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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."
I guess your Free World doesn't have any gypsies in it.
They just outlawed burqas in public. They are far more socialist than we ever were (A good thing, IMHO, but still, bad example.) Their military is, ah, not very large by any standard, for instance, they have a grand total of one carrier of some 37 kilotons. We have eleven carriers over twice that size. They may have broken ground on an international effort to build a fusion reactor, but until it produces more energy than it consumes, I would hardly call them world leaders in important technology. Sarkozy has done pretty well for a "conservative" in France (their conservatives look like our liberal fringe), but he is no world leader. Maybe if he bought some stilts...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Yup, because between being a corporate whore on the one side and a complete communist on the other there's definitely not an entire spectrum of political views...
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Yeah, we're lucky we had a Luddite peanut farmer for President to save us from energy independence by banning nuclear waste reprocessing.
God bless the retards in Congress in bed with the oil industry (literally). Without them, we wouldn't have the joy of $200 billion drained from the U.S. economy every year to pay for petroleum.
And hugs to the corpse of President Nixon without whom we wouldn't have the cozy relationship with China that allows us to say goodbye to over $200 billion per year only to borrow it back so we can go further into debt all over again next year.
With leadership like that what could possibly go wrong.
The problem with the Sun is getting the energy from the reactor to where you need it efficiently. Solar cells just aren't cheap enough, yet.
As someone born in a country with a large gypsy population, I have this to say: it aint bigotry if it's true.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
There's no purpose served in using photoelectric panels for industrial-scale power generation. We don't need better photoelectric cells to make better use of solar power. A black pipe, a reflective parabolic trench, and a turbine generator are all you need - there were a couple of plants like this in California, low tech and functional. Of course, it will never catch on, since it actually works.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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
yes but not the millions of degrees needed to reach fusion
Seems unlikely. There's no indication that their machine will ever reach break-even, and the idea of a piston-powered fusion reactor makes me laugh. As for Los-Alamos, their magnetized-target fusion research seems to have stalled - no updates since 2003. Don't hold your breath on this one.
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 "intents and purposes", "whom" remains part of the language. I care about spelling and grammar, particularly when i see either misused.
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.
"Gypsy" has double meaning: it's an ethnicity, and it's also a culture. As cultures goes, this particular one is deeply rooted in crime, it's practically what it breathes.
And that crime is, effectively, what is persecuted in Europe. It gives the perception of racism, because it's one of those cases where straightforward application of laws results in a disproportionally large number of representatives of a particular culture (who also happen to be representatives of a particular ethnicity) being targeted. The fault is not with the law, though.
But then again, anyone who has actually lived in areas with significant gypsy population (again, by this I mean the folks which embrace the culture, not gypsies by blood) know that all too well, and those who hadn't will just keep crying "racists!", because in their rosy multicultural picture of the world all cultures are equally good and valued.
It's in France. However, the project is international. To be honest, mostly US and Japan.
No, it's not. It's mostly european: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Funding
Indeed the world cannot sit on it's hands waiting fusion. Fission is a highly practical, safe and clean form of electricity generation. And Generation IV reactors make it sustainable and hugely reduce the waste issue. If you haven't seen it, there is a host of informative material and discussion on Barry Brook's blog. Brooke is Director of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide and one of the group including Hansen pushing for development and deployment of Gen III and Gen IV nuclear.
Brave New Climate
With no real published data, and body of *experimental* and theoretical evidence that say it won't..... I wouldn't hold your breath.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Fucking slashdot, home of the know nothing twit
No toxic waste from a Thorium reactor? You ignorant fuckwit.
(I am a strong supporter of the thorium cycle, but the idea that it produces no waste is a new low in delerium even for the home of the "nerds").
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.