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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.
I'm sure Greenpeace is gonna Love this!!
"I drank WHAT?!"--Socrates
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.
At least the French and British decided to stand up against a dictator rather then only joining in to defend personal interests ...
School must have been optional for you, where you come from...
Where I come from, 2005 - 1985 != 10
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I keep hearing that next to Fermi Labs, there are now snakes with two heads and albino deer
Yeah, but how do they taste?
Of course, you'd want to be far away if a leak happened, in a remote control centre.
I would have prefered India, I've been a big fan of Indian Fusion for a long time. Who's ever heard of French Fusion anyway?
Great that this is finally happening, and not even the U.S.A. backed out.
Funny if they don't like this, as there are actually very few risks to Fusion recations. There is no waste by-product that is harmful to the area (like plutonium, for instance), there are few risks of "meltdown", the process uses only non-lethal fuels (seawater may suck to drink, but it isn't deadly to fish), and magnetic fields can be contained. Fusion != Fission. Remember that.
It will be available just in time to power Longhorn on the latest Intel. Oh yeah, and maybe restore power to the undersea Internet link to Pakistan.
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.
Somebody still has to keep those powerlines in good order. Unless they develop the household Mr. Fusion, then they'll just have to deliver Deuterium to your door.
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
I believe he was refering to this:
With financing and contracting agreements in place, the 10-year construction can begin
From TFA:
"If we can really make this work there will be enough electricity to last the world for the next 1,000 to 2,000 years."
Is this reactor suppose to power the world? What about distribution?
My vote would be to focus on a smaller project that can be duplicated in less than 50 years.
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!
With someone having to run the plant, the licensing required, the cleanups, pr, etc it costs money. And do you honestly think the energy companies are going to research themselves out of a paycheck? Hopefully fusion power will work, but we will still be charged. Hopefully it will be cheaper if it is truly clean. Hopefully it will be cheaper if the cost to create the energy is inexpensive. But there will always be a price...just hopefully it will stagger future price increases.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Don't forget the 35 hour (or is it less now?) workweek and the scheduled labor strike rotations...
I think you miss read that. The project start in 1985. The construction (not started yet) will take 10 years. Maybe reading was optional in your school?
Anonymous Cowards suck.
Here in Colorado, USA, we're getting a new coal fired electrical plant. Stick with proven technology, we always say.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
I regret even thinking this.. but I can hear the thoughts of all the Republicans murmuring about how it is smarter to wait for the French to go through the first mistakes so 'we' can profit from your experienced knowledge. That, and there's more money in using up the equipment and reserves for the petroleum industry before jumping ship to the 'next big thing.'
I don't agree with these thoughts.. but I can hear them.
(puts tin-foil hat back on)
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
This is very interesting. I thought Japan had this in the bag. Of the two groups vying for power in this scenario, EU/Russia/China vs. US/Japan/Korea, it appears that the "non-aligned" group has won. However I imagine Japan will still have a very substantial role in this.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Maybe we can figure out how to get cheap energy from fusion before oil production peaks in 3 to 5 years time.
See here and here
It's a European Union site, not French. France has nothing to do with this.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
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.
No, intolerable. If a source of energy emits no pollution, greenhouse gasses, or nuclear waste (etc.) then there's no reason not to use it. That would never do, now, would it? What would the protesters do?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
For those of you who don't know what fusion is exactly, read at Wikipedia:
Fusion Power
Some interesting quotes:
"The natural product of the fusion reaction is a small amount of helium, which is completely harmless to life and does not contribute to global warming. "
"The half-life of the radioisotopes produced by fusion tend to be less than those from fission, so that the inventory decreases more rapidly. Furthermore, there are fewer different species, and they tend to be non-volatile and biologically less active. As opposed to nuclear fission, where there is hardly any possibility to influence the spectrum of fission products, the problems can be further reduced by careful choice of the materials used."
"Although fusion power uses nuclear technology, the overlap with nuclear weapons technology is small. "
A "fusion plant" is not the same thing as a "research facility." A misleading headline, in this case implying production-level fusion capacity, does nobody any good.
Reading was definitly optional for you. They said the 10 year construction can begin. They did not say this has been 10 years in planning. So their estimating it will be done by 2015.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
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...
According to Sim City 2000, we don't get fusion power til 2050
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/
why shouldn't china have fusion power if they want it?
Can't wait until the singularity/transhumanism so we can get beyond these silly border struggles.
I didn't care which one they chose--just want the dang science to start!
Transcend Humanity. Please.
Would you want the newest and most experimental nuclear research facility in your neighborhood?
In a heartbeat...... then again I live in the area of, and work for the principle nuclear power research center in the US. I can spit and hit the first "city" powered by atomic energy on the planet.
The new Gen IV reactors that the US is developing are slated to be built here.
Now a $$ 10 billion fusion project..... just think of the boon to the local economy.
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So are American politicians going to call this new energy "Freedom Fusion?"
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
I keep hearing that next to Fermi Labs, there are now snakes with two heads and albino deer, all this stuff did not exists before they started their research.
Yeah, yeah, yeah... and the buffalo glow green at night.
As a former employee of said labs I will gladly refute the existence of anything like what you (or anyone else) have described (I have heard all kinds of wierd made-up stories).
The main superconducting ring is 60ft underground; and FermiLab's experiments don't revolce around radioactive materials!
...and won?!?!?!
Germany hasn't dismantled their nuclear power plants just yet. They have a law saying that the existing plants will be shut down after a shorter than expected lifetime (20 years instead of 30) and that no new plants will be built, but this is expected to be turned around by the next legislature way before a single plant is actually concerned. I don't know whether they export lots of electricity from France. France does a lot of business selling electricity to Spain and Italy though.
kW.h prices for individual households in France are close to the European average, but the effective price is somewhat lower since the monopoly electrical utility belongs to the state, and that the juicy profits it makes are that much tax that doesn't have to be paid.
The old De Gaul slogan: Follow me! I'm right behind you!
Oh well, what the hell...
And how do we know this isn't how the sun started in the first place...
Never confuse volume with power.
Just Frenchmen? Hook me up. I want work. Plus, I could stand to live in the south of France and improve my french from 'abysmal' to 'bad'. Jobs, anyone?
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
So, are you sure you know what you're talking about?
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The job market for physicists is tough, but even so, I imagine they'd have trouble attracting top-notch people to the Sahara or other sparsely inhabited (or AIDS-decimated) parts of Africa.
Two headed rhinos and elephants would be cool, though.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
I know. I live in Arkansas too. When I marry my sister; she takes MY name. Jesus! Gosh darn yankees.
And also even with their "out-of-nuclear energy" legislation, the German industry (Siemens, E.ON) has partnered with the French industry (Areva, GDF) to develop a next-generation nuclear reactor EPR, a prototype of which will be built in France, and I think the design has already been exported (Finland, something like that). So the German nuclear power industry is alive and kicking.
What are you complaining about? It is in France! The worst thing that can happen is that some French will get Fried...
Oh well, what the hell...
Not to troll - but didn't this article headline foxnews.com and google.com/news like 8 hours ago?
http://www.bobbarr2008.com/
I was the consortium luck. I'll just add, I remember reading 25 years ago how it would take at least another 25 years for magnetic confinement fusion to be commercially viable. Now it is 50 years. Big science like this rarely pays off.
an ill wind that blows no good
I used to live nearby Fermilab. I went to their movie nights from time to time. They have a herd of bison living onsite, with absolutely no ill effects. The claims that they are causing mutants and the like are simply silly. Seriously, if I remember correctly, the bison are living right above/nearby the tevatron main ring. If the magnets screwed with wildlife that much, somebody would have noticed, and tried to get famous by writing a paper about it and studying the exact nature of the effects.
Would I want a fusion research facility in my neighborhood? Hell yes!
...
Too many people have this stigma about anything with the word nuclear in it that they panic and envision 50 foot ants eating them. Nuclear = dealing with the nucleus of the atom. Nuclear fusion = combining two light nuclei to make a heavier nucleus and release energy. Other than neutron activation of the surrounding material (the immediate area around the reaction, since it likely to be well shielded) there is no residual radiation (unlike fission which leaves slowly decaying fissile materials afterward).
Magnets?
Ruin the soil or rain? This process doesn't have to emit anything to the atmosphere or water. Unlike conventional fossil fuel plants which spew tons (tons!) of material into the air.
I worked at Fermilab for awhile and there would always be a protest for a couple of weeks during the summer by people who just plain did not understand a bit of physics. They apparently read that the lab, reproduces the energy levels present at near the big bang, and assumed it was some sort of risk to the world (universe?).
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
I live in Arkansas, too, so I will make fun of my home as much as I like. Wait, you're an AC...that means you royally suck, just like France.
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--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
we're trying to phase out coal. That technology never really panned out for us, even though we mine a lot of good coal here. Our Amish lobby is just too strong. We'll still sell it to Colorado, though.
We're going back to wood. The initial leading choice for the fuel is oak, since those are the biggest, oldest trees we have. When those are gone, the maple crop should be ready.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
Fusion, if feasible, could be the best thing since the fire was discovered - clean, virtually inexhaustible energy (well, not really, but close enough for now) - and the morons are fighting over who gets bragging rights?
That's unbeleivable.
The albino deer are imports to Argonne National labratory. They were brought there on purpose to be bred in the wild. As for snakes with 2 heads- give a reliable source, until then I call bullshit.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
They could just build one of these..
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/mahg/tests/mahg2c.htm
with a measured 1500% efficiency..
-or-
one of these
http://jlnlabs.imars.com/vsg/index.htm
which has a measured COP of 3.46% and is acutally fusion..
it already exists.. just need a large scale version of it
This should be modded +5 on the basis of your research alone!
an ill wind that blows no good
Bullshit. This stupid thing spread around way too damn much, hell it wouldn't be too hard to write something up like this for any country.
Ever wonder why there are so many words of French origin in the English language? Familiar with that time period when France de facto dominated England, and all people of culture/nobility in England spoke French? Did you know, in fact, that the origin of swear words (such as "shit") were that they were used by the lower classes (and are more authentic english) while classier ways of saying these things (such as "manure") were used by the upper classes (and are thus French).
France, like every other country in Europe, has won, lost, invaded, and been invaded countless times. So stop with this nonsense already.
You must be too young to remember the days of metered internet. They didn't say it would be free. Just not metered. you pay $20 a month and use how ever much you need.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I'm French and living near one of our oldest nuclear plants. Our electricity national firm was allowed to run it about 10 years more than what was planned at the beginning. I don't like it.
And I'm not very sure that solar and wind power will provide enough energy in the future. So I'd like to see fusion plants working as soon as possible...
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
Patrick Moore is no longer with GreenPeace, and in fact is one if its harshest critiques. He runs a site called GreenSpirit, which at first glance appears to be "environmentalism for those who aren't brain dead".
France really doesn't suck, as far as I know. I was mainly just being mean to that other AC. However, it is a bit of a cliche' in America - that of France sucking. I'm sure that comes from our British heritage.
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No no... Mr. Fusion doesn't need dueterium. It runs on banana peels, and beer (it works best if you pour the beer out of the can, THEN drop the can in.), etc.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
That didn't happen with fission power, but perhaps it will happen with fusion power.
It won't happen with either, so long as oil remains absurdly profitable and we're not choking to death on carbon-dioxide.
To answer 2 briefly, no a fission reactor won't produce nuclear waste. The point is that you are fusing deuterium and tritium together.
The problem about fusion is about to initiate fusion and to keep it going. The current way of initiating fusion is to start a fission reaction which would produce the energy necessary to initiate fusion.
In the end, you end up having your reactor being radioactive as a side effect of how you started the fusion.
However, new methods are being experimented like using high energy laser and compressed elements. Those methods don't produce any radioactivity.
Radioactivity isn't bad in itself, you actually encounter it every day, and please don't go live in some place where you can find natural emission of Argon or in mountains.
For 3, wind, solar, see power are all alternatives. They should be researched in parallels of fusion, if fusion works it will be producing energy in a very clean fashion and in a concentrated space. A lot of people are complaining about wind power because it is ugly and noisy.
For 4, if no one had any fantasies, we wouldn't be so "advanced" (irony).
Furthermore, since you said you work in wind power, maybe you should stop mixing your belief with possible practical public policy.
And don't forget, if you don't do research, you don't find anything.
This is South of France. We in Paris, Bretagne or Alsace could live without them :-)
Seriously: a major meltdown would mean a problem for the whole Western Europe. If the n1 or n2 economic power has problems, it isn't good for anybody.
Christophe (Don't hesitate to point out my spelling and grammar mistakes, I want to learn - Thanks).
Oddly enough, despite their win/loss ratio, France is still around.
That never stops bugging me.
RTFA again for the best results.
ITER doesn't go "cladderadash" the first time it's fired up!
Flourescent (adj): smelling like ground wheat.
Nice to see that on an interesting and scientific story about the possible solution to the world's energy problems the discussion decends into just slagging off the French. I thought this was a site for geeks interested in technology and science, not a playground for people to trade cheap insults.
And you Yanks are always accusing everyone of being anti-American, can you not see any hypocrisy?
For the record I am not French but I think the EU deserved to have this in their backyard - after all the EU is the major contributor. This is fantastic news, if this works then at a stroke the world will have access to what is essentially unlimited energy. No more greenhouse gasses, smog and you will be able to run a Pentium 7 without causing a blackout across the entire continent.
That worries me, though. The US is very good at backing out, when they don't get things their way. My guess is that the US will follow their alternative approach, which means they'll invade France, once the project produces workable fusion.
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)
Not true!
With the creation of the Euro, Germany managed to successfully conquer France without so much as crossing the border...
http://www.bobbarr2008.com/
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
Yeah, tell me about your history. When did it start ?
You can put it in my front yard. It has got to look better out my window than the freeway I look at now. (The freeway is ~ 1/2 mile away, close enough to be ugly, far enough that there is room for a fusion reactor to block that view)
I like the swamps in my backyard, even if they do breed billions of mosquitoes. I I'm technically a NIMBY guy. They can have the front yard though.
just yesterday or the day before they said here in the german news that we actually had a positive energy import/export ratio. i guess you are not informed very well
See pictures of tits
Even today, production is only about half the cost of electricity (at least here in France): transporting it is NOT free. And the cost of a given electric line depends on the power you want it to have, so consuming twice as much power would definitely have an impact on the price you pay.
Another factor is that a fusion reactor is much more costly today than a fission reactor, so you would probably build less of them, so you would likely have to transport your energy farther away, increasing the transport costs. Bottom line, yes you'd pay quite a bit less, but there will simply a shift so that production costs less and transport costs more: a bit like today's microprocessors, where calculations are virtually immediate but transporting data from one end of the circuit to the other end takes a long time.
Cambridge had a working magnetic field reactor that was able to sustain fusion for 2 weeks. It not only powered the university but also added to the local power grid. Problem with fusion is if the necessary high-pressure conditions for fusion are lost for fraction of a second the whole process stops. This makes for good safeguards (no melt-downs), but it is very difficult to initiate the fusion process.
So fusion has been achieved via magnetic fields in the past. This is the first long-term, large-scale, commercial fusion reactor project that will produce enough power for several countries.
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
The French have one military victory, and it messes up our language for centuries!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
At least last time I checked... Therefore it will never be unlimited, infinite, or free.
http://www.bobbarr2008.com/
One thing that may be of interest to the slashdot community: ITER will likely be using Linux heavily. The plasma control system for ITER (the system the controls the plasma shape in real-time) was developed at General Atomic's DIII-D reactor in San Deigo. It runs Linux. The DIII-D contribution (main one anyway) to the ITER project will be the plasma control system.
So RT Linux will end up in another interesting role.
"There's no secret. You just press the accelerator to the floor and keep turning left." -- Bill Vukovich
"After years of politicking, France has won the right to be the location for a $12 billion fusion research facility."
Exactly my point. If you have 50-500 billion just lying around, there are SOOO many better things you can use it on, rather than shovel rockets into orbit to block out the sun.
You need a FREE iPod Nano
funnily enough you neglect to mention the war where france invaded england and conquered it, and when napoleon ruled most of europe
Might as well add PETA to the list.
So has hot fusion actually produced surplus energy?
Actually, they only entered the war because they got attacked, pre-emptive war not having been invented at the time.
Which is a pity really, because they had a slight military edge and perfect pretext for it in the Treaty of Versailles. When the Germans sent troops into the Rhineland in violation of the treaty, they were under orders to pull back if they were attacked by the French and English.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
That when it comes to Greenpeace, France has their wackos as well.
/me pats himself on the back.
P.S. Is this the first video.googel.com link that's on topic outside of the announcement?
put the what in the where?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Who knows?
This is an expirimental reactor.
Oh, and the people dissing Greenpeace? See previous statement.
Yea I like cute volunteer chicks like that. "I wish everybody would stop fighting and polluting the environment. It'd make me feel much safer and secure."
They're just dying to find a nice highly-paid computer programmer like me. Then they can afford a hybrid car and go out to lunch with all their cute volunteer friends. And when I come home she'll tell me about all of the important volunteer activities she did that day. And I'll tell her about my day. About how my ideas are helping my huge company become more profitable and expand their energy-hunry operations. But she'll feel all cozy and safe and secure knowing that I've got a good job allowing her to do her volunteer work with Greenpeace.
This is a research reactor.
You could build it in greenland, and still the best in the field on the world would want to research there, just because its the best place to be if you are in the field.
Its like TESLA, or LHC. The facility doesnt come to the people, the people come to the facility.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
In my view, Japan is so perfectly suited, technology and mentality-wise, to pull this off.
In my view, France is as suited as Japan for that, even more perhaps. One of the reasons that makes me think so is that France is the only country (with usa) that currently operates the technology to treat nuclear waste. Japan doesn't have it and is sending its to France. Sure, Japan could have it too, but they didn't invest in nuclear as much as France did. Another good point for France, is the CRNS (french-based institute with massive international participation and worldwide recognition for its atomic and subatomic research.)
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)
Count me in, I'd be happy to help build a fusion power plant, or even a testing facility. While I'm not such a great physicist, I am an excellent systems administrator!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Or -1, Troll, because this is at least the 5th time i see this stupid list reposted here on slashdot.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
So it took 20 years for ITER to make a decision? That would make even Washington D.C. bureaucrats proud...
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
I don't really understand you reasoning here...
Arkanoid
gethostbyintuition()... why not?
Okay, FYI - _nobody_ knows when oil will peak. Here's why:
1) The information used to determine this depends on all known sources of oil remaining constant. Guess what - they're still finding (some major) new sources of oil.
a) They're also developing technology to extract previously-unextractable oil (oil sands, oil shale, etc.)
2) The information put out by various companies and countries is _highly_ suspect, if not downright fraudulent, in many cases. When countries routinely use the same numbers for how much oil they think they've got left, year after year, this becomes a little obvious.
The peak may have already been reached, according to some. According to others, it'll be a few years, to some, in 20+, or in the far future.
Either way, I wouldn't be expecting some universal concensus on when the oil peak has or will come. I'd be much more concerned with superbugs or global warming (whether caused entirely or partially by human activity or not), than with the question of peak oil.
Imagine if we had spent $180 billion on it in 2003 in a manhattan project style research program instead of fighting the Iraq war? We'd probably have limitless energy already.
They got money!
My pet project didnt!
This sucks!
(and i wouldnt want money to be given to some ball-lighning gurus either....)
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
1) Whats wrong with a 40 hour work week? I want to make money to fund my hobbies and support myself. Not to mention we get pretty damned used to the 40 hour work weeks from high school and middle school.
/.) Because they are morons? Seriously they have absolutely no farking clue about anything they argue
Greenpeace hatred on
2)Yes the intial forms will produce some radioactive material due to the nuetrons interacting with the containers. But it's not going to be as bad as what is produced in fission reactors. Even the waste produced in fission reactors isn't THAT bad, much better then anything the wastes and environmental effects of other sources of power generation. Plus there ARE fusion reactions which produced little to no nuetron radiation and lots of energy with readily available elemnts. Once more research is done into fusion energy we will be able to use those elemnts and create etremely clean energy.
3) Personally I think that if were to replace all of our energy production with Wind Power, we would screw up the global climate so much that it would be worse then any global warming due to CO2 emissions.
4)Ughh ok whatever you say, that is probablly one of the most cliche questions ever. Anyways one of the greatest things about fusion is also its energy density, once suffecient research is done we could theoritically create small mini non poluuting reactors for each and every city and town in the world. Not to mention we are thinking abotu the FUTURE here. Plus its not like they said "hey lets forget about funding non fusion renewable energy sources" The governments of all of our countries are funding almost every single possible proposal for new energy sources.
Other than a few Europeons and the fruits and nuts of California, does anyone take this group of Luddites seriously?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
The actual numbers are (I'm not parent poster)
for 2003:
Produced: 560 billion kWh
Consumed: 519.5 billion kWh
exported: 53.8 kWh
imported: 45.8 kWh
so that's a lot of importing, but more exporting, as you say
by comparison the US in 2002
produced: 3.839 trillion kWh
consumed: 3.66 trillion kWh
exported: 13.36 billion kWh
imported: 36.23 billion kWh
I know this is flamebait (and pretty funny, besides they deserve it), but I always have to take issue with
- American Revolution
Sorry, Ameri-centrists, but France saved our ass on this one. Saying the colonists defeated Britain on their own is like saying the Northern Alliance defeated the Taliban. That's a little bit of hyperbole, but France was nevertheless instrumental in our victory. I try to tone down my French-bashing just based on this debt of gratitude.
As for the World Wars, I'm wondering what country you could have put in France's position and expected to do better. Holding off Germany for years in WWI while the U.S. decided whether or not they wanted to do anything isn't something to be scoffed at. U.S. gloating over these wars reminds me of two boxers going at it for ten rounds, and then in the eleventh round another fighter who had been sitting safetly in the locker room jumps into the ring and pops out the fatigued opponent, and then mocks the other fighter for not having the strength to do it themselves.
The enemies of Democracy are
yes, I'd have expected high-tech stuff to be in Japan too, but Japan is a geologically unstable country - a fusion reactor is an expensive bit of kit, and if it can be located in a less unstable country then yay! It'll reduce the costs of building an earthquake-proof building for it too.
iirc Japan currently has difficulty supplying itself with power and until it's producing power (somewhere near the end of the project, I suspect) it's gonna need a good source of power to guzzle from - France (and, if necessary, the power infrastructure of the rest of Western Europe - Japan being an island next to China and the back end of Russia)
Oh, and it'll be closer to CERN for access to clever particle physicist boffin types.
But most importantly, it'll be close enough to the UK for education establishments here to organise visits
FGD 135
The bay of Fundy moves more water in and out every 13 hours than .
.
.
.
.
.
.
0 3080222.htm
all the water of all the rivers in the world combined
If we could figure out a way to harness it, we would be good on
power for a VERY long time indeed
http://www.valleyweb.com/fundytides/
The 3 gorges damn is huge, the world's largest dam at present time,
but the power generation possible at fundy is just staggering
I think underwater screened turbines would prevent sea life
from being churned up, and prevent silting like the 'dam'type
hydro electric tidal generators built in france
Some under sea power turbines are being deployed near malaysia
Also in the fusion arena, I think the bubble fusion principle
makes alot more sense economically, and has already demonstrated
that it will work
Keep in mind it is not cold fusion, it is high temp based
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/03/0403
Peace,
Ex-MislTech
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Well, it seems you skipped the Charlemagne era...
And the before that the fact that it was Franks (not yet a country at that time) that stopped the islamic progression from taking over what is now France (and the rest of nortern europe by consequence).
Oh and you also forgot the first crusade...
I am not from France, but despite all their issues, French had their share of victory in the past. Otherwise they would not be on the map, they would have disapeared.
Regardless of my views on the wisdom of Greenpeace, the bombing of Rainbow Warrior by the French DGSE in New Zealand waters was an act of outright terrorism. Not only should've the perpetrators been brought to book, but the French government should've been keel-hauled (either at the UN or elsewhere): turning a blind eye to terrorist training in one's country is one thing, but isn't ordering a bombing in another country an act of war? And if not, why not?! If they'd done it these days in a U.S. port, would Bush be invading France?
Ok, the guy showed his ignorance. Know what, I wasn't aware of that fact too, so what?
He actually took the facts he knows, did a 2+2, and arrived at an apparent contradiction. Good thinking! I am ashamed that I didn't arrive at same conclusion without knowing about the iron's stability. I'd dare to say that that's the way of thinking that advances science.
So, OK, he asked a question, and you happen to know the answer. Does not make him stupid. I know this is Slashdot and all, but he really gave you no reason to bash him.
Please note, the bloke who created that webpage and the vast majority of those quips is English and NOT American.
Germans are so efficient.
Now the French will be their power-producing, cheese-eating, wine-drinking thralls.
Why doesn't the U.N. do something?
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
There are three types of hydrogen:
Protium, or the most common one, and the one we often associate with Hydrogen, has only a proton in it's nucleus.
Deuterium has one neutron in the nucleus, as well as one proton. It is found in "Heavy Water".
Tritium has two neutrons and one proton in the nucleus, and is radioactive.
Ah, you found me!
It belongs to the all the countrys that pay for it.
IIRC
the EU (not a country, but the constituant parts are too insignificant to list seperatly)
USA
Russia
Japan
All will own the technology involved. Where the prototype is makes little difference.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I don't agree with these thoughts.. but I can hear them.
(puts tin-foil hat back on)
You have to take your tin-foil beanie off to hear people's thoughts? That sucks. I'm not sure it'd be worth the benefit. No good reading minds if yours is being controlled, you know? You must be using electro-telepathy, which would explain why you need to take off the hat. I'm more into neuro-chemical-empathy which only requires that I take my allergy medication to keep my nasal passages clear. To each their own, I guess.
The enemies of Democracy are
I believe the coal contains trace amounts of radioactive elements, which are released into the atmosphere when it is burned.
Just google nukeular er nuclear vs. coal or something like that.
Sounds like "Super Collider II: This time, we're going to finish it!"
Perhaps you should just stop listening... Well... yeah, that probably won't work either. :-)
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
Both bottom ash and fly ash would be low level radioactive waste if it was'nt explicitly excluded from the regulations.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I would have been worried about their level in maths if that ratio were negative...
The radioactivity of the container is no real problem. The radioactivity is relatively weak and decays to acceptable levels in a few decades. Then the containter is reusable in the plant.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
[INSERT NAME OF ORGANIZATION, GOVERNMENT, POLITICAL PARTY, OR RELIGION HERE] to be predominantly made up of people who don't think for themselves and have an psychological need to "get even."
I don't join organizations because I am anti-social (it's beside the point), I don't because; like Treebeard, they are not on my side.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
You lost me there.
Every Tokamak is a stable plasma structure. It is just not hot enough to reach energy breakeven.
A florescent bulb is a stable plasma structure.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The French, the British, the German, the Russian, the Italian, the Austrian (or these nation states ancestors) have all at different times dominated military in Europe and too often created havoc on the European continent, not to mention the rest of the world. Many of the European wars have been because one of the great nations got the military upper hand (or thougth they had) and wanted to revenge their last loss of land to one of their European neighbours. Look for instance how the land area behind France and Germany has traded owners through the centuries (latest land trade was of course after WWI and WWII). There is symbolic significance that Strasbourg is where the EU parliment is located, a very German and French city in culture, architecture and language for obvious reasons (just look at a map).
And European history is a reminder for all great nations to be careful before starting a war since the rule of war is that it only create losers and no winners. The US should be careful not to inherit (seems its already too late) the European tradition of starting uneccessary wars when having a large army. Just look at China's incredible long history to find an example how a dominant nation does not necessarily at all times need to expand or start wars with all its neighbours (remember Chinese invented gun powder, while it was the Europeans that used gun powder to conquere the world).
After all that, lets look at the last part of your "freedom fries" list. In WWI France had the main war on their own land and sacrified 1,400 ,000 men. US, which won the war in your history book, lost 116,000. And of course we all agree that WWII that followed, where 40 million people died all over the world, only was won by the US joining in 1943. Especially since the Germans lost 93 % of their forces fighting the Russians.
Anyway, making frog jokes is a nice way for your right wing media, like the Wall Street Journal, to stop USians ask any awkard questions why US marines are dying 3 per day in Iraq at the moment.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
It is Britain that declared war on Germany in the second world war, and it was in response to the invasion of Poland, not in response to being attacked.
I Surrender!!
I'm probably just showing that I'm not an EE, but doesn't this equation have to balance:
energy produced + energy imported = energy consumed + energy exported
With these numbers where did the excess go? ~200 billion kWh is a lot of energy to jsut disappear.
is this really better than spending the money to cover a few hundred square miles of otherwise useless sunny land with solar collectors? What's the percentage of bright sunny days in the Sahara desert?
If the French eat enough garlic, they could hold the US forces off indefinitely.
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)
France has a very impressive engineering history and a strong scientific community. For technology, just look at Concord and Airbus. There are good reasons why France got this project against the wishes of Japan and the USA, and it is not only the French arrogance and stubborness.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
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.
It's not true. What the OP means is: a coal plant normally releases more radioactivity into the environment than the equivalent nuclear plant. Which is true as long as nothing ever goes wrong with the nuclear plant or the handling of its wastes.
The nuclear plant still generates orders of magnitude more radioactivity than the coal plant.
In fact the main french "green" political party is clearly against nuclear power:
http://lesverts.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=60
True. But then there was a 'phoney war' and they didn't do any fighting until they were attacked in France.
t m
http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/phoney_war.h
Anyhow, I still think they left it dangerously late.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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.
Very funny. Enron, perhaps?
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
To these groups, any given tree or platypus has more of a right to be where it is than we, the humans, have to put in yet another road for our SUVs People like you live in scifi phantasy land, where you actually think that we can make tradeoffs between more environment or more technology. But we can't. Our current level of population, our current resource consumption, and our current environmental destruction aren't sustainable. The longer we continue, the harder the eventual crash will be. It doesn't matter how much technology we throw at the problem. So, worrying about platypuses and trees isn't about "values" or "rights", it's about long-term survival of our own species.
I grew up in a "no-nukes" family and it took many years before I realized I was being fed fairy-tales.
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.
Either country would have been fine; the reasons are of course political (as in people-related - "politcal" is not a negative), not technical.
That said, the French have a huge amount of experience with nuclear power. You might also want to take a look at the accident statistics of the Japanese nuclear industry; it's not encouraging reading.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You forgot the addendum: "in spite of their shortsighted government".
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
I believe that most power plants are not highly adjustable. Even if they are "adjustable", the cost of adjusting them up and down exceeds that of just letting them overproduce. Since under-producing means lost revenue and angry customers, most utilities tend to overproduce.
Atanamis
I think the main reason americans and french dislike another is because they are so similar to each other.
If you are american or french, really think through why you hate usa/france. Congratulations, now you know the reasons the rest of the world is getting fed up with you as well.
Actually it was pretty amazing; the childish utterly over-the-top hissy-fits of the americans in the wake of the Iraq debacle ("freedom fries"? Come on!) was probably the only thing that could actually make the rest of the EU to actually overcome the dislike of the posterior-orifice attitude of the french political class.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
If you think THAT way of thinking (not knowing basic facts,not bothering to get to know WHY everything else seems to not care about that "obvious" misstake, but jumping to conclusions ("doesnt work")) helps science, then welcome to the dark age.
Its all in the spin of the post.
And he DIDNT ask a question. He spread FUD. His main message wasnt "how does it work?". It was "that is nonsense that cant work how stupid those dumb d00des are..."
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
use them to split water and feed home powering fuel cells.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
When they started building fission nuclear plants in the 1950s, it was said that energy would be nearly unlimited and nearly free. Lots costs overlooked then and overlooked now for fusion.
Probably depending on the amount. Light water seems like it would be a good one for getting more heavy water, not sure if the neutron absorption for H is too low compared to the O though. Or use heavy water to get tritium.
I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
why not make a maser and use a laser pulse to smash the atoms together?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
I'm just sad that the article messed up the conversion.
It said "100 million Celsius (180 million F)"
When it should have said "100 million Celsius (180 million +32 F)"
Science reporting these days.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Most fusion reactions generate surplus neutrons which have to go someone. The wall materials of fusion reactors will gradually turn radioactive. The slight advantage is that these radioactive substances tend to have shorter half-lives than U/Pu fission products. Fusion waste will have to be shielded and displosed of like fission waste.
There is radioactive material in the coal, which is released into the atmosphere both during mining and processing, as well as during the burning.
The quantity of such material is about twice as much as in the case of nuclear plants, per watt-hour of energy. And we have not even talked about the other (non-radioactive) pollutants.
My physics teacher from high school used to say that he'd much rather live on top of a nuclear plant rather than 1 Km from a coal plant of same energy output. Much helathier.
Sigged!
Not again.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Good points, but if geological stability was a factor, I wish theytook Finland (home sweet home) as an option: Finland has the most geologically stable territory by FAR in Europe. Basically, Finland would be better off to offer any of the E*U countries to send their nuclear waste here and bury it, because the risk of an earthquake is so low that the nuclear waste will have a long and safe life here, unlike anywhere else in Europe, and then the pollution would eventually arrive to Finland as well.
Sigged!
I figured any power other than hydroelectric in SC2K was a waste of money.
Wind is more expensive (in terms of space and $).
Anything else has to be rebuilt every 50 years.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
3) Personally I think that if were to replace all of our energy production with Wind Power, we would screw up the global climate so much that it would be worse then any global warming due to CO2 emissions.
That's just retarded, and this retarded piece of thinking keeps popping up more and more often.
No, it's not going to fuck up the climate. There are already human-made structures with the same kind of impact windmills would. They're called "buildings."
There are already natural structures with the same effect. They're called "trees" and "mountains." Now, yeah, the Himalayas have quite a dramatic impact on weather and climate (the moonsoon?) Do you see a wind farm, well, even a bunch of wind farm having the same impact as just one mount in the Himalayas? Give me a break.
You will not drink with us, but you would taste our steel? - Walter Matthau, The Pirates
First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
What greenpeace is saying is that they'd have used the 10b for windmills now (actually they didn't count the service costs over the years), where it'd supply 7.5 million households with energy (bbc source).
:).
Now consider the fact that this 10b is coming from virtually any big country in the world and it is poo in comparison with other projects. 7.5 million people is not quite a dent of the world population either.
The real fuss (and that it has been for the past 10 years (an bigger design was proposed years ago)), was that Japan wanted to become the center of fusion research, but so did Europe. After years of debate by Worldwide comissions and comittees (which together must have cost more than 10b over the years).
I for one am glad this research is to be set in France. Actually, my teacher in nuclear fusion was none less than prof. Cardozo, head of the european research team. Trust me, I'm proud
b.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Tom Clancy's book "Rainbow Six" involves a radical environmental group which conspires to knock the human population back to less than six figures by means of a biological agent.
HBH
"Smart is sexy." -- D. Scully ("War of the Coprophages")
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I now know what it feels like to be a sim in SimCity. We have to make sure they run enough water pipes to the reactor or no one will wanna work there.
It's not like getting modded down is going to affect my karma worth mentioning. Just enjoy the show -- it's all comedy anyway.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"Would stopping someone like that from operating, saving countless lives as a result, and getting to watch those people have actual elections also rate below a "science project?""
;-)
If that would involve an illegal war, killing countless lives as a result, and getting to watch those people have an occupying foreign military force and continious chaos and violence: yes.
"I was referring, of course, to the French attitude about the "unilateral" US position on cheese tariffs."
What? The US wanted to form a coalition of the willing cheese-eaters too?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
America is co-funding this plant... As is Russia, most of the rest of Europe, China and Japan.
Me (Blog)
You wanna show us some links?
Always has.
Always will be.
"The natural product of the fusion reaction is a small amount of helium, which is completely harmless to life and does not contribute to global warming. "
I for one welcome our high-pitched French-speaking overlords.
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.
Give us humans a cause that occurs so slowly that no one will notice it if they haven't been observing for a hundred years or that requires a PHD to understand the nuances of (global warming etc.) and we'll ignore it.
Give us a 'direct' feeling that is right in front of our noses, we can actively see over the course of a month or year or two (evil enemy [we can see and feel] in (cold) war, money for gasoline), and we'll react promptly.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I remember when those claims were made about nuclear power, about how it would be so cheap that it wouldn't be metered.
It was originally expected that "fast breeder reactors" would be used to recycle and re-enrich the spent fuel rods that came out of power plants. Instead, Carter used execuitive order to put a blanket ban on those types of plants. Fast breeder reactors would drastically cut hte amount of high level radioactive waste that comes out of power plants and cut the costs of operating a plant. Consider the nuclear version of recycling.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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. :)
Hehe... I think this was the concept in Star-Wars and it will always remain science fiction. The production of ultra-heavy elements (such as Uranium) does not occur naturally in solar fusion because not even that gravity or heat is enough to overcome the energy barriers required to fuse the nuclei into such heavy compositions. To create such elements, a supernova is required. Conversely, these ultra-heavy elements are reasonably unstable and are therefore somewhat easy (comparitively) to split. Splitting lighter elements is never discussed because imparting the energy required to do such a thing is beyond our means.
Fusion is practical, today, from Hydrogen on up to Tritium-Boron. I believe that the Tokamak at Princeton was able to achieve over unity in controlled tests all the way up to boron-tritium fusion, but was never funded to the level required to make it commercially viable.
One must appreciate the fact that even the new French reactor does not appear to be planned to be a commercial plant. It looks to be an experimental reactor in the same vein as the Tokamak. These torroidal plasma reactors are really for much more than the study of fusion as well; They are very much for the study of high-temperature plasmas and extremely strong magnetic fields (including the elusive torsion fields). Such conditions provide a rich experimental environment for physical phenemona much more exotic than fusion (e.g. gravity research).
For straightforward energy generation, my bet is on focus fusion, but politics are an issue. Focus fusion uses various plasma-guide geometries to force plasma to compress at a point at very high energy producing super-high temperatures where boron-tritium fusion occurs. The resultant fusion highly ionizes and accelerates the plasma linearly where a particle decellerator can directly convert the accelerated charge into current through induction. Focus fusion holds the promise of hand-held fusion for energy production, plasma rifles and extremely efficient propulsion (all a direct result of the accellerated high-energy plasma). But with all such high energy production technologies that could be mass produced, the politics of the big energy companies loosing control of their revenue stream tends to punish funding for research.
While we are on the subject of exotic physics, some of you might find this interesting...
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Great. Give a major engineering problem to a bunch of people who will try to invent a new screw.....because the screw was not invented by the french. Good idea. It will never work. I suppose this is good news for the other guys in some small lab that will solve the problem without trying to build a star in the lab.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Not sure--but it seems logical enough--there are periods when not enough energy is produced (brownouts, blackouts, etc) so there are periods when too much energy is produced--i guess it just dissipates? too bad...
I know with myself the honor was earned over a number of years. I used to give them money, no more. I'd take back every penny I gave them if I could. The final straw was when I attended a meeting of theirs and quickly got out of there. I was told it was a represenative meeting and they had not a clue. They are almost as clueless as PETA is. Some of them were arrested recently for animal cruelty as a matter of fact.
If you are associated with GP, be sure you know what you are doing. Know what they are doing in your name. If you can live with that then OK. If not, bail fast. IMHO a number of them are just like pirates. They need to be keel-hauled.
BTW it isn't fantasies, it is imagination, some inspiration and a lot of persperation. Fantasies lead you down a bad road, one that won't pan anything out because it is BS. That is why it is a fantasy. Reel yourself back in a bit, into reality. Make the world a better place for your having been here.
I must point out that George Bush's government is spending at least 5.8 billion(US) dollars a month. I heard today that is currently at least 8 billion(US). We could have lots of whiz-bang science for that kind of money, to say nothing of world hunger or AIDS.
United Press International
November 18, 2004
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon is spending more than $5.8 billion a month on the war in Iraq, according to the military's top generals.
That is nearly a 50 percent increase above the $4 billion-a-month benchmark the Pentagon has used to estimate the cost of the war so far.
Source:
United Press International
November 18, 2004
The Army alone is spending $4.7 million a month while the Air Force is spending $800 million a month transporting soldiers and flying combat missions. The Marine Corps is spending $300 million a month, the four service chiefs told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday.
That's exactly what i thought it was. Just wondering which company it referred to is all.
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
France-bashing is so outré. :)
---- I have nothing more to add.
Actually, France got us into the whole Vietnam thing in the first place. And, while there were many mistakes, clearly the biggest one was not following through with post-war support of the the south Vietnamese government.
And now France wants us to cut off support to the post-war Iraqi government? That's not surprising, since the French government has publicly stated that they'd like to "counter-balance" (weaken) the United States on the world stage.
And yes, this certainly is the post-war stage. No remnant of the former government remains, and the whole insurgency would collapse without foreign support.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
they are not dropping 50 b notes onto this in one year...
if it takes 10 years to be built its only 5 billion a year....
if it takes 50 years... well then we have a different situation on our hands..LOL
Check journal for info on Anti-TextBook, an idea by me.
battle of Hastings 1066
Also seen here.
I hope you realize that "shit" is from german...
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
Choosing to quote only references that support your thesis, given that there are good arguments against it, is quite dishonest. This criticizes the 'proof' you mention, showing that it is not nearly as general as you would have us believe.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
1) why are you Americans so incredibly proud of your 40 hour week and miserable holiday entitlement?
Because the price of the French labor laws is the current state of the French economy.
There's no "right or wrong" here. It's just a choice.
Yes, you can have the current French labor laws and enjoy the time. It makes it hard to compete on a global scale with the US, Britain, or even more so, the developing world where labor costs are very low. It may be worth the cost to many.
The other choice is to put in the long hours and less vacation, but have a higher GDP. That may not be worth it to some. If you have young kids, being gone can be a high price to pay, for example.
You can't have both. Or more exactly, you can't have both for an extended period of time.
You can try to tariff out competition on labor and land cost intensive items like agriculture for a time, but in the long run, that's a bill that still has to be paid (And, incidently, helps impoverish third world farmers. The US is guilty of that as well, but France and Japan are both big players in that problem.)
It also tends to lead to things like the dustup with Tony Blair over reopening the agricultural subsidies that had the pundits predicting the imminent death of the EU recently.
2) I used to go out with a woman whose father had worked for the French atomic industry all his life (physics PHD) and he was emphatic that any proposed fusion reactor would produce just as much nuclear waste as a fission reactor if not more.
He was likely talking about neutron induced radioactivity in the walls of the reactor, which, depending on what materials are used, can indeed be a problem. However, it's a LOT less material than is generated at a fission plant, where the large amount of fuel (many tons) becomes highly radioactive and has to be switched out regularly.
There are some questions about how often the reactor vessels of a fusion reactor would have to be changed out, but likely not that often. Gaining that sort of experience is one of the reasons for funding fusion related research.
3) I work in wind power and while I don't think they should be everywhere and blighting everyone's view, renewables combined with pump storage or compressed air storage or hydrogen storage, are more than capable of supplying the world's energy needs.
Yes, they could conceivably be used to power the world. However, that tends to ignore the environmental impacts of massive use of solar, wind, tide and other sources. In the small amounts being fielded, the current environmental costs are miniscule. They will grow greatly if these technologies are heavily used. And they will have to be heavily used to supply just the current level of energy use.
Don't get me wrong. I think that using passive solar in building, photovoltaics in some areas, and wind power are very desirable. But, I think the costs associated with switching solely to them will be much higher than many who promote them think.
4) All us geeks like elegant solutions and fusion has always held out that promise but I think we all need to try to not mix up your personal fetishes with practical public policy issues.
This is absolutely true, but it applies equally well to those supporting the "green" power sources. They'll work well for some applications, however, powering the world with them will not be all roses.
The truth of the matter is, our energy problems are soluble technically, in any of several ways. They will ALL lead to problems of various sorts (technical and political).
The result of that is the real problem. That given the current political situation with each side being able to at least partly block the other, our energy problems are largely politically insoluble.
Thus, we stick with the current fuel cycles, which have their own problems and costs (technical and political) that we can all recite chapter and verse.
TANSTAAFL
They also supplied the revolutionaries with most of their gunpowder and arms. Until a Frenchman by the name of DuPont decided to set up shop here in time for the War of 1812, and whose company would go on to supply gunpowder for US forces until WWI, and be one of the primary contractors for the Manhatten project.
Laugh all you want. A company founded by a Frenchman gave us the bomb.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I was at one of their mercury testing events where they served coffee that was brewed with solar power. They're nice people, and the chicks were really cute.
You should go to some industry shows for the chemical, oil and coal industries. They'll serve you coffee brewed with electricity generated at a coal plant. The reps will be very nice people to you, and the chicks in the booth will be really cute.
Which is more or less why George H.W. Bush decided that invading Iraq back in '91 would have been a mistake.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Um, your not supposed to eat the protective wax covering.
"Shit" and "Scheisse" come from the same Germanic origin (they are cognates) but "shit" is certainly not from German.
This is like humans evolved from chimpanzees. No. We both evolved from a common ancestor which was neither human nor chimp.
In the same way, Germanic split out of the Indo-European tree (where it differs from its acestral connection to other languages like Latin, and Greek.)
Germanic then split into North, East, and West Germanic. North Germanic was basically the Gothic languages, and has since died out before any good specimens of the languages could be recorded.
North Germanic became the Scandanavian languages (or language, depending on where you draw your political boundaries)
West Germanic developed into low and high German. Low German developed into English, Frisian, Dutch, and Plattdeutsch.
High German developed into New High German, and various dialects based on it.
Also, English, before being altered by the influx of French into England, was altered by the Scandanavians and their occupation of England.
So, before we even have the original origins that are pretty similar to German, we have alterations due to Scandanavian occupation, and French alterations due to Norman occupation.
"shit" is definitively *not* from German. It's Germanic in origin, but it does not come from German.
The English neologism "uber", *is* from German. "shit" is not.
(Interesting note: German geeks can now be said to have two words now "über" and "uber", the first being the original meaning, and the second being a borrowing of the English word "uber" which was origianlly borrowed from the German word "über".)
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
http://www.kbb.com/kbbmedia/index.asp?pg=release&y ear=2005&date=6-27
Me and my friends were making fun of the French *before* the Iraqi War.
I remember getting kicked out of our IRC channel, because I called a guy "Frenchie" This was well before we (the US) even started talking about going into Iraq. At least a year in fact.
Don't assume that all French bashing is done in malice over the Iraqi War. While it's true that most of it is because of this (hey, it became popular to make fun of the French.) But some people just made fun of France before then, just because.
Besides, they smell.
Seriously though, this is not really intended with any real heart people. I have no malice intended in my bashing of France. It's just a light hearting target of our bashing-rants. Like the one kid at school, who always got teased. I think France is doing a pretty damn fine job, and they've done miracles with their military at times.
And I will not take the claim that France's military sucks because they couldn't take out Germany in WW1, and were taken over in WW2. They were in a bad spot, against a very strong military opponent. In WW1, they deserve all the credit for holding out as long as they did. In WW2... hell, look what happened to Poland. It fell faster than France. Only reason why Britain took so long was the channel between the mainland and them. If Hitler had had the chunnel, England would have been his.
So, I don't make fun of France just because they didn't support the Iraqi War. I also don't make fun of France because I have some true malice in my heart. It's light-hearted, like when I make fun of Laughing Boy for having the most annoying laugh in the world. (Serious, he could be on the other side of Wal-mart and you would know he were laughing.)
Some of us are just kidding around.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
...is cable losses. 93 million miles, you do the math.
</deadpan>
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Yes, well, in WWII I don't believe there was an army in the world that would have lasted much longer than France's. France had a long land border with Nazi Germany, the Wermacht, inventor of the Blitzkrieg. Britain, Russia, and the U.S. were spared because of the English Channel, the Russian Winter, and the Atlantic Ocean respectively. France was pretty much screwed.
The enemies of Democracy are
Fuel re-processing and breeders are independent things.
Re-processing splits a used fuel rod into a small amount of highly radioactive waste (fission products) a larger amount of medium-level waste (things like fuel rod coatings that have been in the heart of the reactor and got pretty active) and a lot of uranium and plutonium that can be used as fuel.
It sound like a great idea, but there are some issues in practice: you produce and separate plutonium, from which it's loads easier to make bombs that from uranium; the process is quite hard to do safely and economically, you need acids and heat and heavy machinery, all remotely operated and rad-hardenened; you make lots more low-level waste from the used materials, plant and equipment.
Breeder reactors are nuclear reactors are "tuned" to turn U238, which is 99+ percent of natural uranium and not directly usable as fuel, into plutonium, which can be used. Together with a reprocessing plant you get a cycle that effectively burns U238, and produces small amounts of high level waste plus lots of medium and low-level waster. Which is nice, but it's not cheap or simple.
Erm, sorry to say it was the Normans who conquered the English, they were Vikings who had previously conquered Northern France (Normandy). So, erm, that looks like another loss.
Hah, that's funny. You know when Hannibal was invading Italy he wrote to his brother to find mercenaries, at the end of the letter he said
"ps don't take any Gauls (French) they are quickly discouraged in battle and moan a lot."
It was Charles de Gaulle who unearthed that gem in a letter to his son. He added the note: "See! 2000 years later the French are no better - they are vealcows just fit to be mown down by German machine guns."
Good navy historically, though. But they even lost to Sweden (some of all the times). :-)
Yeah, but it were beaten and stolen by the British in 1807
Pray tell me, how many hundreds of percent has the ISS gone beyond the projected costs? 5? 10? Well, the shuttle still makes it look cheap to build and run, so let us put that at NASA and not Denmark. :-)
I didn't say Denmark is the main force behind ISS, I said that Denmark has developed equipment which is true. Several Danish companies and universites (Thrane & Thrane, DTU, you name it) has delivered equipment for the station.
I really don't get your point with the projected costs... yes, it is expensive, far more than were though (partially because of the Columbia accident) but honestly - the second we let money hinder science and development we will stagnate and fall...
Arkanoid
gethostbyintuition()... why not?
I only found out recently that the US got involved in WW2 only when it was agreed that we would pay all their troops, fuel and other expenses. It's a debt that runs on until this day.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Somehow I think that irony will be little comfort years from now, should history show that the French acted unilaterally to ensure the progress of mankind, while the US acted unilaterally to horde resources for themselves.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Shampoo is french (in addition to perfume, which I guess is what you're referring to). So much for your theory...
Give me a job. Please?
Actualy, both 'personal' and 'hygiene' have French origin.
I don't think it would come to that. The french army are not really wimps, and their veteran legion is one of the toughest armies in the world. Just that they do not send troops into a war they consider pointless doesn't mean they are cowards or wimps. It just seems a lot of americans can't take a no for an answer...
int main(void) {while(1) fork(); return 0;}
Yah, the French certainly made some blunders. The Maginot Line is one of history's most famous -- though you do have to remember that the fast tank attack hadn't been seen yet. It was still pretty stupid to imagine that WWII would be a repeat of WWI. Yet I maintain that nobody would have been able to stand up to that first German rush in 1940. Nobody was prepared for Blitzkrieg.
The enemies of Democracy are
Huh? Germany still has lots of nuclear plants. There is *talk* about shutting them down within the next *30 years* or so; saying that they already have been "outlawed and disbanded" is so blatantly false that it's quite hard to even attempt to attribute your statement to naivity and stupidity instead of labelling you as a troll.
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Good movie, and book.
Um "what makes you X so Y?" ... the phrasing is inflamitory.
Either that, or someone took exception to you proclaming yourself a geek and in the same post saying "I used to go out with a woman".
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
It's from (T) transmission losses.
G = Power plant A produces X MW
C = Consumption = Total energy uses at the meter.
G - C = T
G - C - E (export) + I(Import) = T
Comment removed based on user account deletion
VA Linux (remember them?) at peak had a bigger market cap than the ITER will cost.
My fascist chemistry teacher told me the same story about another place 18 years ago in Austria. Just google for oxygen-dihydride and you see the same story over and over.
If your local greens really fell for that, they are the dumbest greens ever. E.g., the greens in Austria usually have chemists and other scientists in the parliament and EU parliament. (They have dumb people too though.)
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
This is factually incorrect. The direct waste product of fusion is helium. Indirect waste products may include materials from the reactor that will become mildly radioactive over time due to neutron flux from the fusion reactions. Yet this nimrod from Greenpeace equates the amount and type of waste produced by fusion to the amount and type of waste produced by fission, and then goes on (incredibly) to bring up the specter of nuclear proliferation.
How a fusion reactor could possibly lead to nuclear proliferation is beyond me. Indeed, how can you portably weaponize the technology used for generating power from fusion reactions? We already have fusion bombs, but they are nothing like the tech needed for sustainable fusion reactions.
This is the worst kind of FUD -- it's based entirely on misinformation and outright ignorance, and preys upon the ignorance of the common man. It's idiocy like this that makes me question much beloved institutions such as freedom of speech. Individuals have the protection of laws which limit speech (e.g., laws against defamation, slander, and libel), but nothing prevents people from making wildly absurd claims that can torpedo funding for a project that will benefit humanity.
Thank you, but shouldn't transmission loss be considered when one is considering consumption? I can see G, C, and E being clearly metered in large facilities, but trasmission loss can happen between the metering and consumption of the electricity. Or is that little bit considered insignificent?
You do realize that Japan still is involved, do you? It's an international project, they just chose to build the reactor in France rather than Japan (which makes sense, considering the population density of Japan vs France).
It's a billing isue building "huge" power plants let's the power company be more effecent in some ways but the furter that power goes the more transmission losses they get so they need to seperate the generation of power from the people using it so they know where to expand capasity for the best bang for the buck as it where.
Also if a power plant in New York is selling power to DC where they set the meter will change the useage picture so they look at supply as how much power is going to be supplyed to a specific location. The simple fact is the grid seperates the use of power from the generation of power to such an extent that you realy can't tell how much of any one plant's power is lost from transmission isues.
There are basicly 3 players in power the guys that make it the guys that send it around and the guys who use it and somone might do a little of all three they can generate 500MW buy 500MW use 300MW sell 650MW and lose 50MW but they guy selling the power does not care if he is losing that 50MW and the guys useing that 650MW don't care so he hase to eat the cost. By seperating the generation from useage they can get an accurate picture of what's going on and so they can say to the generation people I will pay you 9.801c per MW at location A and 9.701c per MW at location B.
Sources? or did you just pull that figure out of your ass?
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
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