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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.
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!
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).
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.
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.
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
Obligatory
I'm sure Fusion was only 20 years away when I was a kid 30 years ago.
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
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
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).
Or more likely, economical break-even fusion will come in some other form. There is a large sub-population of fusion researchers that don't expect tokomak fusion to ever be economically viable (particularly without a hybrid fusion-fission fuel cycle). However, almost all fusion researchers agree that it is still important to develop, possibly because it is the only one we know will actually work (achieve Q>1, AKA generate more heat-energy than is put in).
In my opinion, economical fusion will require a completely new design - particularly a non-steady-state design. Focus fusion is one example of a non-steady state design. However, it is currently unclear how much potential it has for economic power generation.
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.
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.
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.
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
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".
quite so - and the cool thing about this is that it's likely to result in a whole bunch of improvements in materials and such, that should bleed through to commercial applications. i hope.
weinersmith
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.
"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=
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=