Slashdot Mirror
Thermonuclear Reactor To Use Coconut Shells
destinyland writes "A key component of a $10 billion nuclear fusion plant is vintage 2002 Indonesian coconut-shell charcoal. After a 20-year search, German researchers discovered that the coconut-shell charcoal is the best medium for 'adsorbing' waste byproducts sucked out of the thermonuclear reactor's vacuum chamber. In what will be the first fusion power facility that's commercially viable, magnetic fields will heat hydrogen isotopes to over 150 million degrees Centigrade. (Essentially, the super-hot plasma creates artificial stars.) As the article points out, 'It's not quite a Starship warp drive, but it does harness the power of the sun.'"
The head of the project, a former professor, was heard mumbling "Gilligan won't mess it up this time."
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I remember this one. The professor made the Thermonuclear reactor with a bunch of coconuts, financed, of course, by the Howell's... but then Gilligan saw Ginger...got all flustered and tripped over the whole thing causing a meltdown and the Skipper's hair to glow... yeah, that's a classic episode indeed
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
It's a fusion reaction. Just say that. No stars here, no power from the sun. Nuclear fusion.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Coconut shell charcoal is one of the best available for making filters. Charcoal filters are nothing new folks most fish tanks use them as do most water purifiers and even gas masks. And this "May" be a practical fusion reactor but they have been saying that since the 1950s but I am staying hopeful.
Yet another light and fluffy pop science story with a funny little twist because it has coconuts in it... Yawn.....
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
That's not the power of the sun, you're just bangin' two coconuts together!
Fixed that for ya
My vintage Casio calculator harnessed the power of the sun. This, not so much.
Any editor discussing technology who still feels the need to put the word adsorb into quotes, as though it's not a legitimate English term, should be fired. If you're afraid your audience won't understand, then insert a sidebar on the mechanics of adsorption; don't act as though it's a term out of sci-fi.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
We have commercially viable fusion reactors now, yet the "news" is that it involves coconuts?
In what will be the first fusion power facility that's commercially viable...
Oh. I see. 3-5 years out then, just like LHC, battery breakthroughs, etc.
Heavily laden hopefully.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Over time, the containment vessel will eventually become radioactive. The ratio of energy to waste should be pretty excellent though.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
It says the fuel is deuterium and tritium, how hazardous are those?
Oh, EXTREMELY hazardous. Both substances have similar properties to a highly volatile chemical that has in past resulted in some spectacular explosions. OH THE HUMANITY! ;)
If fate makes you a motorcycle, you become a motorcycle.
It's so freaking cool that there's going to be something man-made that will reach temperatures similar to the core of the sun. It's just... too cool. Hold on to your hat, god, 'cause here we come!
Ok, now back to mind-numbingly boring and disappointing reality...
weinersmith
Fusion reactor? You've got two empty halves of a coconut and you're bangin' em together!
The solution of the Sun and other stars - spray the crap all over the Universe - is perhaps not the most environmentally friendly, but it's why we're here at all. We're basically standing (or sitting) on nuclear waste from a star that went bang.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
without knowing anything else, highly sceptical - thought commercially viable fusion years away
PS: all you guys jerking off over how "safe" fusion is - what do you know about the neutron flux, and radioactive embrittlement of the containment shell ?
Boooooooring!
So they found the best activated carbon for their particular use comes from coconut shells. Why is this news?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Also, deuterium and tritium can be found in Dihydrogen Monoxide.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
I believe the term for harvesting the power of the sun is solar energy. And yes the Sun's energy is original from Fusion but under wildly different circumstances (crushing gravitational forces vs magnetic confinement).
Oh, I don't know. To be commercially viable it also has to produce substantially more power than it consumes on an ongoing basis. A fusion reactor that can do that would actually be a pretty big deal regardless of how it were funded...
I'm sure it'll be producing cheap, abundant power.... in about 20 years.
Just ignore the fact that we've been 20 years away from cheap, abundant fusion power for the last 50 years.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
That's just confusion by the writer of the story. This reactor is a scientific experiment, intended only to be the first to demonstrate getting more energy out of a fusion reactor than you have to put into it, not to be a commercially viable power plant. So it's just one step towards the long hoped-for goal of commercially viable fusion.
Isn't that the whole point of this site? It links to news stories from elsewhere.
Deuterium isn't much of a hazard at all. In the form of heavy water it starts to be a problem only if 25% of your total water is replaced by it and isn't lethal until around 50%. Essentially you'd have to drink only heavy water for about a week. The toxicity is due to deuterium inhibiting cell division. In it's gaseous form, it will simply dissipate harmlessly.
It might or might not make a good diluent for breathing gas for deep diving except that it's way too expensive for that so has never been tried.
Even with all of that, fusion reactors will have a net negative impact on deuterium since it is concentrated from large amounts of natural water but will be fused into helium.
Tritium is a beta emitter, so is a bit more hazardous, but will also dissipate quickly. Modern radio-luminescent markers use a small vial of tritium instead of the old radium and are quite safe.
The reactor hardware itself would become radioactive in use due to neutrons, but it's activity would be fairly short lived once the reactor shuts down.
No meltdown risks at all, no dangerous radiation leaks. Whatever happens, the worst possible case is that a very expensive reactor is ruined.
Since the by-product is helium, a reactor leak would only mean that any nearby residents would talk like Mickey Mouse for a little while. Which is better than radiation sickness.
Until you get sued by Disney for trademark infringement...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How do you think stars are formed? Do giant space storks bring them?
Here's the executive summary -- Without fusion stars are just really big clouds of hydrogen gas. Gravitational collapse of gas clouds leads to internal heating and eventually drives the temperature at the core of the new star up high enough to start hydrogen fusion. Even before stellar ignition occurs these gravitationally powered stars can glow as brightly as their older, hydrogen burning main sequence cousins.
So unless your god damn heart is glowing like a blackbody at two thousand kelvin, with strong absorption in the Lyman Alpha line, then stars without fusion are certainly not any blacker than it.
To learn more about stellar evolution, T-Tauri stars, the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, nuclear fusion and spectroscopy, why not go to your local library or take an astrophysicist out to a karaoke bar? Either way you'll hear a lot that you may not be able to understand.
BTW I love coconut.
:-(
Incidentally, coconut fibre (which I suspect might be what TFA might be referring to, rather than the shell) is a truly excellent material for producing an incredibly fine and pure charcoal (i.e. carbon) powder. The particles are so fine that they readily form nearly indelible stains on anything with which they come into contact. Especially on clothing.
So basically, they're using a giant Brita filter. (Brita filters are made from coconut shells) http://www.brita.net/uk/glossary_aquazine2.html?&no_cache=1&L=1&range=&lex=Activated+carbon
don't panic-- clowns can smell fear.
Quite a bit lower. 150 million K (I'll use Kelvin here since it's basically equal to Celsius relative to temperatures of millions of either) is routine for thermonuclear bombs, which we've managed to test while avoiding complete destruction of the earth. The highest temperature of bulk matter ever recorded on earth was about 2 billion Kelvin, and took place in the Z Machine at Sandia Nat'l Labs. Elsewhere in the universe, supernova core temperatures are estimated to reach over 100 billion K; of course, sometimes this process does in fact produce a black hole, but observations suggest that whether this occurs is pretty strongly associated with the mass of the star- neutron star remants can exist at 100 billion K without further collapse. And while the statistical definition of temperature is arguably a bad fit when talking about subatomic particles, the average kinetic energies achieved by colliding particles (in terrestrial particle accelerators and moreso in cosmic rays) equate to temperatures in excess of 10^15 Kelvin or more, at least 7 orders of magnitude greater than ITER.
Now, at some temperature, we could perhaps expect the kinetic energy of particles to be so high that the particles collapse into subatomic black holes. Whether this is physically realizable, and the temperature it would occur at, depend on which physics theory you subscribe to. A key element of the "holographic universe" idea is that many of the maximum and minimum possible values for quantities like distance, entropy, and temperature have constraints imposed by the observable universe being a projection from a lower dimension event horizon. By some interpretations, this might mean that the maximum possible temperature is about 10^17K, which is about 15 orders of magnitude lower than more conventional cosmology theories would predict.
This suggests that the collisions of the highest energy cosmic rays in the universe regularly produce subatomic black holes. The Large Hadron Collider, whenever it is up and running, is also expected to produce temperatures in that range, so it might in fact make a black hole. You may have heard some news about this recently. So, a science experiment in central Europe in the near future may produce black holes, but it won't be ITER.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
If you have to use magnetic containment to keep the reaction going, it's not a star. "Star" is not a synonym for "nuclear fusion reaction" - except in breathless news reports written at a primary school reading level.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
I don't know if fusion has radioactive waste since it deals with light elements, but, I found a business (watertorch.com) that says its product neutralizes radioactive waste. Why would we want to turn Hydrogen into Helium anyway, we can't remake it because it takes too high of temperatures. Therefore, we should stick with fission and neutralize the radioactive waste with the Water Torch.
The thing I love about Slashdot is that, apparently, no one actually reads the articles. TFA said that the carbon is being used as part of a PUMP to evacuate the waste helium (and some hydrogen, as well as dust created from the walls of the chamber gradually deteriorating from neutron bombardment) from the chamber and maintain vaccuum. They didn't say they were using this as shielding.
Slashdotters seem to be skeptical.
ITER is a Tokamak reactor. There are 20 now in operation. Thirteen were operated before and are now shut down. None of them have ever produced more power than they used.
Well, at least TSA isn't letting you carry it through security anymore...
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Here's a quote from the article, where they discuss this.
In a bit more detail:
They need to remove the Helium because it gets in the way of the reactants. They also need to be able to filter out whatever small amounts of waste that are generated by the plasma brushing the wall. Presumably reactions between the plasma and the walls would produce metallic hydrides, which are toxic, and in some cases potentially explosive. Not only that, but after a while, the entire inside of the reactor will be radioactive, from neutron activation. Again, this is small amounts of material, but they can't just spew it out into the air. Besides, they'll want to analyze it and see what's in it, since no one has ever run one of these for an extended period of time before.
Bullwinkle J. Moose: "Hey Rock, watch me pull net energy out of my tokamak"
Rocket J. Squirrel: "Again? That trick never works!"
Bullwinkle J. Moose: "This time for sure!"
...comes from cows. No, really. There are millions of cows in India, and observant Hindus consider it sacrilege to harm them. So they mostly die from old age, and there are no religious issues connected with recycling their remains. And it turns out that their bones, being extremely brittle, make excellent charcoal.
I found this out from a newspaper story a few years back. It was in the news because a British water company was using cow charcoal in its filters. Local vegetarians were not pleased.