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Biggest Obstacle of Nuclear Fusion Overcome?
Yetihehe writes "Nuclear fusion could become a more viable energy solution with the discovery of way to prevent super-hot gases from causing damage within reactors. The potential solution, tested at an experimental reactor in San Diego, US, could make the next generation of fusion reactors more efficient, saving hundreds of millions of euros a year."
Here I was thinking the bigger problem was returning enough net energy to make it worthwhile relative to the astronomical upfront costs. Silly me.
Still nifty, though.
So, nuclear fusion has finally got serious backing from politicians and the R&D budget to go along with it?
My gallery: www.estiasis.com/modules.php?name=gallery2&g2_ite
First rule is, there is always someone opposed. There will be some doom and gloom environmental group that comes out opposed to fusion. They won't even have to make sense, when they fail to sway public opinion they will use the courts to delay. They will buy a politician or two to stall as well.
Hell, if the environmentals don't get it the rich NIMBYs will.
So while we have overcome another technical hurdle its the legal, disinformation, and fear, hurdles that will be harder to get around
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"...could make the next generation of fusion reactors more efficient, saving hundreds of millions of euros a year"
There's a current generation of fusion reactors?
FTFA, "...the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER) - which is to be built in Cadarache, France, from 2008 at cost of 10 billion Euros." The experiment was completed in the US. The reactor's use will be in France and probably service, oh, I don't know...Europeans.
It's another small step forward. This is good, but that's it.
In fact, far more interesting, is how this article is an example of the effect television has had upon the reporting of news in all mediums.
The medium through which a message passes shapes the message being transmitted.
You can't discuss philosophy using smoke signals; looking at a picture is utterly different to reading a discription of a picture, being in a church for a ceremony is entirely different to watching it on TV in your kitchen.
Television as a medium can only show entertainment.
As such, all messages shown on television are shaped into entertainment.
Unfortunately, where TV *is* our culture (do you remember back when the debate was merely if TV would reflect culture or shape it?) it strongly influences all other mediums as well.
As such, we *cannot* have an article which simply says: a researcher has made a small step forward, solving a possible problem with fusion technology.
No. What we get is "BIGGEST OBSTACLE OVERCOME!!? NUCLEAR FUSION NOW ON THE TABLE?!"
It has to be exciting. It has to grab the reader. It has to be *entertaining*.
...as they do with any new energy source. Wind turbines kill birds and look ugly. Dams flood areas. With fusion, they new complaint will be: "It still uses radioactive particles."
More importantly, how stupid is that headline? "Biggest problem" my ass. This is just one maintenance problem... hardly the "biggest problem".
Daniel
Carpe Diem
the biggest obstacle is public perception of anything with "nuclear" in the name
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
huh... I always thought the biggest obstacle to overcome would be... you know... getting a positive energy return from the damn thing!
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
How can there be a "next generation" of fusion reactors that are going to be "more efficient", when the aren't any viable, net-energy-producing fusion reactors AT ALL? To have a next generation, you first have to have a *first generation*. It's still an entirely open question whether functional fusion reactors (with postive energy balance) can even be built.
Brett
I'm not a scientist but is testing Nuclear Fusion in a very populated area a good idea?
I'm not a scientist either, but I have read a little on the subject....And from what I understand, the reaction would peter out and die very quickly - very little fuel is used in comparison to a fisson reactor, and the reaction itself requires very precise control to happen at all.
Comments like yours are part of the reason there's so much nonsensical backlash against this sort of technology - "I have no idea what i'm talking about, but it must be bad just because! Nuclear bombs are evil, so this must be the same!".
Couldn't they have done this in some place a little less populated? Like North Dakota or in the area near Area 51?
I would have one of these reactors in my backyard (well, if I wasn't in an apartment right now, anyway) with no reservation whatsoever.
Fusion power has been Just Around the Corner. For the last fifty years or so. There is always some new technical breakthrough that is about to overcome the biggest obstacle.
And we are always told that fusion power will be safe because, uh, well, because, well, it's not fission. It's completely new and totally different, so it must be safe. (Not that fission isn't safe, mind you, but fusion will be even safer). And it won't produce any radioactive waste. To speak of. Not from the actual fusion reaction. Well, sure, the neutron flux may make a lot of other things radioactive, but that's big deal. Why, in fact, the government has promised that Yucca Mountain will be ready by 1998. If you want to pick nits it isn't, uh, actually in operation yet, but it's Just Around the Corner.
Also Just Around the Corner: helicars and moon colonies.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Actually, the dollar is litarally killing the world economy. It is, in a way, dying, an similar process as the German Mark underwent. All we have to wait for is a large selling of dollars on stock exchanges around the globe 'triggering' the downfall. After all, you Americans are borrowing $3 mil. a DAY of the rest of the world...
So yes, the dollar WILL be the new dollar, for a while. And after that, the economy is going to shift to the East.
Yes - you are correct. However Thorium is easy to mine and is commonly available. India is undertaking development of the Thorium cycle. China is also nuclear. Any nuclear reactor anywhere in the world can be stuffed with Thorium and you get U233 out of it which is easy to chemically separate from the Thorium.
You can also just pull a fuel element from the reactor when it has only been in there for a short period of time - this will contain a high percentage of Pu239 as opposed to Pu240. Pu is easy to chemically separate as well. It is an effective material for making bombs which "we" demonstrated on the Japanese.
The actinides can be burned. All you need is a neutron flux. This gets rid of the 1000++ year radioactive wastes - and we get power from this as well. This is what the IFR does in fact.
The nuclear genie is out of the bottle and has been for a long time. I personally do not think that our "misguided" decision to not use these fuel cycles will delay India, Pakistan or China from pursuing them.
OTHO, we are presently burning over 25% of the world's oil production and we have alternatives which we are not pursuing. Instead we are pursuing along with the UK - a misguided war in the middle east that is clearly based on our desire to control (you can read steal) their oil.
The middle east is living in part in the middle ages and they have an egaggerated view of the value of their oil. But of course - the price at the pumps has everything to do with our desire to buy it. Last time I filled up my car I bitched at all the other people in the service station that if they weren't so eager to full up their cars I wouldn't have to pay so much for the gas!
The point is that still people are looking over their shoulder at the next guy and playing a game of economic brinkmanship - wondering when the next guy will stand down and take the bus or ride a bike. As part of this game we send a lot of kids to the middle east to "stablise it". Some come back in body bags. We should add to this count the number of kids in the middle east who are killed - but somehow that number isn't worthy of the media's attention.
The issue is that we have all the energy we need right here at home and we are not using it. Instead we are the ones pursuing a war.
We have 1.8 trillion barrels of oil in the tar sands. We need hydrogen. We don't have it. We need about 75 nuclear reactors in the GWe range. We don't have them. The reason we don't have them in part is because as you point out - someone overseas might want to build a weapon.
The truth is that many people overseas already have built all the weapons they want. Furthermore in the middle east the main reason they want to build the weapons is because we're over there attacking them.
Insanity rules!
Well all organic garbage contain CH chains. Technology could break down these chains and use the H relesed for fusion. Given that my hand held calculator is more powerfull than the 2 room large ENIAC of yesteryear I would not be surprised if in the future fusion reactors could be minituarized to fit in cars. Of course noone would really use these as most cars would run on the pavement embedded electric network and charge their batteries by induction.
Maybe camping equipment manufacturers would sell it to the yuppies of tomorrow who would like to go off the grid during vacations.
**Life is too short to be serious**
The euro started trading at an artifically specified U$1.18, dropped quickly to just over $0.82 in actual markets, and has climbed from that natural valuation to $1.27. That's an over 54% increase. The euro's superiority is clear, defining supremacy over the formerly supreme dollar.
You can't be "sarcastic" simultaneously about both a false euro introduction rate of $2.00, and predicting the imminent supremacy of the euro. Especially when getting the intro rate wrong isn't sarcasm.
--
make install -not war
We already have a working fusion reactor.
It is called THE SUN. The only problem with the Sun is that you cannot charge people for using its energy. This is why they are trying to put it (the sun) into a proverbial bottle, so they can sell it to you for big ca$he.
Well if you're a Brit, an Canook or an Aussie you're pretty much the same thing (woohoo I'm gonna burn now)
Bollocks.
By far the biggest problem with fission is not neutron activation of the machine itself but rather the creation of unstable intermediate-mass daughter atoms. The problem is that the neutron-proton ratio of heavy stable elements is slightly higher than the neutron-proton ratio of lighter stable elements. Hence if you break apart a heavy nearly-stable nucleus you get very unstable isotopes. A few of those isotopes have half-lives measured in hundreds to thousands of years, causing a big problem because you have to store the waste a long time.
Neutron activation of the machine itself is not a big deal. Fission reactors are largely made of aluminum and water. Aluminum that absorbs a neutron ends up (after a short-lived decay chain) as stable. The oxygen in the water produces mostly the heavier stable oxygen isotopes and a small amount of stable fluorine. The hydrogen produces mostly deuterium and a tiny, tiny amount of tritium (from neutron absorption by deuterium). Tritium is messy but not a long-term problem as its half-life is only 12 years.
Existing fusion machines have neutron-activation problems largely because they are experimental rigs, composed of lots of materials that are not particularly well selected for neutron absorption or non-activation. If tokamak technology becomes an engineering reality, tokamak plants will be engineered for minimal neutron activation.
But yes, nuclear power plants are all one-off designs with no "off the shelf" replacement parts available, unless you count the doorknobs and lightbulbs. Toshiba seems to be testing a novel new approach to distributed nuclear power that makes a lot more sense. It'll do battle with the NIMBY crowd, but you can't please everyone.
One advantage to designs like Toshiba's is that they're small. Yet another issue with Trojan was that if it was cranking out power at it's peak (1100 MW) and it suddenly went offline, the whole Western U.S. felt the hit. Smaller plants cause less havoc when they trip. Furthermore, economic right-sizing for plants seems to be at about 500 MW. Power traders seem to like to manage plants of that size, though I can't say I completely understand why.
In all, I hope to see something of a resurgence in popularity of nuclear power, particularly as we see rising fuel costs for gas fired plants and continued environmental issues around the existence of hydroelectric dams. I don't think we know much at all about the long-term impacts of wind farms.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011