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Construction of French Fusion Reactor Underway
GarryFre writes "It has been said that fusion is 50 years away for quite a few decades, but now work has actually been started. Digging has begun in the south of France on the planned site for France's first fusion reactor. A tokomak is a torus shaped magnetic confinement device which is necessary to withstand the temperatures associated with fusion that are so high, solid materials can't hold them. As such, the building represents the future core of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.) It will be interesting to see if it takes 50 years to build it."
Guess we can't go fusion now either, since that would entail imitating the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. :P)
(That was sarcasm...I hope.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Freedom Fusion.
LE DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, September 15, 2060
The country formerly known as France has successfully performed its first and last Fusion reaction.
Haven't fusion reactors been built already but have simply used more energy than they produced?
No time to google when shooting for FP.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
It has been said that Fusion is 50 years away for quite decades
Many many things have been said. Some of them make sense. That one doesn't.
It may well be physically in France, I wouldn't call it French per se. The I in the name most assuredly stands for International, with technical and financial input from around the world (China, the EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the USA, in alphabetical order).
It's a project we all may ultimately depend on as a civilisation, so the International part is important.
the world's first Fusion Reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch_Fusor
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That eternal "Fusion is 50 years away" saying stopped being due to physics and started being due to squabbling countries and their bureaucracies many years ago. ITER could have been started over a decade ago.
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
I'm looking at France and saying, hmm...
-Leading in important technology to answer the world's problems
-Pushing for freedom while criticizing the US on its record
-Building strong military (aircraft carriers, etc)
-French President pushing US President to avoid Socialism
It's starting to look like there's a new Leader of the Free World.
Mr. Sarkozy, I think you're well on your way to earning it.
SPELLING FAIL.
Dog is my co-pilot.
It's an international reactor, hence the "I" in ITER.
Duh.
According to sources inside the ITER meeting at Jeju, Korea, the six non-host partners will now contribute 6/11th of the total cost - a little over half - while E.U. will put in the rest.
Sounds like it's mostly not Frances'.
They cost $50,000 and come out in the year 2050!
yes that from simcity 2000
The Polywell will get there first.
Sunlit World Scheme. Weird and different.
"Haven't fusion reactors been built already but have simply used more energy than they produced?"
That's correct. Hobbyists have built fusion reactors in their garages, and successfully achieved fusion.
There are about 30 Tokamak fusion reactors in the world today. All of them produce fusion. None of them produce more power than they require to run. Why do the ITER managers believe theirs will be different? That I don't know.
Also, there is evidence that the ITER project is badly managed, in my opinion.
... Gypsy scientists make significant breakthrough in fusion energy. Expect to have commercial reactors ready within 3 years.
Have gnu, will travel.
Design parameters for a fusion reactor:
1. Shielding: 10m of water or similar as well as magnetic shielding
2. Energy density 10kW/m2
3. Politics: Not in my backyard
Conclusion:
Sun
1. Atmosphere and earth magnetic field: perfect
2. perfect almost anywhere
3. 150 million km away: perfect
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
I'm sure Fusion was only 20 years away when I was a kid 30 years ago.
There are some scientists saying the ITER project may be a waste of money (like our nobel-winning Georges Charpak). They say it's just like a bigger JET reactor. After a few seconds it is detroyed. In the while, the Z-machine has achieved sufficient temperature for pure, aneutronic fusion using Boron.
I am not affiliated with those crazy rebel scientists...
F-U-N-D
F-U-N-D
F-U-N-D
F-U-N-D
F-U-N-D
...
Earthquake!!!!!!
Stupid Slashdot telling me not to use caps. Doesn't it understand that my humor would make even less sense if it was lower case?
When some of the early fusion reactor designs were tried they worked great.... until they started trying to increase the temperature and confinement. Tokamaks have been chosen for ITER because they are the most promising and well tested design. When polywells can demonstrate temperatures in excess of 2 keV (many large tokamaks e.g. JET, DIII-D, JT60-U), long operation (e.g. Tore Supra, over an hour), more energy out than in even briefly (JET, JT60-U), then people might become interested.
I wish the polywell guys and General Fusion the best of luck, but the chances of their investors getting their money back is laughable
Now you made me fire up doxbox instead of doing something useful.
I'll just leave this here.
Living With a Nerd
Interesting, but I'd say France is doing well in spite of Sarkozy, who appears to be doing everything in his power to destroy France. Same thing is happening in Canada under the current prime minister.
-FL
It's more like a real world situation if you use O-I-V-A-I-Z-M-I-R to get bonds and a military installation...
http://www.tenjou.net/
Oh that's right..... They already did!
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"It has been said that Fusion is 50 years away for quite decades but now work has actually been started."
For quite decades.
What?
The first REAL fusion reactor is in a series of tests right in in Livermore, CA. Here's the link to their lastest progress,
https://lasers.llnl.gov/
They expect to have a reaction that gives off many times more energy than it takes to produce THIS YEAR!!!
If they actually get it going, get it sustained, and make it better than break-even, do they know how to get the helium out?
And who was it who said that the tokamak is the Russian design for how NOT to build a nuclear reactor?
France got the rest of the world to fund a nice jobs bill for them.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
or we could just build thorium reactors in 5 years that produce no toxic waste...
IIRC, the article has it wrong. The problem isn't that solid materials can't contain the plasma, it's that touching the walls would cool and pollute the plasma.
Reading storms of my grandchildren and while regular nuclear reactors produce radioactive waste that lasts thousands of years, 4th generation reactors actually can reuse fuel and the radioactive waste products are only a problem for a few hundred years and produces a fraction of the waste of the older reactors. The US has about 50 trillion dollars worth of radioactive waste that can actually be used as fuel for these reactors which for some stupid reason Clinton canned the project (Smells like Gore). The waste itself is a solid glass material and does not corrode containers etc, and would be much easier to deal with.
Fusion. On earth. What could go wrong?
"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
Bussard claimed that what a Tokomak can do, an infinitely cheaper Polywell device can do better, with no radiation or hazard (on top of power produced). In a form factor small enough to fit on a medium yacht.
His research was under wraps for a long time (the Navy wanted this to power their big boats), then they cut off his budget, and he did one last act of a man who had very little left to live - he got in front of a Yahoo and Google tech forum, handed out everything he worked out in the last 15 years on handouts to anyone who'd take them from him, did a ~1 hour braindump that got put on the interwebs, and promptly kicked the bucket soon after.
Is it feasible? Energetically? Financially?
Quite possibly yes. No reason to get excited yet, but his company will tell us in a year or two. They're now financed by -someone- (maybe google or yahoo as these organisations had interest in clean containable ways to power datacenters and have been actively approached for this financing), and emc2fusion will likely get busy building a full-scale energy-positive POC in the next few years.
If they turn out to be right, this is BIG . And it's career-changing if you work on a tokamak project - this will cheapen power by an order of magnitude, allow contained powerplants in very small form factors, and generally end up being the biggest disruption the energy market has ever seen. Nothing to get excited over.
If it pans out, the French will end up wearing their new tokamak (an uberexpensive adventure, as tokamaks go) in a less than complementary way. I'm surprised they didn't wait.
-
Actually, Teller thought for the longest time you could make an H-bomb this way, kind of like making a big high-explosive bomb by putting some dynamite next to a bunch of fertilizer or some such thing. It was known as the Classical Super (bomb). One of the contributions of the early generation computers was showing that the Classical Super would never work, that is, unless you fortified it with gobs of tritium, making it completely impractical. That you could get tritium to fuse with deuterium had already been demonstrated, by boosted A-bombs in the US, by the Layer Cake, known as Sakharaov's First Idea in Russia, but this was hardly what people had in mind for a Super bomb.
The details of what both the US, Russia, and maybe Britain, France, and China got to work as a staged nuclear bomb are somewhat sketchy, and whether this is truly a fusion bomb or a monster fusion-boosted fission bomb is a matter of controversy, but the actual H-bomb is believed to be out-of-the box thinking from the Classical Super.
Some engineering intuition tells me the Tokamak is the Classical Super of controlled fusion -- something that will work if you throw enough tritium at it, but the tritium requirement making the Tokamak impractical -- think breeding time and EROEI -- much as the Classical Super was ultimately impractical as a bomb.
I understand that the USA was upset when France didn't help out in Iraq, but what I don't understand is why you guys hate on them so much, I mean without the support of the french and all the arms and backhanded supplies - from what I understand, you'd all still be subjects of her majesty.
It's "tokamak" instead of "tokomak."
His work is based on an earlier work, the Farnsworth Fusor. There is no logic that the Polywell improvement to the Fusor concept will not work. In fact, it's most likely that it will, odds on favorite.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
"It has been said that fusion is 50 years away for quite decades"
No further away than good sentence structure will ever been.
Because the moon has large supplies of isotopes that don't cause so much damage to the walls of fusion reactors.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tore_Supra
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_de_Fontenay_aux_Roses
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LULI2000
I said it earlier and I'll say it again: this is *not* a French reactor. It may be physically based in France, but it's an international endeavour. There's already a tokamak in operation, located in England and operated by the whole EC: it's called JET, for "Joint European Torus".
It all makes sense now. They're building it in France because LaForge was French!
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
That's as may be but he did a rubbish job with Duke Nukem Forever.
As a plasma physicist I'd be curious to know your thoughts on this attempted fusion reactor. It seems a very interesting and potentially clever design and very different to anything I've heard of before but, while it seems to pass the smell test I'm a particle, not a plasma physicist so that does not mean much!
Why didn't the French (actualy the EU, China, India, Japan and the US) wait and see whether the polywell works?
Because sitting around waiting for someone else to do the work isn't how you get things done.
Combining that locale with the Gallic work ethic, it will be another 50 years before they are finished breaking ground.
LE DAILY NEWS
Thursday, September 15, 2060
The country formerly known as France has successfully performed its first and last Fusion reaction.
FTFY
Just make sure your head scientist on the project is not Otto Octavius. Just sayin'.
This is an interesting and worthwhile view if you're interested in the complexities of fusion:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606#
It's very interesting that the tokamak design is considered a dead-end by the speaker.
"Ivy Mike" begs to disagree with you on this point. 10-15 Megaton fusion blast, ignited by a standard fission bomb "next to" (technically above) a huge canister of liquid deuterium, with no tritium used at all.
"Actually, Teller thought for the longest time you could make an H-bomb this way" - and he was essentially right. The trick was in the configuration.
Now practical is another matter... but it still worked.
Only if you have no idea what the differences between the two devices are... What separates fusion from boosted fission is the role the fusion reaction has in the process.
In boosted fission, nearly all of the energy comes from the fissile material - a small quantity of fusion fuel is used only to generate extra neutrons which accelerate the fission reaction and increase yield.
In a fusion bomb, a fission bomb is used to create the large quantity of radiation needed to compress and heat the fusion material to its critical point.
Two very different processes, two very different designs. There really is no "controversy" over this.
=Smidge=
Why is it that we're throwing gobs of government subsidy money to wind and solar in the U.S. when we should be devoting all of those resources to fusion power?
77% of the energy released by this bomb came from fissioning the natural uranium tamper (with fast neutrons provided by the fusion reaction).
There was still sustained, massively-energy-positive fusion without tritium, which the parent was saying was essentially impossible. That was my point.
=Smidge=