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New Wave of Fusion and Robot Innovation at MIT
An anonymous reader writes "Popular Mechanics has been getting some great access inside the labs at MIT all week, and they've gotten some interesting looks at developing technologies. Robot-assisted rehab with gaming-style controllers comes out of the biomechanics lab, blind and crash-proof UAV testing with F/X cameras is being done at the aerospace controls lab, and work on electric scooters with super-cheap assembly is proceeding at the Media Lab. Perhaps most exciting is a fight for funding while the holy grail of clean fusion power in reach at the plasma center. The article on fusion predicts, "We'd see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century."
and what have YOU done about it huh?
How we know is more important than what we know.
Tokamaks will never be cheap, nor efficient.
Inertial gravitational containment is the holy grail.
Inertial electrostatic containment is the next best thing.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Yes! Clean, reliable fusion power is only twenty years away...remarkably, this has been the case for over 40 years.
I don't know if you can say "always will be" 30 years in the future, but I'll admit it seems that way. I remember the same stories back in the 70's, and yes, we were supposed to be building our first commercial fusion plants right about now.
I have to wonder if other approaches, or a look at possibly some new ones wouldn't be a better idea. It seems that the constant with that 30 years is that it always involves "a bigger tokamak than we have now."
The truth is, we still don't fully understand how plasmas act in the real world. The article alludes to this, by mentioning turbulence and instability. Fluid models and magnetohydrodynamics just aren't detailed enough, and full-blown simulations are far too complex to be of much use on a fusion-reactor scale.
A key concept is "transport". What a fusion reactor requires is to keep heat bottled up. The ions in particular need to be kept hot so that they can fuse. What happens, though, is that heat gets dumped from the ions into the electrons (which are useless for fusion) at a rate which exceeds theoretical predictions -- one of many "anomalous transport" phenomena. (Great phrase, which you may recognize from HL.)
Bottom line: we need to do more research on fundamental plasma physics for fusion. Yet for whatever reason, fusion funding has been dropping for decades.
Link directly to the cities.media.mit.edu info/scoot photo...
/.Soulskill/anonymous(again /.)/PM biz ...enjoy.
Bypassing the ever-silly:
-=-=-= -=-=-=
Scooter with ITRI and Sanyang Motors
RoboScooter - Clean, Green Mobility for Today's Crowded Cities
The RoboScooter is a lightweight, folding, electric motor scooter. It is designed to provide convenient, inexpensive mobility in urban areas while radically reducing the negative effects of extensive vehicle use - road congestion, excessive consumption of space for parking, traffic noise, air pollution, carbon emissions that exacerbate global warming, and energy use. It is clean, green, silent, and compact.
People Ryan Chin, PhD Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Yaniv Fain, Sloan School Michael Chia-Liang Lin, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Arthur Petron, Mechanical Engineering Raul-David "Retro" Poblano, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Andres Sevtsuk, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Urban Studies & Planning
SYM/Sanyang Motors Grand Wu Wan Ching Chang
ITRI Wen-Jean Hsueh Eugene Hsiao Ying-Tzu Lin Barbara Yeh
I don't know about anyone else, but I asked some nuclear physicists very nicely and they assured me that they would build me one...
... to power the mecha that I asked some robotics and mechatronics guys to build me.
A game has objectives and is competitive, anything else is just play
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9986&page=87
That's a great question!
I worked for two years at General Atomics trying to model and understand the interaction of fusion plasmas with the reactor walls. I've seen people here who have done more.
Like many other people who have worked/are working on fusion, I don't think it's going to be commercially viable this century. The problem is materials. It's simply too expensive to build these things.
I thought that was "anomalous materials".
You should look China when you are talking about Scooter.
They have a wide selections in Carrefour, or whatever Supermarket.
Price tag: ~1200RMB (150USD). Probably can goes up to 30MPH.
May be not as stylish as the MIT one, but definitely cheap, usable and actually are all over the streets. And there are more scooter than bicycle on the street.
Some models looks just like more than a hack of Bicycle + Motor + Battery pack, but works! Most design with battery pack can be swap out, and can be plugged to the main directly for charging. I have seen the janitor in Office bringing her pack upstair for charging.
It's just cheap!
Why not Nature? Their News and Views section explains the important papers at a layman's level, and the papers are, of course, the real science uncorrupted by journalism.
ResidntGeek
A nagging question about these fusion devices they've been talking about: How do they plan on extracting the energy from the reaction?
By convection/conduction with waste products being ejected from the "reactor" (not a bad term, imho)? By radiation?
Are they intended to be connected to some thermodynamic cycle or something more exotic? What kind of heat transfer temperatures are people talking about? Several thousand kelvins, or something more conventional?
It's not just him ya know. Pretty-much every fusion researcher on the planet who isn't working on a Tokamak has had their funding dry up. This isn't because Tokamaks are so close to being ready, quite the opposite.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Well, perhaps it is in part my physics background, but I didn't get that impression at all. It is a brilliant idea, and even if you aren't familiar with Dr. Bussard, the man knows what he is talking about. He was simply old, somewhat bitter, and impatient--seemingly with good cause. Sadly, he won't see the results of his endeavors, but the research is solid, and thankfully, the navy is following it up.
In any case it has nothing to do with conspiracy theories or blaming fellow scientists. The fact is, basically nothing aside from Tokamak research is funded at a significant level.
Long before this century is out, I think we'll arrive at the point where we can no longer afford not to build these things (or fission plants as an alternative). So get back in that lab and get back at it!
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
To make hydrogen practical requires a carrier. There has been some experimentation with metal carriers, but by far the most efficient hydrogen carrier, packing in far more hydrogen per unit volume than even liquid H2, is carbon. Amazingly, someone/something long ago put huge deposits of carbon-encapsulated hydrogen in giant underground reservoirs for us to use.
The only problem is, the carbon carrier is *supposed* to be recycled, and we haven't bothered doing that, and instead have just dumped all the hydrogen stripped carbon into the atmosphere as CO2, in quantities large enough to alter the atmospheric CO2 levels to a worrisome extent. As soon as we start recycling the carbon like we're supposed to, hydrogen cars will take off. In fact, the infrastructure is already built!
True, but the 'often' in this sentence refers to a select sample, which is the sample of economically viable enterprises. If tokomak fusion is economically viable, it is likely to become more cost-efficient over time. However, if the concept is borderline, it could easily get more expensive over time, as has happened for fission reactors. The physics and engineering of fission are well-understood but costs are not coming down for a wide range of reasons. Plasma fusion on the other hand, requires some difficult physics problems to be solved before we even can build a pilot plant to begin to mature the engineering.
A massive problem for fission reactors is decommissioning costs - what to do with a million tonnes of radioactive reactor? The point that fusion protagonists often overlook is that fusion reactors will face a similar problem decommissioning. In both cases fast neutrons create all sorts of difficult and radioactive materials in and around the core that will be hugely difficult to dispose of. If it were my money, I'd invest in solving the problems with decommissioning and disposal of by-products from fission. But that would not be nearly as cool and sexy as trying to find a brand new way to make the same mistakes.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.