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."

Comments

Re:Yay, another tokamak

[G-funk]

Because there's no theoretical reason it can't work, and whoever doesn't need oil first wins?

Re:Obligatory cliche

[scsirob]

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.

even better

[idlake]

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.

Some confusion?

[massivefoot]

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.

Re:we already have clean nuclear power technology

[Decker-Mage]

Unfortunately, despite all the advantages of breeder reactors, the first thing the public and especially the eco-freaks think when you say breeder is nuclear weapons material. I don't make the universe, I just take it and engineer solutions within it. The problem with breeders is political, not engineering. Just as the public and some of the eco-freaks hear fusion and start singing hosannas despite the well known engineering problems that they will have (posted above) that they also happen to share with their fission cousins. All politics.

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.

Re:loss of containment

[Anonymous Coward]

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]