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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
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
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.
Or could create the biggest fireworks show yet seen on earth?
Someone save me from this sanity.
When your dad was a kid the Soviets were still offering free delivery of their fusion devices to US cities. Nowadays fusion isn't as big a deal at the DoD, which means fewer resources and slipping goals.
Because there's no theoretical reason it can't work, and whoever doesn't need oil first wins?
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
No. The produced Helium in the Tritium-Deuterium reaction slows it down until it stops. In fact one of the problems of fusion with a tokamak is to get the helium-ash out of the plasma.
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.
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.
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.
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