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Construction of French Fusion Reactor Underway

Posted by samzenpus on from the limitless-escargot-coming-soon dept.

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."

26 of 389 comments (clear)

  1. probably not first post anymore by anagama · · Score: 1, Informative

    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
    1. Re:probably not first post anymore by hpa · · Score: 3, Informative

      Quite. ITER follows in the steps of the Joint European Torus (JET), and other research reactor. It is not aimed at achieve power plant break even (that is slated for the followon project, DEMO) nor economical breakeven (that would come after DEMO).

    2. Re:probably not first post anymore by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Actually, ITER is intended to demonstrate a useful amount of energy production from fusion. It's baseline design is for Q=10, i.e. 10 times more power out from fusion than put in. This is essentially a feasibility demonstration, and experimental test bed for things like wall modules and blankets. The follow-on (DEMO) will then be a prototype power plant, and actually be connected up to generators etc.

      ps. though AC, also a plasma physicist working on tokamaks

  2. French? Well, kind of. by Trapezium+Artist · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Professor Farnsworth begs to differ . . . by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Informative

    the world's first Fusion Reactor

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch_Fusor

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    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    1. Re:Professor Farnsworth begs to differ . . . by istartedi · · Score: 3, Informative

      Of course this design has no chance of achieving net power output. It's useful as a source of low-energy neutrons. I've always wondered what kinds of isotopes you could make with one. The next "radioactive boyscout" might use them. If you aren't familiar with that story, google it.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  4. T-O-K-A-M-A-K by Scareduck · · Score: 4, Informative

    SPELLING FAIL.

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  5. Re:As an American.... by Jedi+Alec · · Score: 4, Informative

    Shame about the whole 3 strikes business and kicking the Roma's out of the country...

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  6. Not French by gpig · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's an international reactor, hence the "I" in ITER.

    Duh.

    1. Re:Not French by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Also it isn't Frances first Tokamak.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tore_Supra

  7. ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 2, Informative

    "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.

    1. Re:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      There are two main reasons why it is thought that ITER can achieve more power out than in (10 times more in fact)

      1. It is about 8 times the plasma volume of JET (about 2x in each direction). The temperature gradients in tokamaks have limits (things like Ion Temperature Gradient mode-driven turbulence) so the bigger you make the machine the hotter you can make the middle of the plasma and the better your performance. The problem with this is that the power output goes like the volume, but the area this power is deposited on goes like the area. Hence why small fusion plants would be nice, and materials are the biggest issue for ITER and DEMO

      2. They will be using Tritium in ITER. Tokamaks today have only very rarely used tritium (e.g. JET, JT60-U) to produce more power out than in (very briefly 1s). This is because the plasma physics doesn't really change when you add Tritium, so experiments use Deuterium which is much cheaper and less dangerous (e.g. radioactive). At 100 million degrees, the D-D fusion rate is still pretty small and so the amount of fusion energy produced is tiny. The D-T rate is orders of magnitude higher and so significant power can be produced

      p.s. Yes, AC plasma physicist

    2. Re:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. by TheTurtlesMoves · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Q on fusors is lower than 1e-6. More like 1e-12 or even 1e-15. A Q of .1 would produce about 5e10 neutrons per second. They typically run at at kilowatt levels which would imply a neutrons level of 5e13 per sec. They currently produce about 1e8 or less neutrons per sec.

      --
      The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
  8. 50 Years Away? by 0123456 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm sure Fusion was only 20 years away when I was a kid 30 years ago.

  9. Re:Polywell by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

    WB-8 was supposed to have been completed earlier this year, yet I note that there aren't any preliminary results or even pretty pictures of it in operation on that site. I'd love to see the Polywell concept work, but they've been very quiet since getting their last bit of funding.

    --
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  10. Re:Polywell by dch24 · · Score: 2, Informative
    From the wikipedia article:

    In 2009 a consortium led by General Fusion was awarded C$13.9 million by Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) to conduct a four-year research project on "Acoustically Driven Magnetized Target Fusion"; SDTC is a foundation established by the Canadian government. The other members of the consortium are Los Alamos National Laboratory and Powertech Labs Inc.

    I would hope LANL believes in the project. They're partners in it.

  11. Re:Oh well... by swamp_ig · · Score: 4, Informative

    Fortunatly the magnetic confinement techniques they'll be using doesn't fail at any particular temperature. RTFM!

  12. Re:Le Daily News - 9/15/2060 by ClickOnThis · · Score: 3, Informative

    The burning crater formerly known was France has successfully performed its first and last Fusion reaction.

    ~FIXED

    Good joke, but I'm sorry to spoil it with a few facts. It's very difficult to make fusion happen in a reactor. The best you can do is get a small fraction of the deuterium and tritium present in the reactor to fuse at any moment. Even if you could get all of the fuel present in the reactor to undergo fusion all at once (a physical impossibility) the total amount of energy released would do no worse than demolish the reactor building. So no crater, not even a small one.

    --
    If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
  13. Re:Oh well... by Altrag · · Score: 5, Informative

    Which is still a tiny bit short of the 100,000,000K that they're looking at. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Reactor_overview.

  14. Re:Le Daily News - 9/15/2060 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Losing all the time as when that great French loser Napoleon, like, lost all the time. He was horrible at war, wasn't he. The link you have is funny...but...I think you meant this one: (http://www.militaryfactory.com/battles/french_military_victories.asp)

    There, corrected that for you.

  15. Re:Do they know how to get the helium out? by toQDuj · · Score: 2, Informative

    the tokamak design is never going to run in continuous mode. To maintain the field strength of one of the magnetic gradients, an ever increasing current in the superconducting magnets is supplied. This has to be (cautiously) removed every n minutes. This is not a problem with the stellarator design, but that is much more complex to build. The idea is to have three tokamaks on one energy producing site, rotating in operation to keep a constant power output.

    --
    Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
  16. Re:Oh well... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    They're both talking about Jimmy Carter, artard. He's also got a BSc, which would be nice to see in a few more politicians.

  17. Re:As an American.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    You have a very interesting definition of socialism. State owned critical infrastructure is not socialism, it's a necessity for every society.

  18. Re:Oh well... by Neil+Boekend · · Score: 2, Informative

    Yes they do: they are superconducting and will fail quite destructively when brought above the superconducting temperature (max 133 K at the moment).
    Yeah I know: that temperature can be several meters from the plasma, which makes it possible to maintain.
    (for the one person here who doesn't know how: The magnetic forces push the plasma away from the wall, creating a vacuum. This insulates enough for high temperature ceramic materials to survive. The backside of the ceramic materials is cooled by the energy transfer to the steam turbine (with some steps in between). There is heavy duty insulation and then the superconducting coils, cooled to the right temperature.)

    --
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  19. France has plenty of fusion reactors already. by Ihlosi · · Score: 2, Informative
    First, it's "Tokamak". And then this isn't the "first fusion reactor" in France. I'm sure you can find a few Fusors used as neutron sources, as well as these fusion reactors:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tore_Supra
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_de_Fontenay_aux_Roses
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LULI2000

  20. Not French !! by Liquid+Len · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".