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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."
So when my dad was a kid (1960s), they said fusion power was 30 years away. Now, they say it's 45 years off. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_energy_develop ment
Are we looking at a pipe dream here?
Or could create the biggest fireworks show yet seen on earth?
Someone save me from this sanity.
Where would all that mass come from?
A related point is that we probably needn't worry about inventing a device that annihilates the entire Universe, either. If such a device could exist, it probably would have already been invented elsewhere, and we wouldn't be here thinking about it.
That's why astronomy and cosmology are so important -- what we see when we look far enough out, is likely all that is possible.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
propaganda when you see it? The government outlet makes a big deal of what is essentially a small research setup. How's that comparable to ITER? Yeah, "superior Chinese technology can make this 10 times cheaper than primitive Western technology". Utter crap. I can't believe this made it to slashdot.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
The land of the rising sun AS SEEN FROM CHINA. You can see this in the Chinese/Japanese characters for Japan (Riben or Nihon): they are a sun plus a root in succession. The Chinese characters were imported by Japan.
Even if it does, though, I'd imagine it'll be a fairly small black hole. Most are, seeing as they're basically a supercondensed chunk of gravity. I saw somewhere that scientists hypothesized that the universe was about 3" in diameter prior to the big bang. And that's a damned universe worth of gravity and matter. Think of the densest material you can, make a 3" sphere out of it. Mulitply that weight by infinity, add 3.14 (not pi, just 3.14) and raise that all to the i power, and you'll have about how much the universe weighed in that form. My theory is we had two balls (*ahem*...) of half-univseres that gravitated towards each other with such an incredible acceleration that the collision force caused the big bang. And it'll eventually happen again, with black holes sucking in each other and making even stonger ones.
Wait, if something becomes so dense that it's own gravity makes it smaller, doesn't that mean that there's an actual weight limit in America?
Seriously, though, why bother? We have a perfectly good sun right now that already has nuclear fusion figured out, and it should last at least another five billion years. Not to mention it's free (at least until we have some sort of Burns-esque sun-shield so we can be charged even more for light and heating).
How are sites slashdotted when nobody reads TFAs?
The Yuan exchange to the dollar is pegged by Chinese policy, so the value in Yuan probaby doesn't reflect simply to a value in USD.
In addition, this is an experimental reactor, not a production reactor. What good would building 100 of them do for anybody?
Another thing to note about a fusion reaction is that pressure is required to keep it up. In the unfortunate event that the torus breaks open, the plasma will stop reacting.
Can a knowledgeable person comment about escaping neutrons, gamma rays and stuff in such an event? Could that lead to a nasty cloud of radioactive strontium or something similar to what we think of with "fission gone bad"?
1928
"There is no likelihood that man can ever tap the power of the atom. The glib supposition of utilizing atomic energy when our coal has run out is a completely unscientific Utopian dream, a childish bug-a-boo."
Robert Millikan
1932
"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean the atom would have to be shattered at will."
Albert Einstein, German-born American physicist.
1933
"The energy produced by the atom is a very poor kind of thing. Anyone who expects a source of power from the transformation of these atoms is talking moonshine."
Ernst Rutherford
1945
"This is the biggest fool thing we've ever done- the bomb will never go off- and I speak as an expert on explosives."
Admiral William Leahy, speaking to President Truman about the atom bomb
In the USSR, they actively avoided thinking about the decommissioning costs of Communism. Much the same is the case in China. That's acceptable to them as the regime insists on the notion they are in it for the long run.
All around the world, the issue of decommissioning costs of Nuclear power has been actively avoided. "We'll, er.. figure that out later (after the generation benefiting from the power plant is dead)."
I think a distinction needs to be made between the use of fusion to produce net energy versus fusion for other purposes, such as a low-volume neutron generator. It is the latter which IEC devices currently find their use. For instance, a friend of mine is working on using the IEC device to produce medically useful isotopes; another works on detecting explosives/land mines via the emitted neutrons.
When it comes to making power, IEC grids suffer from the same neutronics issues. A real fusion reactor will be undoubtedly the harshest material environment on Earth. These neutronics material issues are of fundamental importance, so much so that a separate neutron irradiation facility will be constructed as a part of the ITER negotiations to study the topic.
When the Chinese looked towards Japan (east) they see a rising sun, so the chinese characters for Japan represent a sun (ri4) and its origin (ben3). Japan didn't have a writing system of their own and through a protracted process adopted the Chinese characters even tho the language was totally different (approx 5th century). The character for ri4 meant "sun" and was mapped by the japanese to the word 'Ni' which meant the same. The chinese character (ben3) which meant "origin" was mapped by the japanese to the word 'hon' which also meant "origin"
Hence the Chinese (and thus Japanese) characters for Japan mean "Land of the rising Sun" AS SEEN FROM CHINA.