Slashdot Mirror
Europe Plans a New Type of Fusion Facility
SR71Blackbird writes "European physicists have put forward a plan for a facility that uses lasers to produce fusion. From the article: 'The laser would be used to compress and heat a small capsule of deuterium and tritium until the nuclei are hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion and produce helium and neutrons. In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste.'"
It's sufficiently urgent that we can't wait for the fusion fairy to visit us. By all means, we should continue research in fusion. It's an exciting field with a lot of potential. But we don't potential so much as a workable energy policy now. We can't base them prototype research facilities that materialize "by the middle of the next decade."
My $0.02
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
What makes this any different?
Fast Ignition. From TFA:
Kodama and colleagues are now upgrading their laser system in order to approach "breakeven" - the point at which the energy output is equal to the energy needed to sustain the reaction. They then plan to further enhance their system so that it reaches ignition, which happens when the fusion reactions generate enough energy to sustain themselves without the need for further heating. Finally, they hope to build a demonstration fast-ignition facility. Physicists in the US are also studying fast ignition.
We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?
You're exaggerating. Scientists have always been pretty upfront that creating a confined, sustained fusion reaction is an exceptionally difficult problem. The potential payoff is so large that we continue to study it.
What makes this different is that they are building a large test facility for inertially-confined fusion. Magnetically-confined fusion is the more popular approach. The article doesn't talk about the details very much but one of the primary obstacles to inertially-confined fusion are the presence of hydrodynamic instabilities such as the Richtmyer-Meshkov effect. The lasers are directed at a spherical shell containing a deuterium-tritium pellet and are supposed to cause the shell to implode. Manufacturing imperfections result in the RM instability and the less-than-perfect implosion causes the whole thing to fall apart without the deuterium and tritium fusing together. Does anyone know what the status of research on this is? A decade ago, there were still difficulties getting theoretical models of the RM instability to even agree with experiments, which obviously meant that the process of dealing with the instability seemed pretty far off. Are they still having problems with this?
GMD
watch this
Supposedly, they're even hoping (as the name suggests) to cause ignition -- where the process actually becomes self-sustaining (so you'll only need the containment lasers). Even more likely to reach break-even then.
The other somewhat newsworthy aspect about this unit is that it will be a civilian facility, not a weapons facility with a few weeks a year allowed for civilian research (which is, apparently, the case for many of the other fusion units).
I was originally gonna skip reading TFA, then I figured... Given how (in)accurate slashdot headlines are, I've got to presume that there's something non-boring about this 'new' plan.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
> The main problem with Deuterium-Tritium fusion,
...the reaction chamber walls into radioactive
> even IF you get to breakeven and beyond is that
> the energy released has a very substantial
> neutron component.
Which you soak up with lithium, generating more tritium.
>
> isotopes which in most cases, are actually far
> "hotter" than the low-level nuclear waste from
> fission power plants.
Hotter, and therefor shorter lived.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
But they are initiated by fission reactions. They are not exactly controlled reactions either.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Well the answer is no. Fusion is very hard to achieve and thus you need to fision bomb to start that reaction. Now in order to make a fision bomb you first have to aquire a large amount of radioactive material. Then you would need the proper protective equipment to handle that material. Not to mention refine that material to weapon grade. This would cost you millions to billions of dollars. Bill Gates would have a hard time making a nuclear bomb from scratch, even with all of his money.
Why do you think most contries in the world can not make nuclear weapons. It not only requires alot of knowledge in physics and chemistry but alot of money. There have been countries trying to make nuclear weapons for the last 60 years and have failed. You need not worry about about this technology resulting in WMD. THis technology could not produce a nuclear weapon as it does not have the energy output to even create a small explosion. It is for scientific purposes only and can not be used by the military for anything more then a reseach platform.
The physics of actually creating nuclear weapons and how this fusion reactor will work are very different. I'm not really going to explain it to you cause there is alot of stuff thats really complicated and I don't feel like writing it. Not to mention that there are some things I just don't know.
The reason that most countries pay so much more than the US is taxes. The oil does not cost those countries more than the US and the US does not subsidize oil like Veneuela. Let me splain that again. Those countries tax the shit out of oil so it costs much more.
According to nuclear physicist Freeman Dyson, it's harder to create nukes that are smaller rather than larger. Likely they want to use these lasers to develop nuclear "bunker buster" bombs that would require sub-kiloton yields. There are also efforts at reducing the radiation fallout while maintaining the physical blast, so possibly we could have "non-atrocious" super-bombs.
That's called Tesler's Theorem by Hofstadter: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."
"May the days be aimless. Let the seasons drift. Do not advance the action according to a plan."
This isn't NEWS. The only NEWS here is that someone in Europe is trying it. Big freaking deal. Berkly and Rochester have been all over this for quite a while now. The only problem is that they haven't actually done any useful experiments yet, the test reactions last milliseconds, and the fuel used and energy released are so small as to be barely discernable.
The insane part of this is that they think 500 million pounds is going to build a meaningful facility. What are they going to return - picowatts? Come on. What's even funnier is that anyone thinks that anyone is Europe is going to get this done quickly. Just aligning the mirrors and getting the timing right takes YEARS. Just ask the folks at Berkley. It's an interesting idea, and the ramifications and implications are exciting, but probably not until we're all pretty darn old.
Most important of all, THIS ISN'T NEWS!
Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies.
Never forget: 2 + 2 = 5 for extremely large values of 2.
Plants don't grow in a vacuum. They have to get their carbon from somewhere. Most get it from CO2 in the air.
It is this carbon that is later burned. Unlike petroleum diesel which burns carbon sequestered in the ground over millions of years, biodiesel is more of a closed system, recycling the carbon.
Per the Department of Energy's statistics, each year the US consumes roughly 60 billion gallons of petroleum diesel and 120 billion gallons of gasoline. If moving the fleet of predominantly petroleum diesel trucks to biodiesel -- without making major modifications to the truck engines, fuel transportation containers, or fuel distribution methods -- is solving environmental problems, I don't know what is.
Biodiesel can indeed solve environmental problems, especially since it's the most viable way to replace oil/gasoline.
--------------
Now I'm curious. What would you suggest instead as a better environmental solution?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
From Austin Powers:
Dr. Evil: You know, I have one simple request. And that is to have sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads! Now evidently my cycloptic colleague informs me that that cannot be done. Ah, would you remind me what I pay you people for, honestly? Throw me a bone here! What do we have?
Number Two: Sea Bass.
Dr. Evil: [pause] Right.
Number Two: They're mutated sea bass.
Dr. Evil: Are they ill tempered?
Number Two: Absolutely.
Dr. Evil: Oh well, that's a start.
"Fusion "experiments" have been "beginning" for over three decades, to the tune of over $60 billion dollars when last I checked. It will take an enormous amount of power to break even on that -- and every year the bar gets higher. *We're* nowhere near break-even, but Sandia's been doing all right!"
Whatever are you talking about? The Z-machine at sandia has only produced millijoule fusion yields, the JET at cullham has produced kilojoules.
"Meanwhile, not a penny for research on an electrically- accelerated boron-deuterium reactor."
There's no money for it because that is a nonequilibrium system which was proven impossible for generating excess energy.
I can't quite make much sense of the rest of your post.....
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
Actually, you don't even need the ISS. All you need is a drop tower with vacuum inside. Any object in free fall is in zero gee. This technique is commonly used, on Earth, to manufacture small, cheap metal spheres.
"In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste."
neutron bombardment will produces long-live radioactive isotopses of any material near this device. The neutrons liberated by fusion will be captured by any matter in its path. As this process occurs it causes the material to develop into unstable isotopes.
The main reason for developing fusion is that deuterium is virtually unlimited, unlike fossil and fission fuels.
Umm... Physicists in the US have been working on this for a long time. There was a laser at Lawrence Berkeley doing these experiments back in the early 90's and I worked on it at Los Alamos then as well.
There are some big problems with it as a reactor design. Needless to say you have to get the tritium pellet positions just so inside a large laser. Figuring out how to do that with a *lot* of spherical pellets is non-trivial. And that's assuming they can make a self-sustaining system. (Something that I tend to doubt a lot - although I became rather cynical about the whole approach)
My personal feeling is that at least in the US, most of those working on this were former weapons physicists. The physics is basically the same. They got to keep their jobs and work on the same sort of thing by bringing up the fabled "alternative energy" mantra. But I honestly doubt it'll ever pay off as an energy source.
Great way to refine the physics of nuclear weapons though.
A "European" scientist can be from Portugal or the most remote parts of Siberia.
If Siberia has been moved from Asia to Europe, I must have missed it. Siberia is bounded on the west by the Urals, and the Urals mark the boundary between Europe and Asia. It's a pretty arbitrary boundary, but it is well accepted.
And in the late 1980s at that very same laboratory, Prof. Gerard Mouru discovered a way to increase laser pulse power by over a thousandfold. It is called chirped pulse amplification and NOW it is being used in conjunction with the older lasers to reach ignition. That's the new idea here.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
AFAIK the biggest wind turbine by now is the "5M" by (German company) Repower. It has a rotor of 126m diameter and does 5MW.
And it's in use already.
http://www.repower.de/index.php?id=66&L=1
k2r
The U.S. Military Research has been experimenting with many methods of fusion (including lasers) for over ten years now. Did an indepth research paper on various fusion technologies in 1997. Europe might be building a commercial laser-fusion facility, but just wanted people to know where the research behind it came from.
If you want to validate this, try reading some trade journals.
It's not a number of years off it's a question of research $$$ to finish. AKA spend 3 billion a year and we get fusion in 30 years spend 1 billion a year and it's going to be closer to 70.
The are basically 3 approaches to hot fusion:
Kinetic: AKA no Confinement other than time. Build a bunch of big lasers and hit a little ball. It's by far the hardest but it's a good way to get the department of energy to help pay for your lasers. Take this project, which is getting 15% of this, lasers time but that's not in the article anywhere. (PS: It's a stupid idea and is 100's of years from being efferent. But the military loves them because it involves blowing things up and using big lasers.)
Magnetic Confinement: Sounds all sci-fi and it's the most "fun" to work with. You use supper cooled "high temperature" super conductors to confine supper hot plasma. Science geeks life this stuff and it's not that hard to get working if you have a few Million $ and a bunch of unemployed plasma physicists. It's about 30-75 years off with sufficient funding. (Not with this white house.)
Electrostatic Confinement: Take a wire mesh charge it up to 100+k Electron volts (Works at 15 k but it works much better at higher energy levels ) stir in some plasma and it just works. This is by far the simplest with several hobbyists building working proto types. The problem is it's not that sexy. For the most part you build it and it and then all you can do is optimize the gas density and charge on the mesh. The problem is it's really simple so once you build one there is not much effort to keep it running 24/7. (No idea what time frame this one is at we could probably build a working aka net positive energy plant today if someone wanted to pay for it but nobody is putting much money behind this so it's anybody's' guess how long it's going to take. (Note this is by far the best approach to use in space, as it's extremely lightweight if you don't need a vacuum chamber.)