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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."
I see the light in Sun Tzu's the Art of War!
Excccccceellent! *rubs hands* /monty_burns
But Japan is land of the rising sun!
Isn't this how it works in the US too?
-Disgruntled Grad Student
"What could possibly go wrong?"
Dr. Otto Octavius recently filed suit against the government of China, damn USPTO lets you patent anything these days....
Wikipedia has some info about Tokamak reactors, and fusion power in general. I still don't get it ;)
I, for one, welcome our new chinese plasma physics overlords
The article says that the reactor "aims to generate infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy".
.. anyone else a tinsy little bit worried about that word "infinite"?!
Infinite energy?
Uh
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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I don't know how much longer the real sun's going to last. I mean these days it seems like half the time it's not even up there.
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
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?
See also the Joint European Torus, the largest nuclear fusion reactor yet built, and ITER, the international attempt to build a much bigger one.
this device swallows the earth instantly in a big black hole?
I'd say "God" has the patent rights to this, but do the Chinese care? :)
They are building an experimental fusion reactor, a Tokomak. While I suppose you could call it an artifical sun, I think a better choice of words would be tokomak or fusion reactor.
On another note, this is not a one of a kind device. Europe has one called JET, and is planning on making another, ITER.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
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?
we have these already, they're called LIGHTBULBS.
When it will be available in walmart. I think everything "Made In Chine" is there, maybe not at 1/15 or 1/20
The article addresses this. The reactor that's being built in China is apparently a lot smaller.
the chineese are soooooooo going to take over the world.
The west has a culture dominated by traditionalists (Jung sJ types - think "lawyer") - the East, esp china is dominated by conceptualists (Jung NT types - think "engineer").
Other notable exapmles:
France,Tibet, Swiss - primarily idealists (NF)
Brazil, Sweden, Italy, Canada - primarily experiencers (SP)
This probably also explains the Chinese Moon program. They plan to go up there and steal all the Helium-3 before we can get it for ourselves.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
And people say outsourcing is bad.
With these kind of discounts, a bit more tweaking by Walmart and they could have these puppies on shelves for about 3.50
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.
Because there's no theoretical reason it can't work, and whoever doesn't need oil first wins?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Yeah right. If you have to follow Chines safety standards and can pay your workers Chinese wages, of course the thing will be a lot cheaper
That's because until recently practicing law all but forbidden in China. Private law firms have only begun to spring up within the last five years.
--Forest C. Adcock--
No, only 135 of them. To get the other 135, we would have to "think about the children" and stop "piracy"- only then can you attain the mgic *270*
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
The title says 'China to Build World's First "Artificial Sun"', but if "similar devices [are] being developed in the other parts of the world" then it isn't a foregone conclusion that they will be the _first_ to do so.
I thought this was a news about cloning
There's no theoretical reason why the infinite improbability drive can't work, either. There is no reason to believe that the Chinese have any practical or even theoretical solution to wall-heating or plasma instabilty, either.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Errr, tokamaks are a method for generating the required pressures and temperatures (and I don't know why you think radiation is necessary). You might also want to explain to all those plasma physicists why they're wrong and millions shouldn't be spent on tokamak research.
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.
Not a bad price tag to build a star, considering how much it costs to fly out to one.
How much to maintain?
and
What does 100 million degrees look like when it gets out of control?
I thought the Klingons taught us a thing or two with the Praxis Explosion?
I hope this doesn't somehow indirectly lead to the near-death of Mr. Burns...
Just very, very dense. It'll suck in additional mass then.
Surprised no one mentioned it yet.
The scene with the artificial sun has to be pretty close to what the process looks like.
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.
Let's be clear about one thing: we already have a nearly unlimited supply of nearly waste-free nuclear power in the form of breeder reactors: they destroy most of the radioactive waste and are at least an order of magnitude more efficient than current nuclear power plants in using nuclear fuel.
Why aren't they being used? Hard to say. The US claims it's because of nuclear proliferation, but that doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument. In light of the hazards of current fission reactors, and the difficulties of achieving fusion, maybe that's the third option.
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.
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.
Chinese entry into controlled fusion research is hardly the first. Please make an effort to distinguish between headlines and content, especially when quoting form sterling paragons of fact-based reporting such as "People's Daily Online"
Unlimited electric power would go a long way towards making other types of energy available. Think about how you could sink more power into getting oil out of say, tar sands, then you get out of the use as fuel. You take a hit in exchange for portability, but it wouldn't matter if you had free electric power.
If you have effectively free electrical energy, you can produce other energy sources from that, can't you? I guess you could even transform any excessive CO2 from the atmosphere into pure carbon and oxygen. Of course pure carbon isn't very useful for cars, but again, it could be transformed into gasoline. You could even make diamonds (literally out of the air) if you wanted to.
However, I for one much would prefer using that one fusion energy source we already have, at a fairly safe distance. I know that theoretically a malfunctioning local fusion engine would halt and not run amok, but although I might want to bet the farm on it, I'd rather not bet the entire planet.
-Lasse
Taiwanese companies will supply most of the core technologies that Beijing needs to build this artificial sun. In the past, Taiwanese companies have collaborated with Beijing in exporting weapons technology to Iran.
China has been building Tokamaks for the last 30 years or so. He Fei has housed a Tokamak in the Physics dept. of the local university for at least 20 years for conducting fusion research.
In any case, why does it sound more reasonable if I said there were fusion devices in Madison, Wisconson and Princeton, New Jersey (both at universities as well) than in China? Don't be a racist troll. Even if it were a publicity stunt, I'd take a publicity stunt over ignorance any day.
probably be like $39.99
Well, if China is still on planning stages, how come theirs will be the "world's first" since "similar devices [are] being developed in the other parts of the world" ???
Building a fusion reactor is not like making trainers in a sweatshop.
:-> :->
What graduate school did you go to?
Though I always wondered why my committee had me making all those shoes. "Plasma Jordans" my ass.
Try searching for "DSM-IV" and "301.7" - explains just about everything, doesn't it?
In response: :)
1. To smoke kneejerk reactionists out so we can see them and deal with them....GOTCHA!
2. I don't have a "...your favorite liberal democrat..."- I'm a registered Republican, but ya gotta call em like ya see em.
3. Fish???- Oh, sorry. I have to use a Winbloz box at work....wasn't thinkin', sooooo Thanks for the fish, and have a nice day! (I'm allergic to seafood you insensitive clod!)
I also fail to see the connection between fish and a totalitarian gov't., unless you mean to imply we ( the people) are the fish.....WTF????
4. "this is what America and other Coalition participants are working for - to take the totalitarian government out of power and industrialize these nations - making them self sufficient in the long run. "
Sooooo, if they aren't marching to our tune they are WRONG? Again.... WTF????
I suggest you put down the crack pipe, step away from the keyboard, and GET A GRIP!
Reminds me of an old Sanka (tm) commercial: "What's the matter Bob, too much cafeine?"
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I'm seeing predictable phaser rays. Stage two emitters activating now. Overhead capacitors to one-oh-five percent. Eeeeeh... its probably not a problem, probably, but I'm showing a small discrepancy... well... no... its well within acceptable bounds. Sustaining sequence.
Bzzzzzzt! Boom!
Oh dear! Gordon, get away from the...
Shutting down, attempting shut down, it's not, it's not shutting down, it's not...
B O O M!
Now it is time to bring the Sun Device over to Procyon II and speed the Chmmr Process up!
Star Control 2 - Try it if you haven't!
...think of a Quantum Singularity-Powered Romulan Warbird when they read this?
You're the asshole who starts talking politics in the middle of every discussion, aren't you?
Example from your life:
Coworker: So I started talking to this hot babe at the bar yesterday, and we were really hitting it off...
You, interupting: Bush wants to take away her voting rights and chain her to the stove!
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Ummm....we here in the US already had one. For 15 years actually. And that's the part that's unclassified. It's over at Princeton.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TFTR
So....I can see why this is printed as the 'first ever' in the source link. Last time I checked, Slashdot wasn't promoting Chinese Propaganda though. Maybe a correction should be made.....
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?
This already happened in Spider Man, and it didn't end well. The octopus guy had to kill himself to destroy his man made sun. Do the chinee have an octopus guy?
or else!
Could somebody please write me the number infinity to 5 significant figures? Thanks.
(Hah! It's a joke! Don't flame me you OCD mathematicians you.)
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"?
The article glosses over a few important details, such as the fact that it's highly unlikely it will be able to produce more energy than it consumes. Thus while it might be able to use seawater to produce 300 times the energy per volume of gasoline, it probably takes about 3,000 times as much energy to extract the deuterium and generate that energy (the bit about getting the core temperature up to 300 million degrees is telling).
Especially if they're only spending $37 million US. I'd expect research and development costs to be at least 1000 times that. Of course, the article is too light on details to even begin to understand what the hell they're talking about.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
The Chinese aren't actually making an artificial sun, as the article would imply.
They are going to make a donut shaped chamber that will have a small amount of plasma reacting in it.
This won't create any conditions that would support a black hole. There are risks with fusion, but it's generally considered to be on the order of a melted fusion reactor and some very unhappy physicists and investors.
I'm hoping an expert can comment more specifically on human health risks associated with things most likely to go wrong with a fusion reactor.
Too much ego?
Not enough of them taking LSD?
More scientists should be open and willing to accept anything, even if it invalidates the last 30 years of their
efforts. Otherwise you will die a stupid old man, like the idiot who liked DC power in NY, Edison.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Uhh, the tokamaks still use up more energy than they put out. And the scientists have been promising to deliver fusion power for decades, but patience has been used up. Congressional hearings have even wondered aloud about barrier laws that even fusion researchers have been slow to admit to.
Getting payola for science can be very addictive.
There are no free lunches especially when it comes to nuclear engineering/physics. The promising thing here is that you have the potential to have a much higher power density and cheaper fuel since deuterium, in the form of heavy water recovered from the ocean, is not exactly hard to come by. Desalinization followed by reduction of the water to hydrogen and oxygen and then just gather ye heavy hydrogen in the form of deuterium and tritium. Heck, if they don't use the tritium in the reactor, even though it is a fine lower temperature ignition source, they could always sell it on the open market. It's quite valuable on its own.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
OK, so that is where we get the duterium from, but where do we ''mine'' the tritium ? Can we, perhaps, get it by irradiating duterium ?
Anyone know the answer ?
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
This seems like a good move on the part of the Chineese. While information about a lot of "prestige engineering", like rockets and nuclear bombs, is locked up in U.S. and Russian government agencies, most fusion energy research has occured in the open in the international scientific community for the last 50 years. So the Chineese can start right away at the state-of-the-art, without having to re-discover all the stuff that we won't tell them. (Not that the state-of-the-art is really all that impressive. After 50 years we still don't have a sustained net-positive reaction.)
By the way, the people worring about some doomsday scenario can rest easy. The stored energy in a Tokamak isn't much different from the stored energy in a dam or nuclear reactor. (The energy density may be comparable to that in the sun, but the volume isn't so big.) So while you wouldn't want be standing next to the thing when it blew, once you get a few hundred kilometers away, the explosion wouldn't bother you too much.
You're being funny, right? You don't really believe that psycobabble, right?
The West, since its emergence from the Dark ages, has been dominated by people who can evolve and adapt in order to get what they want. (As opposed to certain eastern parts of the world, which tried to seal their borders for 200 years in order to preserve their purity.) If there is some truth in your psycobabble, and the West really does need more "NT types" to compete, you can be damn sure we will start producing them.
That's an awfully simplistic way of looking at things. Congress has actually manged to run up the deficit on many many programs not related to "the war on terror". Remember the farm bill, No Child Left Behind, and the massive increases in Medicaid spending we've had since Bush took office. Spending is up across the board, and social programs still take up the lion's share of spending in Washington.
That is not a valid argument. There's a possiblity we _are_ the only ones here. There's a possibility that it hasn't been invented yet (someone has to be first). There's the chance that if it has been invented, it happened such a short time ago or so far away that the event horizon has not yet reached us.
How you choose to claim "probably" is unknown, since none of these probabilities are known.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Surely having your own "sun" can be interpreted as being a WMD. No? Go get 'em boys...ugh.
Actually it's a real diff. geom. theorem (2nd-year math undergraduate stuff) which is indeed applicable to tokamaks, since ionized particles stay (up to diffusion) "stuck" in magnetic field lines.
The Wikipedia article is indeed accurate, although very terse.
-- and yes, I AM a plasma physicist (or at least, was one for 4 years)
Working for necessity's mother.
the wall...their own sun...when will they chop the country of earth and orbit on their own around the sun?
"All your sun are belong to us"
Marine Sergeant: Did I give you permission to b*tch, soldier?
...vapourware. I'll be great if they get it to go, but I'm not holding my breath. And if they do get it to go and then the West starts making unauthorised, unlicenced copies of it, will they feel entitled to complain?
I have been waiting for a good Slashdot story on energy as I recently found a very interesting site http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ which talks about a subject called Peak Oil, our reliance on oil and how technologies like this will not easily remove our reliance on oil. I would love to hear other /. comments on this.
To me, something like this Fusion reactor sound promising, but there are still so many industries that are reliant on oil, it can be somewhat scary.
Adventure City Tours
It's a tokamak fusion reactor. It will undoubtably use deuterium-tritium fusion instead of light hydrogen fusion (which we can't do yet)so it's not exactly 'an artificial sun'. It is also by no means the first - JET near Oxford in the uk has been operating for 15 or so years (biggest at the mo') and there have been loads built all over the world. It's the first big one to use superconducting magnets which is actually quite interesting. The most amazing thing to me is that they can build the thing in a couple of months as the article suggests. Does anyone have any real info on this project? The linked article is a bit light on facts.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Everything else is made in China...
This just in! 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.
You could build a whole lot of things for the money that goes into Iraq. For example, you could reduce AIDS drastically, almost eliminate child mortality due to malnutrition, malaria...
Heck, you might even build a few (read tens of) Big Science labs with the money that gets left over from the previous attempts of bettering the world. If you're feeling green, you might also want to save some of the world's biodiversity hotspots and prevent extinction of thousands of species.
Of course, the money in Iraq is doing important stuff there as well. War is expensive. I'm just lucky I'm not the one doing the difficult decisions whether to fund research or take out Saddam.
[ Antti Rasinen ]
Didn't the US build the world's first artificial sun over Japan during WWII?
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Dude.. its not free so get over that part of it. Even in
conventional nukes the costs of the fuel (which takes a
few years to go through) is not a large % of the cost.
As other poster noted, until electric cars offer the
necessary distance, power, and quick recharge (compare to
time spent re-filling a tank of gas) - they just aren't
going to be a large part of life. Once you get into the
suburbs or rural areas they just wont fly.
Finally - do not ignore the large consumption of product
by industry for a wide range of goods including plastics.
1/3 of US consumption is non-transportation related.
You realise that they could be simply misguided. I would love to see that this works, and I think I understand the (v. basic) principles behind why it should eventually. Of course they should try to see if they can get energy from fusion, because as with the alchemists, they may make other discoveries while they are doing it.
Even if fusion itself is a red herring.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
Sorry, we will always need some sort of oil.. A world with out plastics and moving parts would be pretty dull.
However, reducing the need to where bio-oils can meet our needs, is a good goal.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
In the palm of my hand...
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
- C. Montgomery Burns
Bad enough when readers don't RTFA, but the submitters/editors???
Where in the world could anyone have gotten "world's first" from here? The article makes it pretty clear that this is an upgrade to an existing design and that plenty of similar tokamak reactors already exist.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
...how do you say "still twenty years from now" in Chinese?
"Scientists believe that deuterium can be extracted from the sea and an enormous amount of energy can be obtained from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction under huge temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius. After nuclear fusion, the deuterium extracted from one liter of sea water will produce energy equivalent to 300 liters of gasoline."
I just know that in 2106 we'll all be freaking out by some horrible climate problem caused by nobody ever bothering to find out if important plankton or algae can survive in seawater that's had the deuterium removed.
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.
Yeah, I totally agree with the AC. Awesome series of posts. Thanks.
sig.
Looks like they even cut your budget for a spellchecker....
The continuing use of "infinite energy" in the article is false and a misunderstanding of what is happening in the reactor. It should be something along the lines of "uncomprehensibly large amounts of energy".
Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer
that would be another good reason to use the existing fusion source (solar energy) instead of building expensive tokamaks. However, even "real" local fusion energy would have a far better cost pattern than the existing use of fusion fuel in weapon systems. The reason being that the device used to create the fusion has a far longer lifetime than the fractions of a second in a bomb. Thus the initial cost can be amortized. In principle I can't see anything preventing the price per joule from going down to effectively zero. It would probably take a few centuries, though. My personal opinion is that developing technology for harvesting the existing energy flow from the sun will succeed in an acceptable price far sooner than developing local fusion energy sources.
As for oils use for plastic and other chemistry - as a builder of plastic scale models (we are an almost extinct kind of dinosaurs) I am very much for this use. Oil should be used for chemicals and plastic, and plastic should be reused far more than it is today.
-Lasse
WTF DOES THIS MEAN!?
In East Asia or Amerindian civilisation, they have had a irresistable yearning towards the Sun. Often the Sun had been characterised as the objective of faith.
Ancient Greek Philosophers -18c Enlightenment Thinkers -Slashdotters
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.
"Eco-freaks" don't particularly care about proliferation, they care about the environment.
The people who worry about proliferation are people like Bush, people who want to maintain a nuclear monopoly in the hands of the US and a few others.
So you've been outlived ? Doesn't that mean you're a corpse ? And if you're posting on slashdot then you must be a ZOMBIE!! That damn comet dust!!!!
starring Jack Lemmon and Jane Fonda about a malfunctioning "artificial sun" and I further predict that it will be called "The China Syndrome".
... that title seems oddly familiar somehow.
Huh
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
In Soviet Russia, fusion reactors built you!
Let's assume commercial fusion reactors are available, safe and overall cheaper than running fossil fuel powerplants.
Then oil- and coal driven powerplants will disappear almost automatically. How fast will depend on the exact financial numbers, but the market will handle that one nicely.
In transportation, railways (electrically driven) could make a comeback and handle a lot of the long-distance transport that is done by trucks and planes today. For short-range distribution, electric cars might help. Where that is not practical due to sparse poulation (railway not economically feasible) bio-diesel might help out.
And finally, there is petroleum-based chemistry. I guess that could be converted to use vegetable oils. Which would of course need time and money for development, but I see no reason why it should not work.
C - the footgun of programming languages
I've google it and looked it up on wikipedia, but I can't find something that explains what "Burning Plasma" is and how it is different from what I guess I think of as regular plasma: plasma that is created by applying large large amounts of energy to matter so that its electrons are in a disassociated state. I am certainly no expert in this stuff (but the subject is very interesting to me), so if I am wrong about my regular notion of plasma I would really appreciate it to be corrected. Thanks! Frank
Since no-one involved in the field of fusion research has managed to achieve a net production of usable energy, what is it that the Chinese know about this that everyone else involved in the field of fusion research doesn't? Or could this be (*gasp!*) propaganda?! I'll wait until the thing starts generating a few thousand megawatts before I get excited about it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Because the people with knee-jerk objections to pebble reactors are ignorant, and ignorant people are driven by fear. Seeing heating and fuel costs quadruple will put the fear in them, and when the counter argument from the government is "we can create environmentally safe pebble reactors and address this issue", the ignorant will go from "Hell no" to, "Oh, well I guess that is OK," to "Praise, Jesus!".
Then perhaps you can explain this?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Yes, the Jews are responsible for everything bad! They even caused the extinction of the dinosaurs! It's a worldwide conspiracy, along with the aliens and Bigfoot!
"Sufferin' succotash."
Theoretically you could make fusion practical by throwing money at the problem, building such a huge reactor that it doesn't need as much fancy physics as what they need in Europe to make tiny reactors. China is the only country with enough industrial machinery to build such a reactor.
If Moller's sky-cars work, why aren't we seeing them flying around? -- That is what they are designed for, isnt' it? One can argue that not too many people see the NASA satelites, but we all know they work. But that is because they were designed to go into orbit and not be seen by very many people, but these Moller cars were supposed to replace the cars that people use every day, so if they work we would see zoom by in the sky every morning while we are stuck in traffic.
Obviously, China is not run by huge multinational oil companies, like all other industrialized nations are.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
This doesn't explain why other nations are even more involved in tokamak research than the US (China, India, EU). Working in the field, I get all kinds of people coming up to me with "Did you hear about the device that (insert something about outperforming a tokamak)." At current, the only other devices achieving plasma performance like tokamaks are other large toroidal devices with helical fields like stellarators. A lot of people claim to be outperforming them in their backyard, though. I read Physics of Plasmas, Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, Nuclear Fusion and Physical Review Letters on a daily basis and I've seen no mention of them. I do find lots of mention of it on random websites.
I'm sure it's cheaper in China. :-)
-Gruntled Grad Student
"People's Daily Online" = Commie Rag
Of course, given the low level of credibility required to get posted on Slashdot, this article probably struck the editors as something on par with the Washington Post.
It's more sustainable, but with the amount of deuterium in the oceans it doesn't make much difference. At current power consumption it's estimated that there is enough deuterium for about millions of years. Fusion could be used to make a large powerplant (>1 GW) in a very small area.
No. On the contrary, this is the ONLY post where I attempted (and very obviously failed, whether it be due to me being wrong, or everybody else being stubborn.) Every other post I have made here on /., I have at least tried to keep relevant to the originating topic, whether it be in the humorous posts that I make, or the ones that seriously try to offer up solutions or improvements to the topic at hand. For example, when 90% of the thread on NASA holding the contest (whatever it was) for people with serious ideas as to inventions that could change the future of space travel, it was as I said, 90 percent of the people making posts on the thread only wanted to crack cheap, cliche jokes - I on the other hand, was one of the few trying to seriously offer an intellectual post on the basics of how to make a gauss/rail-gun mass driver powered by a nuclear reactor (and selling the excess power when its not in use to nearby cities, so it would be profitable) for launching satellites and cargo into orbit, and replace the agin shuttle system, saving America and it's Congress mountains of money.
I can understand how you were ready to be so pissed at me for a flamebait post, but if you really wanna go into calling me an asshole for it, please, look into my previous posts - otherwise, I wouldnt take too much heart from anything anybody says of the type of response you had to my flamebait post.
BTW: here's the copy of the last bunch of threads I made posts in, if you dont find them relevant to the topic they are attached to, fuckin sue me...
I'm sure building architechs took care of... Sunday January 22, @12:28AM 1 attached to Saving Energy in Small Office Buildings Keeping Dialup would only let dialer spyware... Saturday January 21, @11:07PM 1 attached to Is Obsolescence Good Computer Security? Re:What has happened to the shows like... Thursday January 19, @01:41AM 1 Re:What has happened to the shows like... Wednesday January 18, @08:52PM 2 1 attached to MythBusters - The Lost Experiments Re:Sounds like the USPTO... Thursday January 19, @08:20AM 1 1 Re:Sounds like the USPTO... Wednesday January 18, @06:16PM 1 1 attached to Slashback: GPLv3, Firefly, iTunes You want to give them a basic understanding... Tuesday January 17, @05:50PM 1 attached to What Should People Understand About Computers? The whole "Web 2" thing is bs, its not a new Web.. Tuesday January 17, @10:32AM 1 attached to Web 3.0 Why use batteries, just draw it from the heart... Monday January 16, @10:48PM 2, Insightful attached to Nanobatteries Power Artificial Eyes Its true, ex: their site: it sucks... Monday January 16, @12:21AM 1 attached to Web Users Judge Sites Instantly Re:oh really? Sunday January 15, @04:45PM 1 attached to IBM's Radical Cell Processor Who wants to bet??? Sunday January 15, @01:58AM 1 attached to SEC Formally Investigates IBM Re:iPod owners have the money and iTunes Store... Sunday January 15, @01:02AM 1 1 iPod owners have the money and iTunes Store... Friday January 13, @04:11PM 1 1 attached to iPod Owners Not Thieves Not replace due to limited # of writes... Thursday January 12, @09:51PM 1 1 attached to Flash Memory to Rival Hard Drives Ya, he promised that for MSN users, not the rest.. Thursday January 12, @07:44PM 1 1 attached to Spam is Dead Its not like its special for ATI, Nintendo already Sunday January 15, @04:36PM 1 attached to ATI Talks Revolution Graphics Just talks bout cases looking like a stereo... Thursday January 12, @04:02PM 1 attached to The Year of the HTPC Hell you still gotta have an inverter... Thursday January 12, @03:53PM 1 attached to The World's Tiniest Power Supply Unit Re: What I meant was... Friday January 13, @03:47PM 1 Sounds like its recognizing IT as under-credited.. Thursday January 12, @03:44PM 1 1 attached to 'The IT Crowd' UK Sit-com
-- Doctor Otto "Octopus" Octavian
uuummmmm...what?
When I rule the world, I'll have squads of flame throwers fanned out around me, and for me, winter shall cease to exist
Firtly, quick recharge for batteries: SOLVED (though not for sale yet as far as I know)
toshiba quick recharge batteries
next range: well even a crappy home made conversion of a normal car to lead acid powered electric gets roughly 100kms range, using second hand old motors , existing drive train etc.
now assuming we use the mentioned lithiums instead of lead acid (or the nimh they tend to use today) we get ~4 times the range, then factor in a new more efficient motor, and car designed from the ground up for electric use, and 600 - 1200 kms range on a charge seems entirely feasable, with the nice 2 mins recharge. (let alone using lithium sulphur batteries if/when they are available, double to triple the capacity again, or fuel cells...)
add some nice decent efficiency solar cells giving maybe 1 or 2 Kw (assuming ~3-5m^2 area at ~25-35% efficiency) on a nice sunny day, boosting the day range up a lot (especially for short trips, where recharging might not be necessary at all)
the main reasons we dont have any decent production electric cars now is because car companies dont want a car to turn into a chasis, some electric motors and batteries and electronics (too easy for cheap chinese knockoffs) after investing so much in petrol engines, so wont do the reasearch necessary to make it a reality, oil companies dont want to lose their market, and almost everyone else believes the lie that electric cars are unfeasable.
next to the comment that we always need oil, i have no doubt at all that if there was no geological oil available, we would have as many of these operating thermal conversion of almost any organic garbage to oil as is necessary to supply us with the required oil(actually these are supposed to be efficient enough to supply the entire US oil needs just using US agricultural waste, solving two problems at once, let alone other waste. no need to dig any more out of the ground at all)
so as you can see, oil production for plastics etc is not theoretical problem only a political one i guess, even without geological oil, and electric cars CAN work fine :)
watch "the money masters" on google video
Damnit, now I have to buy grapes on the way home...
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.
Maybe we should be building fusion reactors and fission reactors in the same neighborhoods.
I hope this one hasn't been patented yet....
H bombs predate any tokomaks. Though brief, they produce more energy than they consume.
-- Stephen.
Since you posted actual advice meaning to help me not screw myself over in the future, I'll have to take it to heart.
Hell, I've only been on slashdot for about 5 months now - not an excuse, just saying I had NO idea the point I was trying to make to one person, in a futile attempt to get them to stop (what it seems like) blaming the war on terror for every little thing that goes wrong, even if could in no way effect what they would rather have.
Like I said, hell, I was only tryin to get a point to rts008, and half of slashdot butts in - I guess thats what I get for posting my personal views on a public formum...
there is mounting evidence that these types are genetic/environment effects that are set before birth.
as for psycobabbble, no, it's not babble at all, Jung types are quite real. The signal is not completely clear, as many environmental factors, people habilts, experiences, etc. all cloud measuring the effects - but I firmly believe that as our understanding of functional and chemical neurology emerges to the point of truely understanding how our brains function, we will go back to these "babble" models and see them as crude approximations grounded in real effects. [[ note to the information archaeologists -- HI! ]]