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Green Light For ITER Fusion Project
brian0918 writes, "A seven-member international consortium has signed a formal agreement to build the $12.8 billion International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). From the article: 'Representatives from China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States signed the pact, sealing a decade of negotiations. The project aims to research a clean and limitless alternative to dwindling fossil fuel reserves, although nuclear fusion remains an unproven technology.' ITER will be built 'in Cadarache, southern France, over the course of a decade, starting in 2008.'" If ITER is successful, a commercial reactor could be built by 2040. Funny, I seem to remember fusion researchers from Livermore in the 70s say that commercial power was 20 years away...
Big science, indeed.
The owls are not what they seem
I for one welcome our new experimental fusion reactor funding overlords.
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Estimates of when fusion would be a viable energy source didn't take into account years of under-funding. ITER could have been done years ago.
no opec nations getting in on this action?
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The Telegraph and several other news outlets are reporting on the international deal to build the world's most advanced nuclear fusion reactor that was signed in today. Representatives of the EU, the US, Japan, India, Russia, South Korea and China signed the ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) agreement in Paris, finalising the project which aims to develop nuclear fusion as a viable energy source to fossil fuels. According to the ITER consortium, fusion power offers the potential of "environmentally benign, widely applicable and essentially inexhaustible" electricity, properties that they believe will be needed as world energy demands increase while simultaneously greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced,justifying the expensive research project.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Shut up you fucking hippies, get a haircut.
Seriously, this -is- an effort to fight global warming, and if you weren't so dogmatically opposed to anything involving OMG ATOMS!! you'd see that.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
1. Commercial fusion power.
2. True AI
3. Duke Nukem Forever
???
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
I figure that'll be done about 5 years after the teenagers in Michigan solve the worlds energy problems.
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
"in the 70s say that commercial power was 20 years away..."
just like when everything bad(tm) that could happen to the planet was going to happen by the year 2000. "by the year 2000 the oceans will be empty of all fish!" that sort of thing. 2000 got here and low and behold none of the bad things(tm) happened. now everything is pushed off another 20 years or so. when in doubt put it 20 years in the future.
Mod parent up please. That's dead-on.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
I hoped Google was going to rise to the occasion and implement fusion for $200M.
The U.S. would resist ratification...because we didn't sign Kyoto...? But we didn't sign Kyoto because we didn't like the economic downsides, not because we as a country somehow like the concept of global warming and are hoping for beachfront property in West Virginia.
The second statement is also fun. So a bunch of nations finally get together and decide to do something that could, someday, potentially give us an alternative to carbon-emitting energy sources, and they pan it as distracting? What gives. Talk about not being happy with anything.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Yeah. Right.
Please google "shale oil reserves".
668: Neighbour of the Beast
If it is just $12.8 billion? Why doesn't the US just build one on its own if it is that cheap? Keeping this funded by one nation would avoid all the hassles of international disagreements. It would seem that the Fusion is the most promising path to being able to sustain our civilization with its energy needs. So the cause would be worthy of more than one simultaneous effort. For the cost of sustaining the Iraqi occupation for one year, the US alone could have 8 ITER like projects. Maybe tokamak style reactors aren't the most efficient, but if you had say 100 smaller projects going simultaneously then different approaches could be explored simultaneously with the likelihood of success much greater.
In Soviet Russia, reactor fuses YOU!
Oh no... it's the future.
He hosts a science radio show in the bay area and I recall him talking about this technology on one of his broadcasts
He mentioned that it was researched @ Lawrence Livermore (as mentioned in the post) and that it showed promise
As per Dr. Bill, as is the norm, he blamed the 'eco-wackos' for not allowing this technology to become commercialized
Sheesh... I thought for sure they would volunteer to host the project.
Personally, I am hopeful that the other small project will work. It would be funny to see a 200M project succeed when govs. will not fund it, but fund large monster projects.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Funny, I seem to remember fusion researchers from Livermore in the 70s say that commercial power was 20 years away...
It was, for the longest time. This century, it will be 35 years away for the rest of the century.
$12.8billion is nothing in the scale of the economies of the countries involved, and much less the combined economies of all parties. That sum represents about 0.5% of the US federal budget for 2006. Why on Earth has it taken so long? Ten years ago it should have been a matter of "How much? $100m a year for fifteen years? Who do I make the check out to?". We'd practically have the thing working by now.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
What message are we sending to Kim Jong Il here? We have China, the European Union, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United States all cooperating to build a giant nuclear device, and then to tell the one country in that area that isn't involved, North Korea, to abstain from any nuclear operations or face sanctions or worse...
stuff |
Israel to produce synthetic oil from low quality shale at $17 a barrel: http://www.upi.com/Energy/view.php?StoryID=2006110 7-070924-5161r
668: Neighbour of the Beast
I wonder if they stuck a sign outside of the room, drawn in crayon that said "No Iranians Allowed!"
This is my signature. There are many like it but this one is mine.
I worked at D3D 'way back in the 1980s, when people thought breakeven would be achieved before the turn of the millennium. If as much effort were put into electrostatic confinement (the Farnsworth fusor we keep hearing so much about) that might have actually happened. The advantage of the Farnsworth fusor is that it uses a confinement field with a divergence term!
The magnetic field has no divergence (there are no magnetic monopoles) so it is extremely difficult to confine anything -- you can only slow down the leakage. That comes with some problems -- for example, it's very hard to get anything into or out of a magnetic bottle (as in a Tokamak) unless it is electrically neutral. Accelerating and heating the plasma are hard because the energy sources you can use (manipulation of the magnetic field itself, either at radiofrequency (RF heating) or near DC (betatron heating), themselves destabilize the confinement.
D3D used the innovation of firing neutral atoms in through the magnetic bottle, which provides material and heat into the plasma (the atoms generally ionize once they get in -- and then they're trapped like the rest of the plasma). The problem there is that we have no technology to accelerate neutral particles -- so they had these little tiny particle accelerators that fired their beams through GIANT TANKS of reactant that was intended to neutralize the input beams on-the-fly. Some small percentage of the particles got neutralized, and the rest bounced off the outside of the magnetic bottle into a beam dump. Seeing the size of the equipment made me realize that tokamak fusion is probably a dead end for power generation -- if it can be made to work at all (in the sense of achieving, say, 10x heat gain), the ancillary equipment is HUGE and it's not at all clear that economies of scale are enough to make it worthwhile.
The Farnsworth-Hirsch type fusors have the advantage that you can fire in charged particles -- they rattle around and lose some of their kinetic energy, and after that they're trapped in a normal potential well. Like muon-catalyzed fusion machines, the Farnsworth fusor is in a race to get the energy out of a fusible nucleus before it leaks away -- but fresh hydrogen or deuterium ions are much, much cheaper than muons, and it seems to have a better chance of working.
(Remember muon-catalyzed fusion? Muons act like electrons, only more massive -- so atoms that have an electron replaced with a muon get smaller [it's a quantum thing], bringing the nuclei closer together and boosting the fusion rate. You can get a pretty high fusion rate (a few fusions per muon per microsecond) at close to room temperature in pretty tame materials. The problem is that muons only last about two microseconds before decaying into energy, neutrinos, and electrons -- so you have to make several hundred fusions per microsecond, to make the energy worth the effort of making a muon in the first place. Nobody was able to make it pay off.)
So basically people want to halt this research because it was DELAYED?
.. maybe since they themselves can't and never have contributed anything good. Maybe the estimate is off by 100 years. So what?? The potential benefits are enormous.
So what if they said it was "20 years away" 50 years ago. Maybe it was a mistaken estimate. It doesnt mean the damn thing is IMPOSSIBLE. People want to focus on negatives, especially if something's negatives are minor they want to amplify it
Cheap energy means cheaper products. Cheaper cars (cost of iron ore to iron price will be reduced and the cost of running the machinery that creates the cars). Cheaper food via mechanized harvesting or hydroponics. Heck, people may only have to work 20 hours a week to be able to afford everything they need for living.
I think I can speak to that.
The problem is that we currently are putting a massive amount of investment dollars in an unproven technology - fusion power - which has no proven results, when the money could be spent today on actual projects such as tidal energy, solar energy, wind energy, etc that would deliver real change by reducing C02 emissions.
However, I think both arguments ignore the real problem, which is that the use of oil and natural gas are both subsidized very heavily (taxes, investment and exploration credits) when if they were not subsidized, the market would shift more money to such alternatives and let us do research and development on fusion power reactors.
If you look at the research and subsidy pie, more than 95 percent goes to oil and gas. Get rid of most of that and put that towards fusion, and the market itself will expand use of solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, etc due to market pressures.
Sometimes, you have to walk up to the elephant in the room (oil) and push it over with a large mallet.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
To quote Niven/Pournelle, "the air's already full of crap from fossil fuel plants and we're running out of fossil fuels, and damned fools keep delaying the nuclear plants that might get us out of that particular box."
Nuclear waste may be nasty stuff, but at least it stays in one place where you can keep an eye on it, rather than being thrown up into the atmosphere at large. And the byproducts of fusion are generally a lot less problematic than those of fission - from what I understand, mostly radioactivated metals from the reactor itself, not spent fuel.
Isn't that just...sad. We could have fusion by now. Or alteast several dozen gigantic fusion experiments.
As the decades pass, new students pick up fusion, and old students give up on it, it's starting to feel like the way nature achieves fusion is the only way it can be done. The only way to get energy from fusion is to have a blob of gas so massive it's gravity compresses the hot gas enough to fuse it.
Yea. Lets all think about that ;)
Why is fusion receiving such a tiny (relatively speaking) amount of funding? Why is the Western world not rushing the project. At a risk of sounding cliched, it seems to me that if the 300-500 billion thus far spent on the Iraq war had gone into fusion research, we could have 10-20 different experimental approaches (essentially, trying all the major possible reactor designs) and commercial reactors in a few years.
Not to mention the obvious superiority of spending billions educating the horde of scientists and engineers and computer programmers and managers and other technical workers that would need to be trained for a big project like this. Instead, we spend that money training young men and women how to fight and perform military tasks. The thousands of technical workers that would be produced from an all-out effort for fusion would be extremely useful in achieving the next level of technological breakthroughs.
War damaged soldiers come home, often with permanent injuries, and may never reach their potential. I am in the Army National guard, and I've seen it happen time and time again. Surprisingly few people take advantage of their GI Bill to actually finish a degree.
Oh, and the middle east would be irrelevant. Without money from oil, they would be unable to buy advanced weapons or commit international terrorism, and would basically be another degenerate culture like most of Africa. Sure, they'd kill each other : but we would be able to safely stand back and occasionally drop in food to the refuge camps.
"With this achievement, the Delegations are pleased to declare that their work is finished, opening the way towards concluding the negotiations at political level." http://www.iter.org/N_12_Joint_Press_Release.htm
The news title should read: "Political Green Light..."
or else is old news...
And why is this submitted to Hardware? Is it because it was so HARD getting to this point?
Personally, I am hopeful that the other small project will work. It would be funny to see a 200M project succeed when govs. will not fund it, but fund large monster projects.
I just hope any of the approaches work, so we can be done with this War on Terrorism.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
$12bln is certainly a lot of money for a research project with very uncertain payoff.
12 billion dollars is really nothing, especially spread out among different nations. Consider that the US spent an estimated 135 billion 2006 US dollars to go to the moon. What did we get out of it, some moon rocks and publicity? Sure we got to study the origins of the moon, some technology, etc. But those payoffs were just as uncertain, if not more.
I'm just saying put the costs into perspective. The Iraq war has currently cost the US government 344 billion dollars, and we're not out yet. Are you seriously trying to argue that 12 billion spread out among different countries is "a lot of money"?
AccountKiller
"...although nuclear fusion remains an unproven technology..."
Fusion technology works and has been used already to sell electricity to grids during experiments over a couple weeks at a time.
The problem is keeping the fusion process going so that a profit can be made from selling the electricity.
Unlike the Spiderman 2 movie, when the slightest problem occurs fusion stops cold turkey.
The purpose of ITER is to make fusion commercially viable.
I use fusion for years already to run my home... I invented it myself!
Our ancestors harnessed the power of a sun, and so again shall we.
Dude, you can't rush wonders... even if you could, it's a large project and would probably cost the lives of 4 citizens....
ITER gets a lot of press, but there's an equally large obstacle to commercial fusion that it doesn't even address: the materials issues.
A commercial fusion plant is going to produce a tremendous neutron flux, orders of magnitude greater than that seen in modern fission plants. So many neutrons will be produced that every single atom in the reactor vessel is can be expected to be struck and displaced several hundred times over a 30-year life cycle, and you're actually going to get a small number of nuclear reactions that will produce minute hydrogen and helium bubbles at lattice boundaries. There are no known suitable materials that can handle that kind of neutron exposure without swelling, cracking, degrading, becoming extremely brittle, and so forth. This would be Bad.
ITER isn't going to generate the kinds of neutron flux you'd need to even explore those issues. ITER's going to generate about 3 displacements per atom, not 300. There is another facility, IFMIF, intended to research this by generating similar neutron fluxes to what you'd see in a real fusion reactor, but it's only at the design stages right now, and won't come on line for long after ITER does.
Getting the fusion right is only part of the problem, and it's possibly the easier part. It's an engineering problem. But the materials issue might not be solvable, because the right materials might just not exist.
Folks, there are huge amounts of uranium and thorium around, and we do not have time to wait until we figure out fusion to stop dumping carbon into the atmosphere. By the time we even come close to exhausting our sources of fissile fuel, we should have learned how to construct large-scale orbital structures, and once we can do that we won't even *need* fusion. It's entirely possible that commercial fusion will never happen.
Guess that Steorn thing didn't pan out, eh?
Michigan teenager Thiago Olson just built the world's 18th non-professional - but functioning - fusion reactor in his basement:7 082
:v)
http://www.freemarketnews.com/WorldNews.asp?nid=2
Fusor technology. Somewhat different approach to ITER, and wildly different in the amount of funding it attracts.
Vik
Wasnt 2040 the date you got to put in a Fusion Power Plant in SimCity 2000? I could be wrong.
The economics of fusion power are, unfortunately, quite depressing. There was a short article on this in Science, 10 March 2006 (p. 1380). It estimated that the the capital cost for the blanket-shield alone in a 1 GWe powerplant "amounts to $1800/kWe of rated capacity--more than nuclear fission reactor plants cost today". All the other extravagantly high tech equipment and construction costs are in addition to this. It posits a total capital cost of $15,000/kWe of plant rating.
Is there any other alternative energy scheme that is seriously proposed that is *more* expensive than this?
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
...how many delicious frogs you can fry with that thing at a single blow. ;-)
http://www.iter.org/a/index_nav_6.htm They've got some speeches here for anyone interested.
And from http://www.iter.org/I.htm
ITER - "The way" in Latin. Formerly interpreted to stand for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, although this usage has been discontinued.
Let us know when you find a mallet that big.
To be a viable energy source, you don't just need to prove it can work in theory, but also need to reach a low enogh $ per Watt threshold.
One of my pet hates is the way the photovoltaic industry showcases products through the Austalian solar race. This, and most of the competition between the PV labs, focusses on efficiency (light->electricity), and not the more important goal of reaching low $ per W. For example, the top-end vehicles in the Australian solar race will have PV panels costing tens of thousands of dollars - not exactly practical for real purposes.
For most practical energy purposes, $/W is all that matters. So what if it is only 5% efficient.... I'll tile my roof with the stuff.
I know there is the camp that says that all the bleeding edge research will give spin-offs (like how space flights gave us non-stick frying pans... yeah right), but that is a myth. It is like suggesting that Formula 1 engine design will give better engines for everyday use. This is just not so. The goals of F1 engine design are to give max power for a couple of hours; it does not matter if the engine blows up after 4 hours of use or if it has to be stripped and rebuilt after every race. That mindset is completely hopeless for everyday vehicles.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The scary thing here is the following question: If you add power generated by 'clean' sources to the grid, will people stop using 'dirty' power, or just use more power?
I think the fundamental problem is that even if you add new, clean sources to the grid (or off the grid, whatever), you're probably not going to take away from the current levels of existing emissions. All that will be done is a change in the increase, because despite what treaties say, it is very unlikely that current emission levels will drop; the only way that's possible is if the rate of increase of total production of alternative sources outpaces the growth of consumption, allowing the old emissions-generating methods to be taken off-line. If the rate of consumption is the same as or exceeds the growth of "alternative" sources, you cannot reduce the existing emissions base.
I think that's the economic hardship that is spoken of - you cannot maintain existing output unless you are able to grow new technologies fast enough to allow old technologies to be taken offline - and there is real economic loss in taking machinery offline before it's lifespan has expired. It's unlikely that we'll actually have any technologies which actually reduce consumption in a meaningful quantity over a short (say, 25 year) timeframe. Sure, new construction may be more efficient than old construction, but that's still adding load to the system - unless you replace or retrofit the old no new technology will help the existing situation.
Remember, per-capita energy consumption may decrease, but what matters is total consumption (if increase in population is greater than decrease in per-capita, there is no gain). I'd even like to see world per-capita energy use, not just broken down by "major offending nations" and see what that looks like.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
Isn't 2040 when fusion power plants become available in Simcity?
That works out to 110% of the cost -- let's hope their science is better than the [reporter's] math!
I don't think that Fusion is unproven. Just look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_European_Torus.
As to your post, well, between that, Rocky Mountain shale, and ANWR, I think OPEC will eventually be importing from us.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
Robert Bussards improved electrostatic fusion reactor. It is 100,000 times better than standard electrodstatic fusion It needs 200 million to make a full scale reactor. Magnetized target fusion is another option that seems cheaper and simpler than tokomaks We should try some of the cheaper alternatives to tokomaks. 10-20% of the 12 billion tokomak budget for alternative fusion and fission power. Fission already works and we can make fission better for immediate major contributions to our energy problems. Current nuclear reactors can be made 50% more powerful by changing the shape of the nuclear fuel and adjusting the cooling water This would add 160GW to global power. Thorium fission reactors were made in the 1960's and would be better than our current uranium boiler reactors Thorium liquid flouride reactors do not produce transuranic 10,000 year waste and would not have weapon proliferation issues.
The scary thing here is the following question: If you add power generated by 'clean' sources to the grid, will people stop using 'dirty' power, or just use more power?
That was why I said remove the subsidies for oil research and exploration.
Stop incentiving that form.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Fusion technology[...] has been used already to sell electricity to grids during experiments over a couple weeks at a time."
Sadly, that is not the case in this reality. I'm afraid you're likely going to have to wait decades until you can find an adequate power source to travel back to your own universe.
Which fusion system design is it that creates a self-sustaining reaction that requires active containment in order to not turn us into another star?
"Its backers say one quart of sea water would be able to generate energy equivalent to a quart of oil or two pounds of coal."
One quart of sea water is roughly a litre, or 1000 grams of water. This will contain about 110 grams of hydrogen, of which about 0.1 grams is deuterium. Perfect D-D fusion releases 338 trillion joules per gram, so about 34 trillion joules from this 0.1 gram. A gallon of gasoline produces about 125 million joules when burned completely, so the deuterium in the quart of sea water is energy-equivalent to about 2.7 million gallons of gasoline.
Either this device is going to be super-inefficient, or someone erred drastically on the units.
-- Insert witty one-liner here. --
Bush and the $500m fusion lollipop
Through the miracle of arithmetic we see can extrapolate this trend to see that commercial fusion power was available in 1920 when it was undoubtedly captured by a Henry Ford and with assistance from proto-Nazis, kept it secret from the rest of the world in a Peruvian cave where they run their UFO base to this day.
With Y being the years from now the geniuses predict commercial fusion energy and X being the year of the prediction:
deltaY=((2040-2008)-20)=12
deltaX=(2008-1975)=33
slope=12/33=0.363636
Y=20+slope*(X-1975)
X-1975=(Y-20)/slope
X=(Y-20)/slope+1975
Setting Y=0
X=(0-20)/0.363636+1975
X=1920
So we see that commercial fusion power was available about the time spherical electrostatic confinement was first conceived of by Irving Langmuir, Katherine B. Blodgett: Physics Review, 23, pp49-59, 1924; "Currents limited by space charge between concentric spheres", which was the last time there was any leak about the existence of commercial fusion power once Henry Ford and the proto-Nazis impounded the technology.
Seastead this.
You're right, that is funny! Mod submitter +1 Funny!
Of course, commercial power is 20 years away... from T minus 20.
I guess this is similar to why breast and penis enlargement ads are still popular. Hope springs eternal at the thought of a larger sex organ or unlimited, cheap electricity. I just wish I had known in college that researching fusion energy was a secure, long-term career choice.
What really bothers me is the fact that $12.8 billion dollars could easily buy over a billion watts worth of solar panels, which would produce close to 2/10's of a percent of the total US electricty requirement for over 25 years! On top of that, fusion still produces radioactive waste.
"Meaningless!, Meaningless!" says the Teacher. "Utterly meaningless!"
Apparently I'm in a mood to crack myself up today. Must be the excellent green tea.
So I made myself a bumper sticker with the above comment title, a sunshine icon, and ITER.org. If anybody else wants to help spread the Word about ITER and fusion, Zazzle will happily sell you a copy for $4.
Don't worry trolls, nobody's getting rich here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
>If ITER is successful, a commercial reactor could be built by 2040.
>Funny, I seem to remember fusion researchers from Livermore in the 70s say
>that commercial power was 20 years away...
--------
2006: Fusion power estimated to be 34 years away
1976: Fusion power estimated to be 20 years away
Assuming a linear fit from these two data points and solving y=mx+b for M and B...
34=m*2006+b
20=m*1976+b
Subtracting, I get:
14=m*30; therefore m == 14/30 == 7/15.
Substituting back in and solving for B, I get:
34=(7/15)*2006+b; 34=(14042/15)+b; b=34-(14042/15);
b=(510/15)-(14042/15); b=~-902.1333.
Therefore, solving for zero-distance:
0 = (7/15)X - 902.1333; 902.1333 = (7/15)*x;
x = ~1933.14286
Therefore, we achieved fusion power on February 21, 1933. QED.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Out of the things I am passionate for, my support of nuclear fast breeder reactors (specifically speaking, the lead-cooled variety) and the development of such is probably at or near the top. Here's why.
Number one: INHERENTLY SAFE
Any commercial nuclear reactor anywhere in the continental US in this day and age is of the thermal type. To put it simply, this means that they operate using highly pressurized water as a coolant and as a moderator. The consequences of using such a reactor are that the water must be pressurized to the extent that it remains liquid while heated to somewhere around 200 degrees C higher then it's normal atmospheric boiling point.
Is this a good thing? Quite frankly, in my opinion, no. Chernobyl was what it was because when the folk operating the plant (a comparatively poor design to be sure) failed to keep the reactor under control, and the heat reached uncontrollable levels, the cooling water literally became a steam explosion, bursting the pipes and blowing a section of the plant apart. This radioactive "steam" then escaped and spread across much of eastern europe. The consequences of using such a design may not ever be fully known.
A fast reactor (as opposed to thermal) is of an entirely different design. A fast reactor does not need a moderator and typically uses a highly heat-conductive liquid (usually a metal with a very low melting point) to cool the reactor core. In most designs, the reactor core sits inside a large "pool" of such material and is cooled by natural convection, rather then traditional "fail-safe" mechanisms like pumps. In addition, the reactor core can be designed in such a way that basic physics prevents it from getting above a certain temperature. As the materials used in such a design expand, the amount of fission reactions actually decrease the hotter it gets. Meaning the hotter it gets, less heat gets generated. It's a natural check against any conceivable type of meltdown, without the need for human interference. In addition, no pressurization of any kind is needed. The entire plant can operate at normal atmospheric pressure. No steam explosions. If every single human being working at such a plant were to die, the fission reactions would die off naturally over time, the reactor would cool down to outside temperatures, and eventually become entombed in a huge chunk of shield material (if Lead or Lead-Bismuth is used as the cooling material). In effect, it's an entirely safe reactor design in every way that practically matters.
Number Two: MORE EFFICIENT
This actually means several different things. First off, and most striking, is that a breeder type of reactor can potentially get nearly a hundred times as much energy out of the already impressive energy potential of uranium ore used in traditional "thermal" reactor designs. This is because thermal reactor designs only "burn" about 1% of the uranium ore that gets put into them, which is Uranium 235. The rest of the Uranium 238 (far more common in nature) becomes highly radioactive and gets thrown away as "waste" that lasts a considerable amount of time before it goes back to the same level of radiation as the ground it came out of. A breeder reactor alleviates this problem by not only burning the usable Uranium 235, but by "breeding" an even greater amount of the Uranium 238 into new fuel, plutonium. The really ideal part is that if integral plant designs become common, the new fuel that gets bred in this process can be refined and put directly back into the reactor core, without the need to ever leave the site. Over time, all of the uranium that gets put into such a reactor gets used as fuel. This gives the human race enough potential energy, given the worlds known reserves of uranium, to last well over a million years. In addition, all that is left is leftover fission-products that have a much smaller frame of time to decay to safe levels then traditional waste, 300-400 years to be exact. And far less of it; small enough amounts to handle safely on site without problems. It can even be
"the participating members of the ITER cooperation agreed on the following division of funding contributions: 50% by the hosting member, the European Union and 10% by each non-hosting member (the six non-host partners will now contribute 6/11th of the total cost)" ITER
To account for all the worker Holidays France has.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
The scary thing here is the following question: If you add power generated by 'clean' sources to the grid, will people stop using 'dirty' power, or just use more power?
That's EASY:
- IF the price of power comes down people will use more power.
- IF it's cheaper than burning carbon compounds, it will displace burning them and less carbon compounds will be burned.
The displacement is a LITTLE complicated: The price of carbon compunds will come down and some will continue to be burned - as long as it's cheaper to run the older fossil-fuel plants than shut them down and tear them out, or they serve special purposes (such as fast start-up peaking generators if the fusion plants don't respond to load variations quickly). But the burning will decline as they're retired and their replacements are the cheaper fusion plants.
Other side of the IF: Just as with nuclear FISSION plants, if the cost ends up higher than fossil fuels (whether due to inherent costs or regulatory/legal costs) they'll never catch on and the carbon will still be burned.
So if the environmentalists are serious about mitigating greenhouse effect, it's time for them to shut up and sit down (or keep the engineers honest by looking for problems).
If they don't, it's clear they're really after shutting down tech so we can "return to nature" (and suffer a die-off that makes the Black Plague look like a bad cold until we're down to the no-tech farming carrying capacity of the planet.) Then, if they get their way, the survivors can freeze in the dark through the next ice age while waiting for an extinction event to finish us off - or our displacement by some species that's a bit more reasonable.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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That's funny. because what I remember "them" telling us in the 1970s is that commercial fusion was 50-80 years away. Sounds to me like they might be pretty much on schedule. (Of course, they might be off by a couple of centuries also).
Maybe we were listening to different people.
BTW, I can't find any record via Google of Lawrence-Livermore people predicting commercial fusion by 1990, but that certainly doesn't prove that there weren't some of them projecting that. I really don't believe that was a majority view in 1970.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Some very interesting content on this subject in a recent Google Tech Talk.
6 673788606&q=Google+nuclear
It's a very technical but interesting talk about these alternate and simpler approaches to fusion confinement. I'm interested if some knowledgeable people could comment on his ideas and designs. He sounds like he's got something. What he explains about politics around funding of the project sounds pretty typical of the government.
Link (Google Video):
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=199632184
break it down
The primary energy uses for joe average are heating, cooling, lighting and transportation, that is where most of the energy goes.
Now we have a dandy set of solutions that can cut all of that in half or more, but it isn't "sexy", there's not a whole lot more "research" that is needed. It's boring to most folks, to most industries, and there isn't enough profit there.
We know how to build smaller and more fuel efficient cars now, this is doable, we could double the US CAFE requirements and eliminate the exceptions. Just be done with it and mandate it. I have owned 60's and 70's cars that got mid 20s to around 30 MPG on the highway,it was the most basic of construction, nothing exotic to it at all, so here we are decades later, and we have cars that can do that and are orders of magnitudes more complex to build, and near impossible to repair at home for most people. This is progress? I don't see it. My old 74 Dart got 25 MPG, seated six and had a decent sized trunk and would break 100 MPH. Uhh, that actually compares pretty well to a lot of cars now, so where is the progress again? More geegaws on the dashboard? Big deal.
We just let the major builders get away with FUD for too long. Just *order* them to do it, order them to do one more MPG a year for 20 years or so, or they can't sell cars, period. They'll do it. If they try gouging or pull any crap,like GM with their EV1 sabotage and FUD, pull their corporation papers, someone else will play nice and do the work, someone will want to sell cars that work, are affordable and get good mileage.
Heating and cooling can be addressed easily with building code laws. I am completely serious now. I have worked on both new construction and remodelling in "superinsulation" projects, private residences. It is beyond easy, quite doable, to reduce heating and cooling costs to 50% (or less) of what they are now using a combo of off the shelf, nothing exotic techniques. If you have never seen a super insulated home you wouldn't believe it, it is astounding how much the furnace and airconditioning *don't* come on. And it's just planned air in and planned air out, tighter construction, with a small heat exchanger to recover some energy(if you want to), and a lot more insulation all over and better windows and doors. and that's it. It works. You can go to ground effect heat pumps with it, meaning more savings. Building code laws and mortgage restrictions would do it, ie, mandated energy conservation on new construction, mandated upgrades to new standards on mortgage transfer/sales (sorry house flippers, you would need to work just a little harder for your profit). We could adapt to it, and it certainly would be easier to pull off than any of the wild schemes we are looking at now. New homes now are being allowed to be built (pass "code") and sold around that are beyond pitiful, absolutely zero improvements in insulation or energy efficiency since years and years ago. Simple, just mandate better standards. We have done it with plumbing and wiring, we can mandate better framing and a lot more insulation.
Lighting can be addressed with a big switch to LED lighting, I think everyone is aware how efficient that sort of lighting is and could be.
There ya go, bascially same lifestyle, 50% reduction in energy demand, no mr. fusion needed.
Lamest SP episode ever.
It took thousands to go from Daedalus to the Wright Brothers.
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
This is the temperature reached by the Sandia National Laboratories http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2006 /physics-astron/hottest-z-output.html with their "Z Machine".
Apparently they can't really explain why they get such a high temperature.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine
Cause you know by 2040 we may be all under the see ;)
Other way around.
Synthetic oil provides superior protection against thermal breakdown and vaporization. It also provides a small, but noticeable measurement in lubrication.
There's a reason the racing community (from F1, NASCAR to local SCCA members) uses synthetic oils. Maybe you should check brands such as Redline, Mobile, and AMSOIL (my favorite).
While synthetics are up to 3x more expensive over conventional "crude oil", performance enthusiasts look to them as an insurance policy against premature engine wear and tear. After running my 99 Mazda Miata over 60,000 miles, all four cylinders still passes compression tests with perfection. Because of less wear on the piston rings, the oil is still nice, clear, and brown after doing a 3,000 oil change.
Life is not for the lazy.
ITER has dropped the "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor" interpretation, since some people don't get a warm, fuzzy feeling from the word "Thermonuclear." Conveniently, ITER means "the way" in Latin, so they took that word as their namesake.
Thanks for the articles!
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
Since when is a tax a subsidy?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If ITER is successful, a commercial reactor could be built by 2040. Funny, I seem to remember fusion researchers from Livermore in the 70s say that commercial power was 20 years away...
:P
They came pretty close, if you add the 10 years of negotiations and 4 years of inflation to the 20 years they came up with, you get 34 years from today which fits with the year 2040. Amazing forsight really.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
>power densities necessary to be a commercial power source (several GW).
Utilities don't really like buying generating capacity in GW lumps. Their idea of ideal commercial power would probably be in the 30-300 MW range and quick to build.
Don't know about the movie, but I don't think Gore mentioned nuclear power at all in the book.
I think conservation, ethanol, and integral fast reactors are the way to go.
We already are extracting useful power from fusion.
The reactor is 93 million miles away, so the energy density collectable isn't great, but it's super reliable. The extraction can be done by a simple diode junction, with no moving parts.
40 years ago photovoltaics were so expensive they were only used in the space program. 20 years ago they were cheap enough to be real practical for isolated power needs. Maybe 10-15 years ago we started seeing highway road signs use them. Right now, the cost is down to the point where private citizens can turn their homes into net generators http://www.pvpowered.com/. If the cost per watt of photovoltaic capability keeps on this trend, in 20 years, we'll be generating massive amounts of electricity from the sun.
I'd like to see funding going to ITER.. it's awesome and inspiring science and engineering. Frankly, I'm bummed we're not doing both this and the superconducting supercollider here in the states. But right now, we need massive investments in known-working non-carbon emitting energy generation.. wind, photovoltaics, and maybe biomass with carbon sequestration.
Am I the only one who would be much more optimistic about this project if the U.S. wasn't involved?
Considering that this project will be given out essentially for free, (Fusion is difficult to make weapons with correct?) not owned by the DOD, the U.S. has a history of being reluctant to contribue to such projects.
Also the U.S. government is largely in the pocket of big oil and wouldn't be particually happy if their economy was affected by this advance?
That was before James Earl Carter, III, then President of the United States, and former US Navy Nuclear Reactor Officer, came along, slashed the fusion research budget well beyond the bone which not only resulted in stagnant research programs but the laying off of many of the fusion researchers at that time. The budget was never really restored fully. Also toss in such idiotic practices as classifying Soviet research that they wanted to share with the US and you have a real comedy of errors (or tragedy actually). There's a lot more but I'll stop there. We could have had it in the '90's given just what I know of what Sandia was doing at the time, let alone the other projects which were also showing remarkable progress right up until the money was yanked.
"[I]t is a wise man who admits the limits of his knowledge or skill, and that pretending either causes harm." --Terry Go
Fussion is supposed to be a clean process they say. Well, that is true in theory.
I once visited the JET fusion project in the UK. These guys that if they need to open the ring and replace elements, they need a special robot because it is so radioactive that a human being would die immediattely. The same is true for the waste materials. Not so clean eh...
The air is planned in and out, for this very reason, and it usually quite filtered, and using the heat exchanger you can save a lot of energy. It is *better* than normal household air, which slips in around windowframes, cracks in the walls, where plumbing pipes enter and leave, etc.. a lot of dirty places. Really, read up on the technique, it's pretty slick. It's more in use in upscale housing in scandinavia and like canada now, but a lot of places in the US are using it.
Tax ..... credit
/G
That would be a subsidy, no?
Why we are going to wait another 20-30 years if there is another much better possibility?
/Z
Remember Cold Fusion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion
It's working!
SPAWAR scientists got simple, portable, highly repeatable, unambiguous, and permanent physical evidence of nuclear events using detectors that have a long track record of reliability and acceptance among nuclear physicists.
Forget your preconceptions, says scientist at Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center (SPAWAR). "We've done the experiments, and we have the data."
Using a unique experimental method called co-deposition, combined with the application of external electric and magnetic fields, and recording the results with standard nuclear-industry CR-39 polimer detectors, SPAWAR scientists: Pamela Mosier-Boss and Stan Szpak have produced what may be the most convincing evidence yet in the pursuit of proof of low energy nuclear reactions.
Read more here:
http://newenergytimes.com/news/2006/NET19.htm#ee
What independed experts say?
Gary W. Phillips, a nuclear physicist and expert in CR-39 detectors is similarly surprised by what he saw in SPAWAR's detectors. Phillips has used the detectors to record nuclear events for two decades.
He said that the tracks recorded in SPAWAR's CR-39 experiments are "at least one order of magnitude greater" in number than those in any other conventional nuclear experiments he's seen.
The evidence recorded in SPAWAR Systems Center's CR-39 detectors are "at least one order of magnitude greater" in number than those in any other conventional nuclear experiments he's seen in his 20 years of related experience.
"I've never seen such a high density of tracks before," Phillips noted. "It would have to be from a very intense source - a nuclear source. You cannot get this from any kind of chemical reaction.
Seems that Fleischmann and Pons should got they Nobel prize soon.
Is that end of The Fossil Fuels Era?
For more information about "Cold Fusion" (Lenr-Canr) please refer here:
* Web repository with all documentation in that field (maintained by Jed Rothwell):
http://www.lenr-canr.org/
* An free E-book about Cold Fusion:
http://lenr-canr.org/BookBlurb.htm
* Last international conference in that field:
http://www.iccf12.org/
* Next conference about Cold Fusion:
http://www.iscmns.org/iccf13/
So, putting money into Hot Fusion development looks like wasting of resources for me.
Happy reading!
Best regards,
...we, as a country, have our priorities straight.
The current cost of the war in Iraq to the American people is about $344bn, more than 2.5 times the *total* cost of the Apollo Program, inflation-adjusted. Wow, that fucking sucks.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
the Farnsworth fusor we keep hearing so much about
Wow, so he's not just famous for inventing the smelloscope and finglonger!
clean sources
There are no clean sources of power. Every form of power generation has an environmental cost when you actually try to scale it out.
Windmills interfere with nature by killing birds, requiring lots of power cabling going to a bunch of different locations, and in general just take up a lot of space that could otherwise be more natural. Same with tidal power and solar (how "clean" is the process of producing/destroying photovoltaic cells?). Hydoelectric power is fairly effective, but has environmental costs as well.
Everything looks great when you build one. The fact is, we need power that SCALES. We have a huge (and increasing) population that needs a huge (and increasing) amount of power. If 10% of that power was generated with wave energy, believe me, there would be a much larger environmental cost than a few radioactive elements that we can bury.
In fact, for the scale this world operates on, power wise, oil is one of the cleanest ways to get power. The only thing with a real potential to beat it is fission and fusion. So let's get working on it!
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.