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International Fusion Reactor Project Moves Forward
mjgp2 writes to mention a BBC article about an agreement which will begin construction on the second most expensive scientific collaboration, after the ISS : the world's first large-scale fusion reactor. From the article: "The seven-party consortium, which includes the European Union, the US, Japan, China, Russia and others, agreed last year to build Iter in Cadarache, in the southern French region of Provence ... He said that the participants would aim to ratify their agreement before the end of the year so construction on the facility could start in 2007. Officials said the experimental reactor would take about eight years to build. The EU is to foot about 50% of the cost to build the experimental reactor. If all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant at Cadarache by 2040. "
even international parties involved in an experimental nuclear fusion reactor project have initialled a 10bn-euro (£6.8bn) agreement on the plan.
10Bn over 35 years for cheap clean energy?
Bah! I say - much better to spend 10bn/month to secure access to limitless supplies of the cleanest energy!
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
Sweet, gotta start somewhere I guess.
"If all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant at Cadarache by 2040"
Guess the traditional "40 years away" is now 36 years?
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
Is it because of the war on science in the US that we didnt get the reactor? Or are we putting all of our money into the Mars colony project?
We are these little intelligent creatures that live on an insignificant planet revolving around an insignificant yellow star in one of billions of solar systems among billions of galaxies in this universe.
It's amazing to me that we should be able to probe the laws of the universe with our limited energy reserves and stunted perspective.
Will we really be able to create the conditions that led to the creation of the universe in an Earth-based laboratory?
It's really fucking amazing.
Just like there is room for improvement in battery technology, is there any chance we can come up with a way to transport electricity over long distances without it diminishing in power as fast as it does now? Or do physics tell us otherwise? That's the one thing holding us back from making super-duper large nuclear plants in the middle of nowhere...
Instead of $300B spent in Iraq we should have spent it here on fusion reactor research!!!
Thats what happens when politicians are un-educated rubes.
...are the crew compartment, engines, storage compartment, enviromental unit, etc and we're on our way to Alpha Centauri!
The Japanese are the contractors, they are pretty well renowned for their efficiency. So I think building time may be reduced.
More work needs to be done on the spherical Tokamaks such as START and MAST. Which are showing increasingly promising results. I know from an inside source that more attention is being given to the spherical Tokamak. Especially now that in nearly all the participating countries there is at least a single toroidal tokamak.
From TFA:
"However, environmental groups have criticised the project, saying there was no guarantee that the billions of euros would result in a commercially viable energy source."
This baffles me, just whose side are the environmentalists on again? It doesn't matter that there is no gaurantee. The likelyhood of it being a comercially viable energy source is very high.
Also, bear in mind that everybody knows that fusion will be "along in 20 years" and has been this way for the past 60. However, most countries in the world are producing larger plasma departments at universities and there is a much greater influx of fusion scientists. Many hands make light work. And it has already been mentioned that there are many tokamaks in the world, Russia, China, Japan and America have multiple. The UK has the current largest, Jet, and it also has the spherical tokamaks as stated.
Peace out, baby.
Hmm, let's see.. I'm 28 now, 34 more years means... yep, I'll probably have lived a full life by then. Sure, go ahead, build your thingy, you kids knock yourelves out. :-D
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
Perfect date to power those Intel Core 6 Octo CPUs running Windows Vista !
We use plasma to help bring atoms together to fuse.
Why not accellerate the plasma to a speed that helps this out by building the tokamak into something like a particle accellerator/collider ? Build two rings just like a collider but instead use plasma.
It would definitely overcome repulsion by atoms.
8 years to build a test reactor? When I was a lad I had to build three in a single weekend, in the snow, and it was uphill both ways! Once I only managed two and I was beaten with a leather belt. Quite right too! You kids these days...
It's a little naive to generalize and claim that just because the Japanese are involved, this project will be completed ahead of schedule.
Mmmm.. Donuts
I guess this has lots and lots of issues, due to which it was taken out.. but anyways here goes
-
The problem now is that there is no way of controlling fusion.
Then dont control it.
Have some huge contraption made ready such that a huge explosion at some specific point can be used to set up potential energy reservoirs which then can be tapped slowly and efficiently.
Now, explode anything, and now we do have a means to obtain energy from the same.
How etc is very vauge, since this is just a germinating idea. But if this is possible, then we have fusion that can be tapped (albeit inefficeintly).
rajmohan_h@yahoo.com
"Project estimated to cost 10bn euros and will run for 35 years"
If it takes 8 years to build, why does it take 34 years before you can demonstrate it?
Stupid sexy Flanders.
well, it's not in spain, but pretty sure provence is close enough to pump out the mediterranean and re-seal the pillars of hercules and the suez. the best farmland is on the bottom near Rome and Marseille and Istanbul. but best be sure to have a boat handy in case pesky eco-terrorists bomb the fusion plant...
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
If we don't have affordable fusion power completed and boring by 2040, we're doomed.
This project by the world's biggest operators of petrofuel companies and deposits (including coal) looks more like a giant anvil they're handing to fusion science/engineering than any effort to deliver our post-petro energy tech.
--
make install -not war
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In case you don't already know here's the advantage of Fusion power over fision: The waste product.
? ch=biztech&sc=&id=13992&pg=1
D-T fuel cycle Fusion produces Helium.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power
Fission power produces low radioactive waste which can be buried
and also high radioactive waste (cesium-137 and strontium-90) which is too radioactive to be buried (they give off enough heat to boil ground water into steam. Steam could corrode the containers or break up surrounding rock, raising uncertainty about secure burial.)
The cesium and strontium has to be kept in a storage pool that circulates cooling water for 150 years, before they cool down enough to be able to be buried.
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx
Both fission and fusion produce neutrons as well, which makes the reaction chamber radioactive and means that the power plant has to be buried after it's decommisioned
The ISS was put up a few years ago piece by piece and cost over a hundred billion dollars just in construction; NASA allocates another $10-20BN a YEAR for it. What did it get us? A plaything for the world's richest people, something for space fetishists to admire ("the sense of WONDER!") and something to put in our kids textbooks (which even in the US, they're starting to have to share because school budgets are getting slashed.)
A hundred billion dollars buys a lot of cement, plywood, 2x4's, and tin roofing. Buys a lot of wheat/rice/corn. It also buys a lot of tractors, schoolbooks, etc. To put things in perspective: the US's largest construction project, The Big Dig in Boston, MA, was unbelievably extensive and complex; 10 years, countless engineering challenges, and they overhauled Boston's inner highways and tunnels while keeping the city (mostly) moving. Despite the problems with cost overruns and fraud on the part of various contrators, it came in at about $15BN for a decade of work.
The 2005 Federal budget included about $65B for the department of Health and Human services, $53B for the department of Education, $50B for the Department of Transportation, $30B for the Department of Housing and Urban Development. That's pretty much the meat and potatoes of all the major social things (well, except law enforcement). It totals $150B, and that is to handle the needs of about $230M people in one of the better-off nations in the world. The cost of "doing business" government-wise in Africa is probably a fraction of that; you don't need 5 tomes of federal highway standards, for example, to build a road from A to B. You just grade things, put down some tar, and stick some signs in the ground, and you're 75% there.
Given what a Billion Dollars can do in terms of basic human necessities and a country's infrastructure...yeah, I do get really pissed off every time I think about the International Space Station. Tom Toles, a Washington Post cartoonist, drew up this great comic on the endless circular nature of NASA.
Please help metamoderate.
Why SHUOLD it be in the US?
There is a problem here.
40+ years at the current fuel consumption levels will enable us to produce limitless energy - but not to be able to produce/maintain the infrastructure to deliver it. No matter how you slice it up, transportation of supplies needs OIL. Horses and llamas are not an option.
Elephants - maybe.
We're doomed!
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
The amount of money US spends on war in Iraq in one month is about enough to build one fusion reactor. But then again, why bother building fusion reactors when US can liberate Iraq from its oil?
You will find that by and large the peopel involved aren't really about any soltuions, they are just about screaming about problems. If you tell them "Ok I agree it's a problem, what do we do about it?" they tend not to have any real answers. The only thing they are ahppy with is you giving them money to continue their cause.
So it's no supprise this is getting protested as well. It's sad, really, because there are environmentalists that really care about the environment, and want to preserve it while also finding ways to give humans what they need, however they are vastly outnumbered by people who just feel like screaming about the cause du jour without really getting educated on the facts behind it.
I bet there are a couple hundred smart engineers/physicists out there that would make this happen.
****
"I'd never want to join a club that would have me as a member" - G. Marx
The seven-party consortium, which includes the European Union, the US, Japan, China, Russia and others, agreed last year to build Iter in Cadarache, in the southern French region of Provence
I wonder if their logo will look like this.
If you don't get it, go watch Contact
With the first link, the chain is forged.
The NASA PR machine has used the "constant repetition" technique to get Congress and the public to believe that the ISS has something to do with science. Apparently with some success. But this does not change the fact that there is no science, and there are no results.
That isn't say anything regarding their overall success, but the American strategy doesn't seem to be taking the terrorist's strategy into account, which is this: Make the Americans spend lots of resources fighting the war.
Taking that strategy into account would mean that America would lower expenditures to trick the leaders into movement that increases their visiblity to try to goad America into reraising their expenditures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HHOa v=0RZFL8gu
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquygen
http://www.wave3.com/Global/story.asp?S=4934566&n
http://www.phact.org/e/bgas.htm
http://www.waterfuelconverters.com/
And if it ends up melting down and blowing a large chunk off of the Earth, all we'll lose is France.
Godspeed!
Not to knock their plan... but let's say it does take 36 more years. We will assume the following variables: the scientists working on it are PhD's, meaning we can also assume they spent 8 years in college. Average college starting age of 18, + 8 years, means the average college-graduation-age of these scientists should be around 26. Now, assume the likely fact that these men (and women!) are probably not all immediatelly being pulled into the project from college, rather they probably have a good ten years or so working in related fields. Add 10 years of work experience to the 26 year old's life and you get 36. If the project is suppossed to take 36 years, add that to the person's age now and you get... (no, don't open up "calculator", you can do it in your head)... 72. So, it's a (VERY) wild estimate that the median age for these scientists will be 72 when this project is suppossed to be complete. Doesn't that seem illogical? I mean, they probably WON'T be working on this project when they're 72. This means the project (especially the upper-management people who are probably even older than 36) will likely have important positions change hands (maybe even more than once). This has the potential to create political clashes (in the work environment, I'm not talking about 'dubya vs. *insert whatever here*). It seems like this is QUITE the undertaking. Quite the undertaking indeed. On a further note, something I just realized is that maybe the reason the "expected project length" is so long is because the first group of scientists is going to slack off (i.e. /. all day) and then when they retire, the second wave will have to haul butt to get the project done "on time".
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
It's BS.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Unless you can design as well as get approval and aquire rights of way for much larger towers you can't really raise the voltage much higher.
You simply have to move the wires further apart. That takes structure.
Insulating the wires with materials such as rubber is one obvious solution that just does'nt work. Look at limits on underground/underwater cables as well as the costs associated.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Thorium reactors have more promise. They are safer, simpler, and cheaper.
It's that they know eventually some of these SUVs will be resold and used by rednecks (like myself) to wreck their nice quite woods with our trucks and guns. Yeahaw, what the hell am I doing here at the computer...
They think if I had unlimited cheap energy I'd just use it for something distructive but fun. They're right.
I'll be happy with a hydrogen powered Unimog (not one of those litte Hummers) and a rail gun.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We already have a huge Fusion reactor in the sky blasting us with masses of free energy. Spending billions on an experimental Fusion reactor is all well and good but it might just be a good idea to spend similar amounts of money working out ways to cheaply produce highly efficient solar cells.
How does government funding for photovoltaics compare to funding for Fusion research? Does anyone have the figures? I've never heard of any grand government push to make dirt cheap 50% efficient solar cells. Imagine if you could buy a 1m square 50% efficient solar cell for $10. That sort of technology could change the balance of power in the world.
I quote from Wikipedia:
I don't understand your objection. No one claims that any energy is being obtained for nothing, just that electrons can move through the superconductor without resistance.
Sean
I think the point here is that literally ANYTHING would have been a better use of our funds than the mess in Iraq. We've spent the $300B dollars, and the situation is objectively far worse than it would have been if we'd simply done nothing.
Sean
Wait a minute... didn't France also just win the giant new underground supercollider project? Why do they get both? Aren't any other countries allowed to have large scientific projects, or are the French gonna hog them all?
Hey, France: QUIT BEING SO GREEDY!
But will that meet the system requirements for Duke Nukem Forever?
50% efficency from photovoltaics is impossible. Study some solid state physics. You're price point is equally unrealistic and way beyond what is needed to make solar a realistic option.
Besides solar cells are already an industry with a market. They have all the interest they need in making better cells. Markets will bring forward better solar cells over time. It's like asking the government to spend money making GE jet engines better (granting the complications: Government gives tax credits for R&D plus the military is likely the single biggest customer).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You'd need the Fischer-Tropsch process, and water electrolysis, and a method of carbon sequestration.
I wonder if it is on the site of EuroDisney?
I wonder what the return would be if we spent the same amount on drilling technology and geothermal power plants.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Disposing of hot nuclear waste has been a research topic for 50 years. There are numerous promising techniques in development. They generally involve bombardment with neutrons to force the elements to mutate to a stable isotope. Here is a naive google search, please get up to date with this before you hammer out the usual anti-fission stuff. We're going to be up to our armpits in water soon unless we make fission better. Fusion is taking too long and it actually may not work.
goog bombardment search
http://www.theinternationalconsortium.com/ [theinterna...ortium.com]
In places where geothermal is easy to get to (the low hanging fruit), it's being used. See Iceland for a good example of this. However, the energy output isn't even close to what we could get with fusion.
Geothermal, like solar, wind, etc, is a power source that draws passively from the environment, and all forms of passive power generation hinge on location. Solar power works in sunny climates, and in space. Tidal power works on the coast. Hyrdo works where there's a river to harness. None of these things work just anywhere.
You ask why we don't just drill a deep hole to get geothermal power regardless of location. I would ask you why you don't think we should construct deep canals to generate hyrdo power anywhere? After all, it's the same idea; alter the local enviroment to provide us with power.
When you look at it that way, you begin to see why it's not going to work terribly well - you can't expect to expand massive amounts of energy just to get at a passive energy source, especially not one that that's only moderately powerful. How deep do you have to dig to get at abundant geothermal energy in most parts of the world, and how long would it take to break even once you harnessed it?
Fusion, like nuclear, isn't passive. We aren't harnessing an existing energy source we're making our own. That generally avoids the aforementioned problems, and lets you put your power plant where it's needed, not where it's geographically convienient.
Also, side note, you are aware that fusion is an awful lot hotter than 1000 degrees, right? If it occured at those temperatures, we'd have the reactors already.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
The bits I was having trouble with were:
1) torch is cold enough to touch (yet hotter then the surface of the sun!)
Well, yes, but that's because you're stupid.
2) Claim that more power comes out then whats put in electricity wise.
Again, stop reading Slashbot for your science education. Such things are possible, regardless of what the idiots (including you) blather on about.
So again, it's because you're stupid.
"3) Fox presenting it as something truthful (should be on some sort of consumer action/anti scam prog if you ask me)"
Yes, but nobody ever asks you, and moronic comments like this are why.
At least it demonstrates the arrogance that pervades your being. Of course the other side can't ever be telling the truth. That would mean that you DON'T have a monopoly on what's true.
Why should your thinking reflect reality? Better to assume your opinion is fact (regardless of the mile long lines of people smarter than you telling you otherwise).
I love pointing out what an asshole you are. You make it so easy, I could do it for every post if there weren't DOZENS OF THEM EVERY FUCKING DAY, ALL DAY LONG. I have a life, so I can't keep up with that kind of shit storm.
If they constructed it in.... Antarctica, would it produce "Cold Fusion"? ;-P Sorry had to get the Pun out of my head.
-Eric
-Eric