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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...
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
Heavily laden hopefully.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
Fusion reactor? You've got two empty halves of a coconut and you're bangin' em together!
Also, deuterium and tritium can be found in Dihydrogen Monoxide.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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...
The 'containment shell' you are speaking of is called the thermal shield, and it is 10 inches of solid carbon steel (usually A36). First, the inside few inches may undergo embrittlement over the course of decades. There is still plenty of ductile material left to hold things together. Second, there will be literally no mechanical stresses in the thermal shield other than gravity... seems like 10 inches of steel ought to be able to hold itself up. It will see thermal stresses, but it is designed with expansion joints so that these to not convert into mechanical stresses. Finally, if these reactors follow any sort of conventional fission reactor design (they will), there will then be 6 feet of steel reinforced high density concrete surrounding the entire reaction chamber, called the 'bioshield'.
There is a lot of information on reactor design out there if you just look and educate yourself instead of reading an editorial and jumping to conclusions. the DOE's websites have a lot of non-classified documents out for public use.
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.
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."
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.
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.