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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. "
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.
And maybe the traditional 36 years is now 34 years.
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.
Physics tells us that the energy lost from transmitting electricity (as heat) is RI^2, and power is IV (I = Current, V = Voltage, R = Resistance). So to send lots of power without much heating, you use high voltages and low current. This is whats done currently, to the point where the wires can't really take much more voltage (well, not cheaply anyway).
There's only one proposed solution I'm aware of, which is using high temperature superconductors as wires. These have very low resistance (in some cases theoretically 0) so reduce the energy lost by ohmic heating (the RI^2 thing). Plus they can conduct around 10* the voltage of current wires. The only problem is there still very difficult to make at all, let alone into wires, having only been discovered in 1986. The link below has some more info,
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/electricity/publicatioPerfect date to power those Intel Core 6 Octo CPUs running Windows Vista !
No, they're putting it in France in case it blows up.
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
in some cases theoretically 0)
It's not theoretically 0, it's really actually 0. It's a macroscopic manifestation of a quantum-level effect. In high-temperature superconductors, there is a finite resistance, but in 'classical' superconductors, it's really zero: current flows with no applied voltage.
The problem with superconductors as a transmission line isn't so much the temperature (although that is a problem). It's not even the materials properties (high-temperature superconductors are basically ceramics. They're brittle and not very strong, which means they aren't very useful as wires). It's the fact that, in addition to a critical temperature Tc above which they don't superconduct, superconductors also have a critical magnetic field and a critical current density. Exceed any of those, and they stop being superconductors, which can lead to some quite catastrophic failures. High-temperature superconductors have much higher critical field strengths than low-temperature ones, and higher critical current densities, but you can't just run all the current you want through them and expect them to not blow up/melt/spontaneously disassemble.
Actually... even in residential areas (US and Canada), the line voltage on overhead transmission wires is typically 13800 volts, and long distance power transmission is done at 45000 volts and higher, up to 500 kV for really high power, long distance lines. These voltages are high enough that you need to use 3, 4, or six-wire bundles (spaced about 8 inches or so apart) to keep the electric field gradient low enough so you don't get corona discharge around the wires.
Less is more.
Actually, progress does increase with economic resources thrown at it. It's a derivative of Moore's law.
I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your brochure.
Please explain more fully how you get "progress increases with economic resources thrown at it" from "the complexity of integrated circuits, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles every 24 months".
Perhaps you didn't mean "derivative", but there's no way to make sense of that statement that I can see.
You are especially being disingenuous by using Moore's law as your implied cost/benefit curve, as nothing other than electronic circuits has experienced an exponential curve for so many decades. You have to consider the cost/benefits when doling out money. Fusion is on anything but an exponential curve; in fact it's damn near on a constant curve, making almost zero progress over time, as evidenced by how it's been "40-50 years in the future" for 40-50 years now.
A weakened version of your claim, that all else being equal more dollars will progress more than less dollars, is trivially true but useless, because that progress could very well be very minimal even for a gigantic investment, and perhaps ironically given your argument, fusion is almost certainly the canonical example of that case.
Only for DC current. AC current always has a finite resistive component to it.
Regarding critical current, one could effectively run up a huge potential (eg millions of volts) and send a trickling DC supercurrent to the receiving station. Of course this brings with it all sorts of high voltage problems beyond the typical substations have dealing with high-tension wires. One being the much larger potentials, the other being efficiently converting DC to DC (as opposed to transforming the AC, as traditional power stations do).
The other thing mentioned is very true, regarding catastrophic failure of the lines. I work with superconducting magnets, where to pack a huge magnetic field, you need tiny wires to get enough wrappings in a small space. So we're basically putting 70+ amps through a 22 gauge wire. That's all fine and dandy when the magnet is immersed in liquid helium at 4K, but if you do something dumb, like change the magnet current too quickly or go past the critical current, you can cause part of the magnet to go normal (as opposed to superconducting), in which case that 70A is going to dissipate LOTS of heat, causing more parts of the magnet to go normal, and ultimately cause the whole magnet to go normal, dissipating the induction energy stored in the magnet as heat, which can boil the liquid helium vigourously, build up pressures, damage the magnet and electronics, etc. Very dangerous. Now imagine a similar scenario but in some transission wires at a potential of millions of volts running through a forest or a neighborhood.