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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.'"
"However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics."
Okay, maybe this is a dumb question - but what *is* the forefront of nuclear weapons technology? They blow up really really big and eradicate cities, we've already got that - are they just trying to get a few percentage points of efficiency, or are there actually breakthroughs they're attempting to pull off?
(I'm avoiding the entire flamefest subject of "nuclear weapons evil lol", I'm just curious what there is in nuclear weapons that's worth 85% of two doubtless insanely expensive facilities.)
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inertial confinement fusion. I'ts not new, but getting better. Most labs are not trying to reach break even point. It's more of a research tool.
And to everyone who has/will ask 'when will these ever get us energy? We've been hearing about fusion for years!'. The new Tokamak being built in France right now is the first one that physicists expect to reach break even point. No other reactors were ever expected to generate more energy than they consumed. They were all for research purposes, to get them to the point they are at now. Probably the same for this new inertial confinement one in Europe.
The main problem with Deuterium-Tritium fusion, even IF you get to breakeven and beyond is that the energy released has a very substantial neutron component. Unlike gamma or beta radiation, neutrons stick to atomic nucleii and change the atoms of say, the reaction chamber walls into radioactive isotopes which in most cases, are actually far "hotter" than the low-level nuclear waste from fission power plants. Now, you say that you don't change the reactor vessel very often, but with most steel or other possible chamber materials, this bombardment of neutrons also makes the chamber very, very brittle. Now you are faced with the problem of changing and disposing of a very hot pile of material. Much better if you use Deuterium and Helium-3.
We have a source of unlimited ( well, practically unlimited ) fusion power plant now.
Its called The sun.
Why not work on technologies that use what we got now, instead of wasting it on research that most scientist agree will never realize even a 1:1 power ratio?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I just browsed through the JET website and saw nothing about break even mentioned. Why would something that major not be listed?
TFA serves as an introduction to some nice fancy words like "breakeven" and "ignition", but that is all. It was made clear long ago that lasers are hopeless for this purpose.
This project is hopeless from the go. Unless they plan on using thousands of lasers, they will never get the symmetry available in setups like pulse-powered z-pinches (which can also do fast ignition, such as Sandia National Labs Z-Machine), and lasers are far more inefficient for this purpose.
Oil will last, just maybe not cheap oil. As far as alternate energy sources, have you looked at oil? Seriously, oil shale in Colorado and tar sands in Alberta have more oil in them than all of Saudi Arabia.
"In the game of life, someone always has to lose. To me, if life were fair, that someone would always be Oklahoma." -DKR
I see one major problem with this, if it actually works...
How do you make it work on a more-or-less continuous basis, rather than "blow one up, extract energy, reset system"?
I suppose some sort of gravity-feed would work to control the overall rate, if the exact position of the capsule doesn't matter too much, but even then this will still make "little bangs" rather than a continuous stream of energy. Internal combustion engines we grasp, but internal fusion engines? This strikes me as similar to the problem of a space elevator - great idea, if only we had something that could bear that much stress...
Ok, so lets say we get fusion working perfectly. Say a 50% NET return on the energy in hydrogen. What answers are in the wings for vehicals?
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?
Are there other denser fuels that we could make with a rich energy source that would be convenient and portable?
And what other uses besides fuel are we using Oil for? Like what percentage of oil goes for lubricants, chemicals?
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.
Probably the biggest benefit of fusion is no emissions and no long-term radioactive waste. Is this going to be a problem to get the public to accept since the process includes the word "nuclear" or are we going to have to sacrifice 10,000 virgin physicists to appease the hippies?
Ha Ha Ha.
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!
If they ever do pass "break-even", all we'll have is hot neutrons, just like the old fission reactors. The plant will cost another $50 billion, and will only last 20 years until it's a pile of radioactive slag, and we need another one.
Meanwhile, not a penny for research on an electrically- accelerated boron-deuterium reactor. It wouldn't cost any $50 billion. Its energy would be extracted electromagnetically, it wouldn't wear out, each small city could could have one, and it wouldn't create a thousand tons of radioactive slag. Of course anything that might actually *work* would be bad for everybody (currently) involved.
Anyway, if it doesn't produce enough neutrons to keep the tritium bombs charged up, what the hell good is it?
They'll just have to make it up in volume. ;)
:)
From TFA:
However, both these billion-dollar lasers will primarily be used for nuclear-weapons research, with only 15% of their time being available for other areas of physics.
This is noticably absent from the article headlines.. I will also point out there are several thousand pefectly working fusion reactors on the planet, and I'd be willing to bet there's an excellent chance one of them is aimed at you sleeping in your bed right now!
The trick is -controlled- fusion, and FWIW, the ball of magic fire in the sky isn't controlled either.
The research is very, very young, and nobody is "Getting Serious" about it yet. Maybe when oil hits $200/bbl.
..don't panic
The main reason for developing fusion is that deuterium is virtually unlimited, unlike fossil and fission fuels.
There is about 0.5 ppm (5E-7 fraction) of hydrogen in the atmosphere, and 200 ppm of that 0.5 ppm is deuterium, so there is 100 ppt (1E-10 fraction) of deuterium in the atmosphere.
There is 1.7 ppm (1.7E-6 fraction) of methane in the atmosphere. In principle we could just extract that and burn it as fuel. It's a potent greenhouse gas in its own right, so the CO2 produced by burning it might actually contribute less greenhouse effect than does the methane being extracted, so the overall cycle could be greenhouse neutral to negative.
There is so much atmosphere (total mass 5.1E18 kg) that there is a lot of both methane and deuterium
in it: 9 trillion kg of methane, and 510 million kg of deuterium. Extracting either one, though, would be extremely difficult to do without using more energy than the resulting product would yield. And in the case of deuterium, you still have to isotopically separate the deuterium from the regular hydrogen after extracting the hydrogen.
There is also lots of deuterium in the oceans, of course.
Check my math.
Atmospheric composition
Natural occurrence of deuterium
Total mass of atmosphere
Break-even has been "just around the corner" for the past 50 years. Assuming we hit break-even within the next few years, will it take another 50 to get 1Mw over break even, or will it progress faster than that? At this rate, we'll run out of fossil fuels long before we get any reasonably useful output.
I'm just imagining having to build something the size of the JET tokamak to produce 1Mw of surplus energy.
* I'm don't want to minimize the importance of psychological milestones. I just don't know if advancement in plasma physics is linear, or if the effort to get increasing amounts of energy out of the system decreases once we achieve break-even.
--- SER
It's funny. I just flew back from a visit to one of aviation's great monuments: Kill-Devil Hills, where the Wright brothers figured out how to build a controllable aircraft and actually flew it.
The interesting thing about the Wright Brothers is that they approached the "aviation problem" with a totally different view of how the Europeans were approaching it. They studied the European data for why it didn't work, rather than why it did. They discovered, for example, that the Lilienthal tables of aerodynamic performance were far more inaccurate than anyone realized.
Perhaps, with all the effort that we're seeing toward research on the "fusion problem" we ought to ask ourselves, why this isn't working, instead of how it can. And then perhaps someone can think of something better than the brute force methods that everyone seems to enjoy funding. The turn of the last century was one where many governments were throwing money at all sorts of outlandish research projects to figure out how to aviate. Socially this feels remarkably similar to the "fusion problem" of today.
OK, so the first "cold fusion" experiments weren't the real thing. How about Sonoluminescence?
And let's not stop there-- there are many other theories about how one might be able to get fusion energy surplusses on a smaller scale. Ultimately, this may be a class of problem like the power to weight ratio that the Wright Brothers noticed.
Where are those Wright Brother types when you need them?
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!