecule (plus a bunch of other particles) that is lighter than the the two hydrogen molecules taken separate with the difference in weight becoming energy by the famous e=mc^2. This is so hot that they have to use a magnetic container to keep the walls from melting and the hydrogen from cooling. If the magnet fails then the reaction just stops. With a bang but nothing more destructive than say a rocket fuel factory going up?
From what I thought, the reason that the Sun can support fussion is because the massive gravity of all the hydrogen pulling together slams them into each other hard enough to fuse. (more or less) Small scale fusion plants obviously won't have enough gravity to sustain a fusion reaction, so you gotta slam the atoms together some other way.
:)
But what I don't get is when you fuse an atom, energy is released, but when you split an atom into two, energy is released as well. How is this not perpetual motion? If fusion energy was possible, couldn't you just take your nuclear waste from fission and split it back into uranium and whatever again.
Obviously fission works, so I'm guessing you'll never be able to get enough energy out of fusion than what you put into it.
Which actually brings up another question, where does gravity's energy come from that supports the suns fusion? What causes the force of gravity?
I'm just a computer programer though, I only took one college physics course, but still am rather curious as to how the universe works.
Don't know about the two-headed snake, but I expect that's an urban legend. The albino deer are at Argonne Nat'l Labs, which is pretty close to Fermi. They came that way though - the land that Argonne was on was donated to the gov't by a rich guy who imported the white deer to the site when he lived/hunted/something there. I belive that a stipulation of the donation was that the deer stayed. It is a bit creepy the first time you see them, but there's nothing odd about them.
maybe they shoulds spend a portion of the money on cold fusion research...
First off, I am not a high energy physics person and I haven't looked into this too much, but from what I have read
0 7/1635251&tid=126&tid=14 to produce tritium as a fuel source would be a better fuel for fusion.
The start up power demand for this thing could be big. Separating Dueterium from the other isotopes of Hydrogen, heating things to 100 million degrees C, and the magnetic containment fields required for this research could use a lot of power in the years before it becomes a viable reality, assuming that they get practical fusion power.
I thought using neutrons from some idea like this one http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/
what part of my post was flamebait? I read other people's posts and it seems that the majority of comments were in the vein of being anti-greenpeace and taking shots at France because in that country they manage to strike a work-life balance unlike on this continent (NA). On the subject of French labour practices: I can see why shareholders and CEOs would fiercely defend and by rightly proud of the fact that the average US citizen loves to work all the hours they can but that is not the profile of your average /. reader surely
Is this flamebait from the POV of a US citizen then? Just another example of how americans find it impossible to tolerate alternative points of view or cultures?
Ok I admit that this is verging on flamebait now but I'm just lashing out bceause I'm hurt and confused :( I thought I was gonna get modded up for introducing a different perspective
I post this as a former fusion researcher and a former project manager for the Office of Fusion Energy (OFE) of the Department of Energy (DOE)
Many decades ago the international fusion community put all of its chips on the Tokamak. It has been a disaster.
Even if a Tokamak could produce break-even fusion ( getting more energy out than you put in) the engineering obstacles to creating an economically successful reactor are daunting.
Many years ago, the OFE sponsored a study, Project Aries, of the costs of a Tokamak reactor. Even using the usual optimistic assumptions, the cost came in way above solar and wind power, let alone fossil fuels.
Another symptom of the problem is that three times in a row, projects to build larger Tokamak have collapsed in the design stage. That is, even before anything was build, none could come up with a working design. The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), the latest attempt, collapsed as the price tag spiraled above $20 billion, but now is resurrected. I assume that they found some technical advances, or just "cooked the books" space-station style to justify it.
The whole OFE degenerated into a "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" process where the lab directories divvied up the pie. All non-Tokamak ideas were cut off, including the one I worked on.( more below).Congress cut the OFE budget almost in half a 10 years ago in response to this.
Now for a blatant plug. In the 70s I worked on a small project at the University of Miami, the Trisops project, which was defunded. The amount of money was not an issues ( our request was quite small), but the non-Tokamak nature, and the nerve of the principal investigator, Dan Wells, to point out that the Tokamac was unworkable.
Last decade the Trisops machine was moved from the University of Miami, to Lanham Md, with a small NASA grant, but there is not money to run it. You can see a report on it.
Another interesting project, the Plasmak(TM) project that is being run by Paul Koloc ( out of his garage!!).
The holy grail on fusion research is a stable plasma structure. The Trisops project achieved it one way. Paul has noted that ball lightning, which has been known for millennia, is a stable plasma structure. He has machine that produces ball lightning, and is measuring it. He gets no DOE funding of course.
This is a update of an earlier post Don't sell your Exxon Stock
I'm what would usually be considered very environmentally minded. I've not only supported environmental work financially, but I attempt to live in an eco-friendly manner.
I've found Greenpeace to be predominantly made up of people who don't think for themselves and have an psychological need to "get even."
I'm not saying useful work is not done by them. They do good work against whaling for example. But as an organization they have a real inability to use logic.
Bring on the fusion, I say. I'm even happy with modern nuclear power if the alternative is fossil fuels.
In the meantime, I'll support people like IFAW, WWF and carry on cycling.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Sometimes, you just gotta shut up and build the damn thing. The problem with fusion is not that it is impractical or environmentally unfriendly, but rather that the fusion researchers seem to be spending time and money in writing papers, rather than actually producing something.
I would be willing to bet that, if the American Government passed a law stating that all non-fusion powerplants were to be shut down (in stages) over the next ten years, we'd have fusion power before the time was up.
How can I be so confident? Because necessity is the mother of all invention, and because those fusion researchers won't get their papers published if there's no power to run the printing presses. You can't expect people to solve such complex problems overnight, but you CAN expect people to become a whole lot more focussed, if it was made very clear that their personal future depended on it, rather than some abstract "future" sometime long after they're dead.
If you want fusion even quicker, get the scientists involved up into Alaska, then provide power in winter only on those days they move forward on the science or technology. Give them the materials and funding they need, but give them some good reasons to do so.
Better yet, if you want fusion power in five years or less, move the top 100 richest people, along with Congress and the US Civil Service into Alaska, and not provide power in winter, except on those days they get the scientists to move forward. Then we'd see some dramatic improvement in the sciences.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It would be nice if anybody could provide some sound evidence that this is a legitimate organisation - and that their claim of achieving a 2 billion Kelvin burn is sensible.
Gee, that's a great idea! By that line of thinking, our ancestors would never have bothered to develop the wheel, because carrying stuff on our back was "just good enough".
How about another metaphor more slashdotters can relate to - When to upgrade some computer hardware.
This situation is akin to "Well, my computer's not fast enough anymore to run FPS-of-the-moment with the resolution cranked all the way up. I've got $150 in my pocket this week, and over the next couple of months I can save up $1000." So you have 3 choices: 1) Lower the resolution and eye-candy. 2) Buy some RAM, or a newer video card, and make some progress towards getting that FPS going at full speed. Or 3) "I'll just wait a while, until the really new stuff drops in price."
So you can leave the problem where it's at (no good), can put together a solution that works better right now (an improved situation), or you can hope that you'll somehow survive and can find the uber-solution later.
I think what sensible people should be advocating for is that middle solution - make things better, sooner, rather than hold out until later, in both the computer upgrade problem and the power problem.
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
You're missing the point. Even if ITER works, we're still many decades away from commercial fusion power. More improvement would result from spending that money in optimizing what we already have.
I'm sure that this happens ALOT faster if the oil price rises steeply.
Give us humans a rational cause (global warming etc.) and we'll ignore it.
Give us a 'direct' feeling (evil enemy in (cold) war, money for gasoline), and we'll react promptly.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And get this: one of the largest importers (the largest?) offrench electric energy is Germany, who have outlawed and disbanded their nuclear plants due to Green misguided pressure, and are now
;).
The last nuclear reactor is currently[1] scheduled to be shut down in about 27 years. Sorry, they're neither outlawed nor disbanded, there're just no new ones to be built (Apropos "disbanded": in 2003 nuclear energy accounted for 27% of germany's electricity production, while regenerative energies amount for about 9% compared to ~5% in 1991). At least we try.
Oh, and by the way: In 2003Germany had an export surplus of 8 billion MWh. High imports from France are mostly due to it being "routed" through Germany towards the Netherlands and Italy.
a) polluting themselves with coal plants, which actually produce more radioactive waste than nuclear plants of same energy output (not to mention other pollutants).
Maybe. According to this site Germany has reduced its CO2-Emissions by 19% between 1990-2002 while France decreased theirs by 1.9%. This may or may not have anything to do with coal plants but was the first thing I found on google - so anyway
b) paying for el. energy to France, which is produced by nuclear plants which are close enough to Germany, that if a meltdown happened, they would be just as affected!
Ever heard of something called "leading by example"? Also, do you think that you (wherever you live) would be unaffected by a major nuclear meltdown?
[1] currently meaning that after the next election these plans will probably be scrapped by the conservatives.
If you follow cold fusion research, the list of countries that participate in the annual International Conference on Cold Fusion includes France, Japan, and other countries that don't have a lot of natural resources such as coal and oil.
Since the US has coal and oil, we don't have as strong a motivation to look into fusion.
I grew up in a "no-nukes" family and it took many years before I realized I was being fed fairy-tales.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
The proton-Boron fusion idea sounded good a while back, but then a clever MIT grad student (link to his thesis) wrote a thesis proving that it (along with a bunch of other clever ideas) would never work. Bummer.
Human genome = 3 billion base pairs = 6 GBit. Windows + Office = 20 Gbit. Which is more impressive?
What is the latest best ratio? I remember when a couple of universities were closing in on things, and their funding got cut along with the SCSC.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
This is a great point. One of the reasons the US initially wasn't involved in this was that scientests here would not go along with a project that claimed to be a commercial prototype when no such thing was yet possible.
You might expect responses to this post to be long, angry rants, but how about just a couple friendly notes instead?
1. "US, which won the war in your history book..." This suggests that this is what you imagine "our" history books must say. All I can say is that I'm reasonably well-read, and I hope you find it reassuring that none of the WWI books I've read say that. To the contrary, the ones I've read all give a pretty balanced account of the War. In fact, if the U.S. is lauded, it is usually for our stance *after* the war -- i.e., that Germany should be rebuilt, not vindictively punished.
2. The whole "Russia did most of the fighting" meme has been addressed again and again. I won't go into it here, only remind you of the highlights: The Stalin-Ribbentrov pact; the fact that the Russians had previously executed most of their own skilled officers; the fact that Stalin disastrously insisted on a line-based defense, (rather than the defense-in-depth that his remaining generals advised); the fact that Russian troops went into battle accompanied by political officers, who shot their own troops to force others into battle; the fact that Russia received vital food, fuel and equipment via the U.S. Lend-Lease program; Russian mass-wave tactics vs. German armor; the fact that as many Russians as Germans froze to death; etc. etc.
3. "Many of the European wars have been because one of the great nations got the military upper hand"
Actually, allow me to suggest that the *only* times of extended peace Europe has ever known has been when one party (Rome, the British Navy, The Soviet Union, the United States) achieved a monopoly on power and *enforced* a peace. Believe me, I sincerely understand the degree to which this might rankle. It would bug me too. But think about it -- does France feel militarily threatened by Germany? No? Maybe that's because, 60 years ago, the U.S. forced Germany to become a democracy (then, of course, helped it rebuild).
4. China may indeed be a dominant nation. On the other hand, that "dominance" is supported by untold millions of faceless peasants laboring away in the fields under a communist government, occasionaly joining the People's Army so they can move into the city, massacre some political dissidents and throw others in prison. Is this really the nation you want to hold up to the U.S. as an example to emulate? Which country would you rather be: Canada, or Tibet?
Anyhow, don't want to come across as France bashing. France is no more or less motivated by self-interest as any other nation, as far as I can tell. Myself, I'd love to go there someday. I've heard it's wonderful.
- Alaska Jack