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Japan's JT-60 Tokamak Sets New Plasma Record
Dipster writes "The Japan Atomic Energy Agency has announced that its JT-60 Tokamak has almost doubled the previous record for sustained plasma production, which is now sits at 28.6 seconds. It is believed that once 400 seconds can be achieved, a sustained nuclear fusion reaction will be possible. While 28.6 seconds is a long way from 400, it raises hopes for what will be possible from the ITER reactor, expected to be finished in 2016."
Let's see, 400 seconds - 28.6 seconds .... works out to about 50 years. Still.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
I know its pretty unreasonable to ask "when is technology x coming out," but a rough order of magnitude (are we talking 10 years? 100?) has got to be doable.
It's about fifteen years away.
Five years ago, it was about ten years away. That's progress for you.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
as someone who worked in the energy generating business i hope fusion comes sooner rather than later!
the price of oil and gas are going thru the roof, and these two fuels are what keeping the base load plants running here in ireland (and most of the rest of the world with notable exception of france)
theres alot of buzz around wind power nowadays but alot of people dont realise that with average 20% availability (compared to 80-90% of base plants) wind power
just doesnt cut it, and u need to have for every MW generated a backup fossil fuel generator (or pump water storage system) waiting and being ready in case the wind quite literally stops blowing
nuclear fission plants will never be built here either (the greens are quite good at scaremongering)
"Also, if we do get large scale fusion, is it really going to be cleaner and safer than modern fission plants?"
No meltdown risk...
No long-lived waste products...
No dangerous fuels...
Likely no immediate danger of weapon proliferation...
And you have to ask if it's safer?
Just so we're clear, fission power is reasonably safe already (provided the reactors are well designed and maintained, and provided that the waste is reproccessed). All of the dangers of a fission plant are outlined above, and they're not that bad when compared with the alternatives. Fusion has none of those dangers; the nuclear reaction ceases if the reactor vessel loses confinement, the major waste product is helium-4 (which is commercially useful and chemically inert), reactor irradiation is minimal, and can be limited further by careful choice of building materials, the fuels are safe to handle, and there's no way to make a bomb out of the reactor technology that we know of yet.
That's not to say there are absolutly no problems. Even with careful material selection, the reactor vessel will become slighly radioactive over it's lifetime. But safer and cleaner than fission? Yes, and by an order of magnitude at that.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
"...it raises hopes for what will be possible from the ITER reactor, expected to be finished in 2016."
Look at that, it'll be completed in exactly 10 years. Finally, this time 10 years means 10 years.
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
And I'm not just being flippant, though the answer has been 50 years for the last 30 years or more.
ITER isn't going to be operational until 2016 at the earliest, and it's an experimental reactor not expected to be a net energy producer. Based on operational experience with ITER and IFMIF (for which construction has not even started), another experimental reactor will be designed and constructed with the goal of net energy production. Perhaps that might be operational by 2035. And if it works well enough, it's *remotely* possible that a commercial reactor could be designed and constructed, and be operational by 2055.
When all is said and done, fusion recactors are expected to produce *slightly* less expensive electricity than fission.
The big win with fusion will require a major theoretical breakthrough rather than simply carrying the current plans to their logical conclusion.
In general it's reasonable to expect that they'll be cleaner and safer. There is no possibility of a runaway chain reaction; the reactor only contains enough fuel at any given time to operate for a fraction of a second, vs. months or years for a fission reactor. If the fusion reaction containment fails, the reaction quickly stops, without serious damage to the reactor and without any abnormal leakage of radioactive material. A fusion reactor can't "melt down".A fusion reactor will produce a greater quantity of radioactive waste (crumbling radioactive shielding and structural materials after years of exposure to high neutron flux), but fortunately the waste will have a very short half-life so it won't be dangerous for too many decades, and will thus be easier to store. No need to worry about safety over geological time scales, or about whether our descendents will be able to read warning signs printed in 21st century languages.
I know its pretty unreasonable to ask "when is technology x coming out," but a rough order of magnitude (are we talking 10 years? 100?) has got to be doable."
Depends on how much money gets thrown at it. If ITER shows promise, and there's really no technical reason it shouldn't do what they expect, these projects will get more funding and it'll be a matter of decades. France and Japan will be along for the PR alone, which means China and the US will have play as well to save face. This could very well turn out to be the next Space Race. With ITER in 10 years, I'd guess commercial plants (likely government funded or subsidised) within 25. I expect to see it in my lifetime.
"Also, if we do get large scale fusion, is it really going to be cleaner and safer than modern fission plants?"
Yes and no. You'll still get a lot of low-level radioactive waste that's not especially dangerous, but you don't get anything that needs to be stored securely for thousands of years. You might still need to store it away for as much as 50-100 years, but on that time-scale it's basically just warehousing, and it'll be mostly harmless long before that.
It'll be safer because you cannot get a meltdown. Unlike fission power plants, you can cut off the fuel supply. If something goes wrong the plasma will dissipate. A fusion reaction is difficult to start and maintain, whereas a fission reaction is difficult to halt. If something goes horribly wrong, at MOST you'll need to replace parts of the tokamak. The fuel is toxic, but that's a negligable hurdle.
A big plus you didnt mention is the fuel. We can't make uranium. We can create tritium/deuterium without too much hassle. It won't run out.
Another big one is that it can't be weaponised. It won't even produce the radioactive waste needed to make a decent dirty bomb.
Was I the only one who thought that it was for a 60-inch plasma screen?
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
Fusion research is one of the only promising research fields whose funding has decreased substantially over the years. In 1970 it was predicted that ITER would be online in 1995, with a demo commercial reactor in 2005. Given that funding was cut once the oil crisis was over, is it reasonable to expect all deadlines to remain the same? In any case, now that construction has started on the ITER site, we are definitively 10 years from an net positive energy balance plasma, following ITER's research, speculated to end in the 2020s, we'll probably have a commercial demo in 2030/40s and large-scale implementation by 2050.
If the fusion reaction containment fails, the reaction quickly stops, without serious damage to the reactor and without any abnormal leakage of radioactive material. A fusion reactor can't "melt down".
Unfortunately, like most reactors, it will collapse into a pile of rubble after exactly 50 years. Which is why I prefer to use hydroelectric power...
Oh, wait, we were talking about Sim City, right?
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Normal fission doesn't have to have long lived products either if you use a integral fast reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
Mark
reactor irradiation is minimal
Now I freely admit that things may have changed in the 7 or so years since I quit my Phd in plasma physics, but back then that simply wasn't true. One of the major byrpoducts of a fusion reaction is (was) a pretty steady flux of neutrons. Being neutral, the only way to contain it is to absorb it. This shielding will become radioactive, and will need to be replaced periodically. It is inevitable that eventually, the entire reactor will have been damaged to the point of having to be replaced; it will all also be radioactive.
Now it's true that the half-life of the irradiated components is much, much shorter than that of the waste products of fission, and (imnho) fusion is absolutely the way to go long-term for nuclear power. However, I really don't think it's true to say "reactor irradiation is minimal".
Like I said though, it's been some time since I last really looked at this, so it's possible that progress has been made. It's also not impossible that I'm mis-remembering things (or simply misinterpreting your meaning), of course.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
to all you wanting to get more info
ITER is designed to produce approximately 500 MW (500,000,000 watts) of fusion power sustained for up to 500 seconds (compared to JET's peak of 16 MW for less than a second). It is a significant amount of power for a fusion research project; a future fusion power plant would generate about 3000-4000 MW of thermal power. Although ITER will produce net power in the form of heat, the generated heat will not be used to generate any electricity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter
When comparing to a fission based reactor, perhaps my use of the word "minimal" was a tad skewed.
Remember that the object of comparison here has the same issue with neutron irradiation (ie, even ignoring waste products, a fission reactor core will become irradiated over time, as will the coolant in the heat exchangers). In addition to the neutron problem, which applies to both fission/fusion, you've also got to consider direct radioactive contamination from the fuel/waste. At least with a fusion reactor we can eliminate (or reduce) the risk of elements like strontium-90, since we get the option of choosing what radioactives we want left over at the end of the plant's life when we build it.
But I cede the point that, objectively, the degree of radioactivity in the core of a decomisioned plant would not be "minimal" by human standards.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
It it worth noting that the progress made in fusion research has been HUGE throughout the past 3-4 decades and while the next step is more difficult than the last we aew still making steady progress. JT-60 HAS attained a confinement quality in the deuterium-deuterium shots it has taken which are VERY good, so good that if they were done with deuterium-tritium mix they would firmly place JT-60 in the breakeven parameter space very near the ignition regime (they have not "gone DT" due to pain in the ass handling issues with the radioactive tritium). There is also always hope for a shocking surprise breakthrough too (but don't hold your breath). For example, 10 or so years ago, it was though there was no way you could get around having to build immensely expensive multi-hundred beam multi-MEGAjoule laser systems in order to make inertial confinement fusion work. Then along comes a cute little trick called Chirped pulse amplification and suddenly you can start talking about petawatt lasers being used to reduce the overall cost of the machine by 10 fold (fast ignition fusion schemes! That's why science is so great, there is always hope something better is just around the corner waiting to be discovered.
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
As a bachelor degree student in physics in the 70's and early 80's, fusion research was on of the 'hot' topics. The tokamak was the predominant fusion plant, but other fusion reactors were being investigated. In those days we measured sustained reaction times in milliseconds. Obviously I haven't been keeping up, 'cuz 28 seconds sounds like a lifetime to me now.
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
The greens (and other similar political groups) scaremonger against nuclear because it is (according to them), the greater of all the available evils.
:)
If you want nuclear to succeed, you need to find a greater evil, for example:
"
Scientists have released details of a discovery last month that when a tiny adorable kitten is poked with something pointy and sharp, an incredible amount of energy is released, many many orders of magnitude more energy than the kitten would consume in food during its entire life.
There is much speculation about where the energy comes from, as it clearly violates almost all known 'laws of physics'. It has been determined so far that the more cute and adorable the kitten, the higher the energy output.
But, with the energy crisis worsening, a proof of concept fully-automated-kitten-poking power plant has been set up with the ability to hold 30 cute and adorable baby cats. Even with an initial supply of 10 kittens, being poked 3 times per hour, the energy output is enough to supply a major capital city during peak hours.
Plans are being drawn up to build a plant large enough to supply the whole of Australia.
"
Suddenly nuclear doesn't seem like such a bad option
Have you ever tried to count the neutrons that come off a fusion reaction? If you do you will see that there are so many that the _best_ use of fusion once we get it will be to operate as a breader for U239->Pu239/Pu240 production or th232->U233. These are viable fuel cycles.
The short of it is that fusion is rather dirty - just as bad if not worse than fission and the reason is because of all of those neutrons that are released.
Forget about OIL & GAS dropping in price for any length of time.
Saudi Aramco has announced as of April 2006 that Saudi Arabian oil production is now in terminal decline and this is taken over all the production the country can muster which includes some heavy oils that were frowned upon before. Ghawar in particular is suffering about 8% declines.
Kuwait announced in November of 2005 that they are in terminal decline as well as the Bergan field has gone over the top.
Of the top four this leaves the Pemex (Mexico) Canateral field dropping from about 2 million BOPD currently to under 1.6 before the end of 2007 and China's DaQing feild also dropping by about 6% per year.
The combined reduced production (read depletion) of these 4 fields alone cannot be replaced.
You can say that in Ireland they will _NEVER_ look at fission - and you are completely correct about the problems with wind and solar. However their other option will be to see if they can buy coal and failing that - they will have to start driving their cars less which might mean getting a horse - and figuring out how to superinsluate their houses which is also something that most people seem to be adverse to doing. And even if they do this I suspect they will be importing nuclear power. Perhaps it will be from France mind you via the tunnel.
The actual research itself is relatively unpredictable, I understand that. But when I read that completion of the ITER (the way I see it a relatively straightforward job, I assume the blueprints are already completed) is still 10 years away, I wonder how much time could be shaved off that estimate, as well as the ~2050 estimate, if (a lot) more money were put into fusion research.
If nuclear fusion has the potential to provide a clean, efficient, lasting energy source, and thereby eventually solve the energy crises, it would seem to me that investing a far larger amount of money than is being put into it today would be a very good investment if that could mean nuclear fusion can be used a few years earlier. I think ITER's cost is estimated at about EUR 10 billion, which is a lot of money, but in the grand scheme of things (I think the world GDP is somewhere around 50 trillion) it's tiny. And seeing the large potential for creating armed conflict there is in energy shortages even these days, I'd say getting fusion sooner rather than later may very well be a real matter of life and death.
However, when I hear discussions on the energy crises, the efficiency of solar/wind/water power, whether more nuclear fission reactors should be built, fusion isn't even mentioned, let alone considered by politicians for larger investments. Is it simply because it's so far away, and that for the most of us, only our descendants would benefit from those investments?
Once again this is a serious question, I'm no expert in any of this so I honestly don't know.
As far as I can read, it seems rather impressive. Their record for plama duration is... 390s ! More information on the fusion-dedicated French CEA (Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique) site (in English).
But the question is honest: what have achieved the Japanese? Is their plasma self-sustaining? Have they reached break-even point and maintained it during the whole 28.6 seconds?
Anyway, just give a look to the CEA site: from pictures to videos, plenty to discover there.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
We could have nuclear fusion power now, we could have had it decades ago, were it not for political concerns. Consider this:
Such a setup should generate more fusion power than we'll ever need.
But of course you'd have to manufacture fusion bombs at a rate of one every five seconds. If a country were to develop that kind of manufacturing capability, it would be very easy to divert some of those bombs for weapons use.
Will the be able to keep it open^H^H^H^H powered on for more than 38 minutes?
Efficient. Reliable. Decentralized. Pick any two.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
Also, Tore Supra has achieved discharge durations in excess of 200 seconds since 2002 and has more recently had shots in excess of 360 seconds (6 minutes). Of course Tore Supra has a significant advantage over most other tokamaks in that it has superconducting toroidal field coils, giving it a steady state toroidal magnetic field. My experience in working with these machines is that on most of them the toroidal magnetic fields seriously handicap their performance due to the massive power requirements of generating a typically > 1 T magnetic field. This brings in the requirement for expensive and bulky power supplies and energy storage devices such as large capacitor banks and flywheel generators. The Joint European Torus has two 3750 MJ flywheel generators that can supply as much as 800 MW (400 MW each) of peak power which are used for the toroidal and poloidal magnetic field coils. The magnetic field coils on JET consume more than half of the power required to run the machine. The remaining power is drawn directly from the grid. Using superconducting magnetic coils greatly reduces the power required to run a tokamak and extends the time over which the discharge can last. Tore Supra has a goal of, I believe 1000 second discharges, which is similar to what ITER will be aiming for.
I predict that we will have fusion power not before oil reserves are exhausted - too much money/politics/everything involved. Can't be allowed. If we have fusion power production tomorrow - what would all those arabs do? Huh?
You appear to have linked to a download of Duke Nukem Forever.
Blank until
First off, the spherical chamber: Do what Operation Plowshare did, use a nuke to build the chamber by detonating it underground. I bet that if you mined ventilation shafts at the near "edge" of the explosion, you could vent off the overpressure. The heat from the explosion would sinter the rock together. All that would be left would be to send in some remote-controlled mining equipment to "smooth" it out. You aren't talking a big sphere here, probably well less than a mile in diameter, but that is OK.
Clean out/rebuild the overpressure ventilation shafts - you will need these later.
Attach to the inside surface of the chamber many, many thousands of feet of stainless steel piping/tubing - probably 6 to 8 inches in diameter, if not larger (I am not an engineer, can you tell?). This is your "energy collector". You will run water through this.
Spray the inside of the sphere (over the top of the SS water piping) with a bunch of concrete - maybe further steel reinforce it, perhaps make an agregate with granite or something. This layer should probably be a few feet thick, probably thicker.
Now, you simply do the same thing - dropping the nukes so they explode at the center (or near). The overpressure goes out the vents (this is a "fatal flaw" - I don't know what you do with the escaping radioactive material and/or radiation from these vents). The heat heats the water in the coils, which is then used like a typical fission reactor by passing it through a heat exchanger system. The coils are buried in the concrete/granite aggregate, which holds the heat very well, so the "every 5 seconds" could probably be extended to something longer once the system is up and running (the first few "primer" explosions would have to be done in more rapid succession since they serve to heat the system up to working temperature, but later blasts can be spaced apart more as the system runs).
Now, for the hydrogen devices - you don't need the "high yield" devices used for weapons. You grab another of the Plowshare-related systems: the delivery and propulsion system from the Orion. These thermonuclear devices were designed to be about the size of a basketball, to propel a ship through space, detonated behind the ship (with an ablative pusher plate to propel it, riding the shockwave). They were extremely small fusion devices - which got them immediately sucked into the "top secret" drawer of things, of course - but they had much lower yields, and if set up properly, the explosion from them could be sized slightly smaller than the size of your sphere, so you harvest the heat, and not anything else that would possibly destroy the system in short order.
In theory, aside from the radioactivity being released, plus possibly servicing/refurbishing the system (as the concrete/granite aggregate layer ablates) - this should work. Unfortunately, even if all of that was conquered, I am not sure it would be any more efficient than a regular fission reactor, plus there is likely no way the design for those mini-hydrogen devices will ever see the light of day again outside of WW-3...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
India has proposed a combined hybrid fission/fusion reactor as have many others. The funding for India's new SST-1 http://www.ipr.res.in/sst1/SST-1.html superconducting tokamak was secured under this pretext.
It isn't a question of how long. It is more a question of dollars.
It is often said that 20 years ago, the physics community estimated that they could have reactors working in 20 years. People usually ignore that this was only the first half of the estimate -- the other half was the level of funding needed to achieve the result. Needless to say, they received a small (and still shrinking) fraction of the funding they said was necessary, and the result is unsurprising.
Everyone laments the expense of large scale research in creating new basic technology. Bare in mind, however, that the production cost of the movie Spiderman 2 was a bit larger than the budget for the whole US fusion program the year it was released.
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
Does anyone remember a short science fiction story that basically had that as a premise? I can't remember what it was called or who it was by, but the idea was that a civilization built a generator that provided wireless power distribution throughout not only all three dimensions, but forward into the fourth as well. So basically as soon as it was turned on, you'd have power for the rest of eternity, even if you shut it down.
The story used this as a device to show how easily people "forget the development," -- once people take something for granted, they forget how it works and how (or even if) it was built.
I remember really liking it, but I can't think of the author or title.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Checking a couple of journals reveals that the JT-60 discharge duration can be as long as ~65 seconds while the ELMy H-mode, which ITER will operate in, lasted for about 30 seconds. The article might be referring to this or it may be referring to some of the 30 s discharges that JT-60U has, I'm not sure. Something else that is interesting is that there are plans to further upgrade JT-60U (U is for upgrade from JT-60) to JT-60SC which will include superconducting magnetic field coils. I haven't been able to find a timeline, but I do know that the design for it is complete.
Everytime I read any Fusion based posts it really allows me to see how ignorant a LOT of people are. Some seem pretty close, but get caught out as being bulls-hitters somewhere in their post
K, I am doing a PhD in Fusion in one of the best fusion plasma groups in the world. I would be happy to answer any questions.
Not having a go at any random posts, but just a few mistakes I didn't see get checked. 1. Yes Fusion is safe, very safe, super safe. Safe!! You can ask me why, but no-one ever seems to pay attention, or even understand.
2. Fusion weapons have been around since at least the 1960's! Hydrogen bombs. Kinda like 50 years too late to be scared about that one.
3. Would you like to know why fusion isn't here yet? It's very difficult! It's not an oil conspiracy!! The people in fusion are academics and believe me when I say they don't generally give a crap about money. They are smart people concerned with the environment.
4. Why is it difficult? You can't switch JET or MAST on for too long because of Ohmic heating. It basically implies that super conducting (very $$$!) coils are needed to get around this problem. ITER will be one of the first reactors to have all superconducting coils.
6. Anything else? Yes, actually. We are literally making it up as we go along. How many people know exactly what a plasma is? I mean what defines it? It's Debeye length? Collisionless? Quasi-neutrality? What do any of these terms mean? If you don't know you probably aren't qualified to talk on fusion. Plasma physics is relatively to the rest of science an incredibly new and young field and it is extremely varied.
There's lots and lots going on in fusion. I apologise for the lack of links but i'm typing quickly and don't have time. Suffice to say, everyone in the fusion community is very enthusiastic about it. It is getting more and more (international) money all the time. The Chinese and Japanese are involved, not to mention India and the most of the West.
On an interesting side note. The thing that mainly held fusion back was
can you guess?
AMERICA!! Constantly pulling in and out of the project. However, now that the Indians are involved the funding is about 110% of what is required. So if the yanks pull out again then they will fall behind because no-one else cares anymore and we'll have enough money to, and we will, continue.
Maybe if we got the Iranians interested, they could get Nuclear Fusion up and running in a couple of years? They've been making some good progress with fission!
Zen tips: Pay attention. Don't take it personally. Believe nothing.
But compared to a fission or coal burning plant? I don't see the radiative waste problem being that onerous.