China Claims Successful Fusion Power Test

SeaDour writes, "China claims to have carried out a successful test of its experimental thermonuclear fusion reactor. But what exactly made this test 'successful' is not clear. From the article: 'Xinhua cited the scientists as saying that deuterium and tritium atoms had been fused together at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for nearly three seconds. The report did not specify whether the device... had succeeded at producing more energy than it consumed, the main obstacle to making fusion commercially viable.'" China is a participant in the 10-nation ITER project to build a fusion reactor in the south of France by 2015. The article quotes the research head of ITER as saying, "It was important for China to show that it is part of the club. Here are English language versions of the Chinese news release: announcement, background.

Comments

Everyone will be doing it soon...

[jbeaupre]

Pretty soon even high school students will be making fusion reactors. Oh wait, they already are. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch_fus or

Re:Oh...

[oc255]

I never thought about the heat. If it produces more energy than it consumes, could we cool the planet off? An A/C unit moves heat around but creates waste heat, could we overcome this by moving it off-planet? Set up reflecting discs?

Seems to me, limitless energy trumps everything because we could use the energy to fix any problems we had with generating it.

Re:Oh...

[jeffmeden]

It's not a white hole energy source, its an energy derived from atoms that fuse together (much like our sun). So no, its not limitless, you need to keep it fed with fuel. And that was the least absurd part of your question; please explain how you plan to build an air conditioner outside earth's atmosphere, where theres *NO AIR*...

Heat Pollution

[Kadin2048]

Actually this is a premise to a series of ecological disasters described in the Reality Dysfunction series of SF books by Peter F. Hamilton.

It's mentioned only peripherally, but the general idea is that the widespread use of fusion power and the vastly increased energy consumption, combined with population and other types of biosphere-bashing, have led to super-storms that basically scour anything in their path.

A little farfetched at present, but an interesting scenario. You'd really have to have "Mr. Fusions" on every car/truck/bus/lawnmower/house, all consuming gigawatts of power, before you would start to come anywhere near to the amount of heat the Earth takes in (and consequently radiates back out, since it stays at a basically fixed average temperature) from the Sun.

However if you did manage to produce some sort of limitless energy source, and just started using it everywhere, it doesn't seem physically impossible that the average temperature of the planet would go up. It would have to -- it's a simple Newton's Law of Cooling problem. The temperature would increase until the energy flowing out into space equaled the energy flowing in from the sun and from other sources; given that the energy flows out at a rate that's proportional to the difference in temperature between the planet and the surrounding space.

Re:Heat Pollution

[Ironsides]

Ever since I came across something mentioned in Niven's Known Space I've been trying to figure out how to cool off a planet. Trouble is, everything I think of basically generates more energy than it could ever disipate except one. Set up a reallllly long piece of metal like a space elevator, only make it out of two metals. The temperature difference would create an electric current that you could then use for energy.

On the other hand you could just set up really really big radiator fins to help cool the earth instead.

Re:Containment?

[wall0159]

While I agree with most of your post, I question this:
"...photoelectric solar panels are already close to their maximum possible energy effeciency..."

my understanding is that current PV cells are only around 30% efficient. This suggests to me that there is large room for improvement.

'No new R&D is required....'
This is so true. we don't need to wait for a magic bullet. We already have the technological solutions to our energy problems - we just lack the political and social will to implement the necessary changes.

Efficiency of photovoltaics

[FooAtWFU]

Well, there are real theoretical limits to the efficiency of a photovoltaic solar cell, and they are significantly less than 100%. I found this 2002 article with a search:

One of the most fundamental limitations on solar cell efficiency is the band gap of the semiconductor from which the cell is made. In a photovoltaic cell, negatively doped (n-type) material, with extra electrons in its otherwise empty conduction band, makes a junction with positively doped (p-type) material, with extra holes in the band otherwise filled with valence electrons. Incoming photons of the right energy -- that is, the right color of light -- knock electrons loose and leave holes; both migrate in the junction's electric field to form a current. Photons with less energy than the band gap slip right through. For example, red light photons are not absorbed by high-band-gap semiconductors. While photons with energy higher than the band gap are absorbed -- for example, blue light photons in a low-band gap semiconductor -- their excess energy is wasted as heat.

The maximum efficiency a solar cell made from a single material can achieve in converting light to electrical power is about 30 percent; the best efficiency actually achieved is about 25 percent. To do better, researchers and manufacturers stack different band gap materials in multijunction cells.

Dozens of different layers could be stacked to catch photons at all energies, reaching efficiencies better than 70 percent, but too many problems intervene. When crystal lattices differ too much, for example, strain damages the crystals. The most efficient multijunction solar cell yet made -- 30 percent, out of a possible 50 percent efficiency -- has just two layers.

So. Things might theoretically get better, but you might consider just how realistic your hopes for improvement are.

Re:China's definition of success, likely a lie.

[VitrosChemistryAnaly]

There was that incident a while back of a [b]North Korean[/b] scientist faking his results in a cloning experiment. That scientist then came clean and blamed the enormous pressure on scientists in that society/government. Perhaps the GP was making an assumtion based on similar political structures as opposed to racial background. I admit being extra sceptical about press releases coming out of the PRC.

It was a South Korean scientist who admitted to faking his results.

You may not know, but South Koreans are not Communists.

However, I am a scientist. And, guess what, my wife is from South Korea. We've had a number of discussions about Hwang Woo-suk (the scientist in question).

I can state, as a scientist, that there's a lot of pressure to get certain results. If you don't get some kind of results you don't get grants. You don't get grants, you can't continue your research.

My wife states, as a South Korean, that there can be a lot of cultural pressure to succeed and that it can be quite overwhelming at times.

I think that the GP (my GGP) was saying that due to all the cultural pressures it may be too tempting for Chinese scientists to fake results.