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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!
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.
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.
we have these already, they're called LIGHTBULBS.
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."
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
Because there's no theoretical reason it can't work, and whoever doesn't need oil first wins?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
probably be like $39.99
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!
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.
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"?
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
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
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.
"All your sun are belong to us"
Marine Sergeant: Did I give you permission to b*tch, soldier?
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.
...how do you say "still twenty years from now" in Chinese?
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.
a big enough black hole would keep swallowing matter and thus become even bigger.
Yes, big enough, and there's not enough matter in a laboratory to create such an object, nor do we have technology sufficient enough to compress the mass present in a laboratory into a space small enough to create a threatening black hole. (by "threatening" I mean one that wouldn't evaporate instantly)
There's something known as the Schwarzschild radius, which is more or less the "event horizon" of an object of a given mass. Only an object whose radius is itself smaller than its Schwarzschild radius can be considered a black hole. An object the size of, say, Mount Everest, has a Schwarzschild radius of about a nanometer. You would therefore need to compress Mount Everest into a volume slightly less than 4.19 cubic nanometers in order for it to become a black hole.
According to wikipedia, the Schwarzschild radius is roughly calculable with the equation: r = m * 1.48 * 10^-27, where r is the radius in meters and m is the mass in kilograms. A 1 kilogram mass would have a Schwarzschild radius of 1.48 * 10^-27 meters, while a proton is 10^-15 meters in diameter. So you'd have to compress 1 kilogram of matter into a space many orders of magnitude smaller than a proton before you'd have to worry about black holes. Like I said, we lack the technology...
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Disclaimer: I'm a plasma physicist.
:)
It turns out that the D-T fusion reaction yields a high-energy neutron. (In fact, these neutrons rattling around a shield/heating blanket around our reactor are what generates the heat we'll use to make electricity.)
However, there also exists a couple of favorible nuclear reactions which convert Lithium to tritium:
1) 6Li + n -> 4He + T + n + 4.5 MeV
2) 7Li + n + 2.5 MeV -> 4He + T + n
Effectively, the presence of Lithium, a very abundant element in the ground (more 7Li than 6Li), around the fusion reactor will generate _more_ T from fusion than is burned. We can therefore breed as much T as is needed from our existing supplies, which are = 20 kg for civilian use! A better way to think of fusion fuel is that they burn deuterium and lithium.
Without a fusion reactor, tritium can be created in trace amounts in the upper atmosphere through cosmic ray bombardment (perhaps ~50 kg distributed around the entire atmosphere), and in practical amounts by using heavy-water moderated fission reactors (deuterium bombardment, as you suggest).
To quote F.F. Chen: "A plasma is a quasineutral gas o charged and neutral particles which exhibits collective behaviour".
A burning plasma is a nearly fully-ionized gas in which the fusion power captured by the plasma keeps the plasma hot. It can also be called a self-heating plasma.
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.