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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.'"
We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
oil as a fuel, won't out last the decade i think. you think you have high prices in the USA? everyone else is paying 2x 4x as much as you are. consumer demand for cheaper power and transportation will drive the nails in the coffen.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
..until the Wright brothers built one.
A thirty, fifty, or even seventy-five year delay doesnt mean people should write a technology off!
What makes this different? Well rtfa.
the US National Ignition Facility. The NIF will be used for multiple exercises, however, the devices main roles will be nuclear weapons testing for the United States, and fusion power experiments.
If this method is made public, would it not mean that many (once accuring the necessary equipment), be able to easily whip up Hydrogen Bombs?
I don't know much about the way the Nuclear weapons funnction, besides that Atomic Bomb works with fission, and Hydrongen Bomb uses fusion
(and even less knowledge on the even more powerful forms of the bombs).
But wouldn't various methods for fission and fusion provide for new ways of making these incredibly destructive weapons?
Fusion, AI, and Flying cars are always 10 years away...
The problem with AI is that it is constantly being redefined. At one point, a robot that would vaccum your house without you lifting a finger would have been considered an example of AI. Nowdays, hardly anyone is impressed by a Roomba. It used to be that a computer that could beat a human grandmaster at chess would have sufficed as AI. Today, we consider that to be little more than a clever computer algorithm. AI will always be 10+ years away if we keep redefining it to exclude any successes we achieve.
If you are talking about "strong AI", where machines can actually think for themselves and are sentient beings, I don't think you're going to find any reputable scientist claiming that is only 10 years away.
GMD
watch this
Here's my impression of the fusion crowd for the last twenty years.
"We're almost there. We only need minor improvements."
Thank you! You've been a wonderful audience.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Now that we've signed the nuclear test ban treaty, you can't actually tell what percent of your weapons will really explode if you were to use them (it's not 100%).
Some of the lightest warheads are actually pretty fragile and it's an open question if they'll fizzle or go boom. You can simulate the degradation of materials and take a guess.
Some of the warheads are dial-a-yield too. Maybe you could make interesting focused explosions for underground hits. You want your opponents to get the sense that there is no defense against nuclear weapons. But right now I think that some leaders believe that they can escape destruction personally. You have to remind them that their society is worth saving. It encourages people to be more diplomatic.
What there is left to nuclear weapons research today is understanding what happens to nuclear weapons as they age. This is the goal of so-called 'stock-pile stewardship.' And since we are currently not testing nuclear weapons, there's no empirical way to understand how our decades-old nuclear stock pile will perform today and in the future. These laser facilities will be able to provide weapons designers some information on the subject. That's one major reason why the DOE is willing to spend tens of billions of dollars on these facilities.
-xest
Much better?
Sure, if you ignore the fact that it's about 16 times harder to even initiate the reaction, *and* the fact that since most of the energy comes off the reaction as a 15 MeV proton, the Bremsstrahlung losses absolutely kill you.
The more you look into magnetic confinement fusion, the more it seems that there's almost some sort of cosmic conspiracy to prevent us from using it as a power generation scheme. Go with neutronic fusion to avoid losing all your produced power to collisions with electrons in the plasma, and you run up against materials limitations. Try to avoid that problem, and you suddenly have a reaction that is *grotesquely* less efficient, to the point where it's probably not *possible* to even *break even*. To reduce those losses, you need to operate at even *higher* temperatures that it takes just to initiate the reaction, but when you do that, you lower your power density relative to D-T by a similar proportion and make containment that much harder.
Seriously, we do not have the time to keep generating power by fossil fuels until we get fusion to work, because that might never happen, the problems are that significant. Even that big new testbed reactor that's going up in France won't really get us close, because it's not dealing with the materials issue; over the lifetime of a fusion reactor, *every single atom* in the containment vessel will be struck by neutrons hundreds or even thousands of times, and we don't know how to build materials that can withstand that sort of irradiation without swelling, distorting, cracking, and a variety of other things you don't want to see in a nuclear containment vessel.
On the other hand, we know how to make *fission* work, and we should switch to that *now*. By the time we start making a dent in the fissionable fuels available to us, we should know how to build large-scale structures in orbit, and can just switch to solar collection satellites. I sincerely doubt if we'll ever even use fusion for power generation; by the time we ever figure out how to do it, it's likely there will be superior options available to us.
Making big, dirty nuclear weapons is relatively easy. The challenge is making low-yeild ones that don't produce long-term radioactive fallout. Basically the "bunker busters" that Bush has been talking about.
1. 22 MJ is quit a hefty pulse so might be useful in the odd application.
2. 16 MW is nothing. Less than one windmill.
3. 65% - put 100 in get 65 out, never going to do anything except exacerbate our fuel crisis...
You are forgetting all those trillions of not quite as near ones (although some are as close as 4 light years I believe).
Visualize Whirled Peas
The same way you take anything discrete and make it continuous in electronics: Your good friend, the capacitor.
-Amalcon
IMO, what they really want to do is create entirely new designs, and goofing around with tiny thermonuclear blasts helps them to do that.
We got people like this sitting around chatting on Slashdot!
I would bet that Slashdot alone loses this world 1 year of progress for every 10 years of time.
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No one is going to give people tritium for plane fuel or tractor fuel.
So how do we use the new clean energy source for portable systems. Burning hydrogen cracked from water comes to mind, but is this really feasible? Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner? For anything?
I'm not sure about gas-turbines (jet engines) but for most piston engines in cars, trucks and aircraft the idea would be to use either hydrogen fuel cells or hydrogen as a combustible fuel. This has already proven itself feasible in prototypes and the lab. However there's little point in doing this if you have to burn more fossil fuels to get the hydrogen in the first place - which is where fusion (or fission) comes in.
And what other uses besides fuel are we using Oil for? Like what percentage of oil goes for lubricants, chemicals?
Good question. But the more we reduce our use of oil the more will be available for things like this, and fusion is an essential part of this.
I really would like to see a great energy solution that makes all nations self sufficient. It would be a huge step towards reducing violence. But how does it work for the modern world and all its complicated pieces and processes.
Just because fusion promises huge benefits doesn't mean it will solve all the world's problems. It can't (for the foreseeable future) be put in vehicles or aircraft, not is it likely to reduce violence (people will just fight over some over resource - water for example). However it will, if it works, solve or drastically reduce our fossil fuel reliance for power generation and will allow the use of other technologies to also solve that reliance in vehicles at least.
Pre-canned Evolution Links for all those Slashdot holy wars.
"You're thinking of the Kyoto Accord, dumbass."
No, dumbass, I am thinking of the Comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty. Although I was not quite correct in saying Bush refused to sign it. He did not refuse to sign it because he did not have an opportunity to refuse, because Clinton signed it. However Clinton could not get it ratified by the then Republican congress. Bush was against the treaty from the begining and still is as are most republicans. The couple of short years of small democratic majority in congress were not sufficient to ratify the treaty as it requires 2/3 of the vote.
So as the test ban treaty is not ratified it is not in force. And of course since the us is not ratifying it a bunch of other countries have decided not to. The treaty will not go into force until all countries that signed it ratify it, and that wont happen while there is 1/3 of republicans in congress.
Well, you need some sort of moderator to slow your fast neutrons, but this is a well-considered problem for fission reactors, and the result certainly won't be worse than a fission plant. Liquid lithium apparantly works pretty well. It's easy to shield your steel walls from thermal neutrons - a very thin layer of Gadolinium stops thermal neutrons cold (so to speak). Boronated plastics work as well, and are easy enough to dispose of.
Still, D-T reactors are the messiest solution, and I certainly hope we can do better. Of course, the coolest possible way to do fusion would be to find a way to stabilize muons, allowing muon-catalyzed fusion (real "cold fusion"), but given that there's no reason to believe that's even possible, we can't expect to see that until after Duke Nukem Forever ships.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Ehm, what would you suggest then Mr. Smart Guy? The way I see it we (the world) have two options.
1. Using science, try to figure out an efficient nuclear fusion method before the worlds limited petrochemical supplies run out.
2. Do nothing and just wait for the the worlds limited petrochemical supplies to run out.
I'm all for the former. The problem with a load of these "insightful" comments on slashdot is that its just like opposition politics sho go around shouting things like "You guys are useless, you're wasting all our voters hard-earned money on stuff" without offering (or most likely even having) an alternative method of providing a necessary service at lower costs. And what always happens with these political whiners is that voters eventually believe them and they get voted in - only to do exactly the same or worse than their predecessors.
Bottom-line. We need safe and efficient fusion power. If we don't try we'll never get it.
Caesar si viveret, ad remum dareris.
This couldn't be further from the truth. It is a VERY controlled fusion reaction, its controlling mechanisms are magnetism, gravity, and other forces. It is so perfectly balanced that it takes a quantity of fuel and an inital ingnition and will burn for billions of years. How much more controlled can you get?