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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.
"We're pleased to announce we are still here to report the results."
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100 million degrees Celsius for nearly three seconds.
I think someone needs a CoolerMaster for that one!
bad news, the coolermaster consumed all the net energy
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It was successful in that it fused deuterium and tritium. Of course, the break even point doesn't matter. To be economical, the reactor realistically has to hit ignition, which only the ITER could hope to do.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
Achieving a net energy gain is not the main obstacle to making fusion commercially viable. That has been done quite successfully. There is no problem passing break-even. It is ignition we are trying to achieve now. That is, a fusion reaction which produces enough heat to cause more fusion, provided enough fuel. If you're going to write an article about fusion, at least know something about the state of the field. Journalists should all be required to read the relevant wikipedia articles before publishing something about science.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
This is a fusion reactor. There is no nuclear pile - that would be a feature of a fission reactor, which is a different technology altogether.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
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
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Magnetic containment. This isn't like fission reactions. There isn't a "pile." Just a couple of grams of non-radioactive deuterium and radioactive but fairly benign tritium. In the event that the magnets somehow fail, the reaction will stop, with just a bit of erosion on the sides of the reactor.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
It's a superconducting tokamak.
The new part is the fact that it uses superconducting magnets. Tokamaks have been used since the 70's.
This post climbed Mt. Washington.
Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced they had successfully tried a domestically developed fusion device in the eastern Chinese city of Hefei, Xinhua news agency said.
...
The scientists called the device "the first of its kind in operation in the world", but the report did not specify what tests it had passed.
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. - what they are not telling us is that their sofistimacated gizmotron is based on a Yin Yang Dragon technology, which employs 500,000,000 manual workers, each one only having to heat up one atom by 1/5th of a degree by applying the power of the Chi.
Since the labor for all the labor only cost about $5 total, the reactor was able to produce an energy surplus, a feat previously considered to be improbable.
You can't handle the truth.
What goes around, comes around
Engineering is the art of compromise.
But that is the law of physics. The extra energy comes from the mass which is converted to energy. Had it said "producing more mass/energy than it consumed", then that would be against the laws of physics.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Good for them.
I hope the test was practical in nature, and will lead to useful contributions from China towards the achievement of practical fusion power.
This is good news. I look forward to following China's future progress and contributions.
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Just don't make her hyperventilate
"Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on the roof and gets stuck." -George Carlin
or even more accurately, Tokamaks have been consuming far more energy than they put out for over 30 years. But governments still throw billions at them rather than use already operating fusion reactor in the sky.
Though ITER is being built soon, it's being designed as its going up. I'm involved with creating an H- ion beam to inject the plasma (called neutral beam injection). The idea is to fire a high energy beam of neutral hydrogen into the plasma to heat it up (neutral so the atoms can travel through the containment magnets without deflection).
So even if the Chinese managed to build a reactor that beats previous records, it's a long while before fusion powers your home. Nevertheless I consider Fusion research to be one of the most important fields; it takes no imagination to understand what it would mean if nations could be powered on water.
... do they call it The US Syndrome
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Actually, you don't lose mass when you burn something. Chemical combustion converts potential chemical energy into heat, but the end products mass as much as the starting ones. All the energy in a gallon of gas is the energy that went into producing it.
But technically yes, when you talk about fusion reactors you should say "converted more energy from mass than it took to fuse said mass". So the phrasing from the article/summary is technically in error, but most people who know their physics can grasp what they actually mean.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Actually, you don't lose mass when you burn something. Chemical combustion converts potential chemical energy into heat, but the end products mass as much as the starting ones.
Actually, you always lose relativistic mass when you release potential energy. A gallon of gasoline is more massive than the sum of the masses of its individual atoms (but not by much), due to the electromagnetic potential energy of the chemical bonds. By general relativity, any place in space with a nonzero mass or energy density is warped. Thus, the potential energy (think of it as being contained in the electromagnetic field between the atoms) actually contributes slightly to the effective mass of the system.
The fraction of relativistic mass lost when you burn a gallon of gas is probably so small as to be unmeasurable by any known measurement device, but it's there (at least if GR is correct).
If you have some design for a solar power generator that can even come close to the output of a fusion reactor, then please, by all means, post it. Or patent it - I'm sure you'd make a fortune.
Of course I somehow doubt that. After all, photoelectric solar panels are already close to their maximum possible energy effeciency. We could get far better effeciency out of them if we put them in orbit and beamed the power back, given that doing so would get around the problems associated with the atmosphere, but our current space program doesn't even come close to adequate for such a task.
For a point of comparison, fusion is already hitting breakeven. So much for "wasted" money these past thirty years, eh? The fact that something takes time and effort does not make it worthless.
If you seriously want power from sunlight, burn oil or coal. After all, the energy in fossil fuels comes from sunlight introduced into the biosphere millions of years ago. In fact one could argue that fossil fuels are the worlds oldest natural solar battery. And unlike solar energy, which loses much in transmission, oil is easily transportable. You can extract and use it in places where the sun doesn't shine.
Of course, it also burns dirty as hell. Even ignoring climate change, burning fossil fuels releases all sorts of crap into the air, from heavy metals, to soot, to radioactives. But lord knows, if you want to utilize that "fusion reactor up in the sky", you can do so today for all your energy needs - no fancy new tech required.
Plus, who ever said fusion and solar were incompatible solutions? Governments spend a pittance on both of them (yeah it sounds like a lot, but look at their overall budget for comparison), so impling that they favour one over the other is utter rubbish. If you want to get really technical, some of the budget for the space program over the past decades paid for solar panel development, as well as things like fuel cell technology, so it's hardly as though green power has been ignored.
We can pursue solar power in the mean time without the assistance of the governement - go out and buy some for your own use, get your home off the grid (assuming you haven't done so already). No new R&D is required to make solar a viable partial solution to our energy needs, and at the same time, there is little R&D that could ever turn it into a full solution. Conversely we cannot pursue fusion power in the same fashion - the goals are too long term for the private sector to be interested in. Your point is a classic false dichotomy.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
A better question would be how they managed to cram everyone in China into the same place at the same time. Methinks someone used a "noclip" cheat
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
Only the NSA would think that a spy satellite is needed in order to read a press release.
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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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Well, the "Me so horny" prostitute was Vietnamese (from the movie Full Metal Jacket), and it's the Japanese that have problems pronouncing Ls, not the Chinese. So, besides mixing up three different asian countries with distinct languages and cultures, your ethnic insult was spot on. Way to go!
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.
If I ever invent a time machine, the first mission would be to make sure the process of fusion was renamed to hot non-bomby difficult controllable process, or HNBDCP, to make sure these concepts were never, ever, confused again!
Go to any elite engineering school and take a survey of the top 10% of the students there. I would be shocked if at least 50% of those students are not chinese. I don't mean chinese americans, I mean chinese from china.
Some of the smartest people I know are chinese. What makes you think they can't do it? Is it because they are not white? Are chinese incabable of doing research? Are the chinese by nature liars?
evil is as evil does
You, Sir, have just invented another way of telling people where to "stick it". I salute thee.
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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.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Since you are modded offtopic, I will reply as AC. I didn't read the GP, but as a "telephone test fluent" speaker of Cantonese (American white-boy), and a passable speaker of Mandarin, I can state unequivocally that Chinese (from China and Taiwan) have trouble with the letter L. It is just not the problem that most people think it is (it is unrelated to the R sound). The following is my experience based on verbal interaction with ladies^W people from Guandong (Guangzhou, Foshan, Zhongshan, Taishan, Chaozhou, Xinhui, and Kaiping), Hubei(Wuhan), Shanghai, Beijing , Tianjin, and Taiwan (Xinzhu and Taibei):
(1) as a final sound in words like "table" (tay-bo), "pool" (poo-), etc. This derives from the fact that in Cantonese/Mandarin the only voiced consonantal endings are M/N/NG.
(2) as an initial (Southern Chinese speakers and people from Western Hubei). It sometimes comes out as the letter N (the reverse is more common, N coming out as L).
This pattern is fading in Hong Kong Cantonese over the last 30 years. The solution was to eliminate N as an initial across the board in Cantonese (almost, everyone now says "lei5 ho2 ma3, but many still say "ni1 do6" for "here"). In English articulation the letters N and L differ little, with the significant difference being L having lateral airflow around the tongue and exiting the mouth. N is all nose. Many Cantonese speakers when they say English words being with L, the initial sound seems almost to be N and L simultaneously with the N starting a few milliseconds before the L.
The conversion of N to L in HK leads to humorous statements from British educated Cantonese speakers saying after a tough day, "I'm completely lacquered." Of course they mean "knackered", both are funny in their way.
Congratulation on having the wang2 ba1 removed from your dan4 (828) (inside joke to parent).
I'm pretty sure that happens here in the capitalist west too. It's not a communist thing but a human thing.