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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.
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."
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.
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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.
"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.
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.