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China to Build World's First "Artificial Sun"
cletuii writes to tell us the People's Daily Online is reporting that China is planning on building the world's first "artificial sun" device. From the article: "The project, dubbed EAST (experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak), is being undertaken by the Hefei-based Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It will require a total investment of nearly 300 million yuan (37 million U.S. dollars), only one fifteenth to one twentieth the cost of similar devices being developed in the other parts of the world."
Hydrogen fusion has fascinated scientists for ages. But till now a break through has not been found. Yes they have made hydrogen bombs. But to control the fusion process to generate clean energy has not been found yet.
China's experimental device could reveal some breakthroughs and might eventually help tide the energy deficit faced the world over.
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So the Chinese government will have enough self-replicating black monoliths to compress Jupiter into becoming a new sun in the solar system? Cool! I bet the Russians and Americans will be jealous as hell at this technological feat. Are they on schedule for completion in 2010?
The cure for polio was a pipe dream. Splitting the atom was a pipe dream. Pipe down.
Because there's no theoretical reason it can't work, and whoever doesn't need oil first wins?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Nothing, that's why they can build it so cheaply.. That's why they cut cost on all safety features, which brought the cost down to an incredible 1/20th of the price of a full falesafe design.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
Since, with clean power, we wouldn't need oil from the Middle East, we could get out of there and terrorists would lose interest in the US.
the wonders of chinese slave labor. I guess you can do that when you have a billion people and a ton of them in jail/reeducation camps.
There seems to be a degree of confusion here. Building a fusion reactor is not like making trainers in a sweatshop. A huge proportion of the work done will simply be in the design. That requires engineers and mathematicians and believe me, engineers and mathmos of this level who aren't getting an acceptable wage in China can find a job damn easily in England.
Break even will never occur with a Tokamak.
Need to use pressure,radiation and heat.
A tokamat is essentially a huge torus covered in magnets to squeeze a ring of plasma (read "gas minus the electrons") as close as possible. That is where your pressure and heat comes from. And no, you do not need radiation.
Well according to this article: The death toll in the building of the first Great Wall was astounding: More than a million people died building this 3,000 mile section more than 300 people per mile.
Now, if more than a million died building some wall... How many more Chinese must die building the Great Sun of China? China's not exactly known for its valuing of individual's lives in the progress of economics...
My page.
BTW, I used to belong to several of eco-freak organizations and tried to pound some sense into them about the risk/cost/benefit ratios of various means of energy production with zero success. Which is why I parted ways with them. I'm ecologically minded, and well trained in the science and the economics of same, they weren't. Those people are not rational, sadly. It's all about what feels good.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Surely having your own "sun" can be interpreted as being a WMD. No? Go get 'em boys...ugh.
"All your sun are belong to us"
Marine Sergeant: Did I give you permission to b*tch, soldier?
Breeder technology was seen as the way forward here (in the UK) for some decades, but eventually shelved more for technical and economic than environmental and political reasons. To make use of breeders you have to reprocess the spent fuel, and this is not at all easy to do safely or cheaply, let alone both. Also, if you're going to reprocess, some of the nicest reactor technologies (like the bed of carbon/cermaic pebbles) don't work so well. The better the fuel is contained in the reactor, the harder it is to get it out in the reprocessing plant. Trying to remotely manipulate ton lots of hot radioiactive concentrated nitric acid contaminated with just about every element you can think of is never going to be easy or cheap.
Councilor Hart, it is posts like yours that have kept me reading slashdot, and enduring (and eventually coming to cherish, to a degree) it's many and various quirks.
I don't really have any way of knowing that you are who you say you are, or verifying that you know what you say you know, but assuming that you are and you can (respectively), I'd like to tell you that you rock! That was the best explanation of a complex subject to a mostly layman audience I've read in a long time.
[Posted AC so I don't get a reputation for being complimentary to people]
Why the hell was this modded offtopic? Have you never played Civilisation?
Of course, the best solution would be to stick with the fusion power plant in the sky: it provides more than enough energy for our needs, with current technologies, if we only made a concerted effort to capture it.
And the cool thing is, it's already in place, and all we need to do is harness the power already being radiated.
Not as exciting a project, though, and it's a decentralized effort. Big countries with centralized command structures can't wield it over their people. Hmmm....
Then the terrorists will come after us for severely damaging their economy and thus causing further pain and suffering to their people. No matter what terrorists always find some excuse to be terrorists.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
You seem to forget that a lot of the apparent wealth of the U.S. is from "transitting" money from abroad. When it was a good place to do business, that's where people invested or stashed their cash. You start playing the antagonistic player and you soon find out that those investments aren't so forthcoming anymore. A lot of the income from taxing flow of money through your gates dries up.
It can be expensive to maintain an antagonistic attitude. Just look at Bush's intervention in the airplane deal between Spain and Venezuela. It's still going to proceed... except there will be NO U.S. technology in the planes. Now, if you were in the business of making planes worldwide, wouldn't you think about it twice before using components that could cause a foreign government start telling you who you could sell your planes to? I'd change suppliers. And if you were a supplier of such parts based in the U.S., what would you do? Yes, I would move my operation elsewhere too.
Hunh? The US hasn't been at war with any of its neighbors (Canada and Mexico) for over 150 years. I'll grant you that Cuba may qualify, but Mexico? Compare that with Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia -- a couple of World Wars come to mind at the very least.
And you think we have poor relations with Mexico? Admittedly the relations aren't at all perfect, but poor? Last time I was down there, in Mexico City, no one spit on me. Sure there are kidnappings, but guess what? Mexicans get kidnapped too! It's a developing world problem, not a US-Mexican relations problem.
Have you seen any of the arguments between the English and French? Or Germany and Italy? China and Tibet have gotten along famously. And let's not forget the great friendship between India and Pakistan. Or Israel and... well... every other country in that region.
Or were you going to bring up Mexican illegal immigrants as a great evil?
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
$37 million is for an upgrade to an already existing machine. Building a brand new machine takes years, not months and the superconducting coils cost more than $37 million. HT-7 is a medium sized machine, so I find it hard to believe that even with an upgrade to have fully superconducting magnetic coils it will be able to generate anything more than an insignificant amount of fusion. For instance, HT-7 is 1.22m in radius with a plasma current of 90 kA. JET is 2.96m with a plasma current of 4.8 MA and it has not achieved breakeven. The article is very misleading; I'm sure that they mean that the intent of the tokamak device in general is to generate power instead of saying that this specific machine will.
I have no idea. I just know a little about how a fusion reactor is supposed to work under normal conditions. /. to have all the answers.
I do know that there is less waste than with a fission reactor. In both cases the chamber has to be treated as waste. The fuel itself from fission is additionnel waste compared to fusion. The problem, while still there, is definitely not as bad. As to figures regarding volume, I don't know. As to years, I always heard something like 50 years of storage for the vault.
Fusion research is a difficult, multi-field, international problem that will require a lot of effort and money to solve. We are not talking about a lone scientist in some backroom trying to get a tabletop version to work. So don't expect some guy posting on
I'm sure it's cheaper in China. :-)
-Gruntled Grad Student
hehe... you need to lighten up. And the other poster is correct, I can't mod you if I write in the thread at all.
I didn't read your post past the first two sentences because it's obvious you're taking it all too seriously.
Here's the chain of events:
1. You make a strained connection to politics in an unrelated thread.
2. I mock you for it.
3. You post a serious 3 page response.
It's just slashdot. Nothing here matters, we're all just a bunch of assholes opining about things that 99.999% of us have no power over whatsoever. If your blood pressure rises at all from anything posted on slashdot or any online forum, you need to step away from the keyboard for a week or two.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.