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Ask MIT Researchers About Fusion Power
Nuclear fusion power is the process of fusing light nuclei together to release energy, and ultimately, to put electricity on the grid. Today, we have six researchers from MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center here to answer your questions about fusion power, tokamaks, and public support and funding in the U.S. for this research. The Obama Administration's budget request for fiscal year 2013 is paying for the U.S. share of ITER construction out of the domestic program, starting with the closure of the MIT fusion lab. The interviewees are ready to answer technical and policy questions, so don't be shy! And, as always, please break unrelated questions into separate posts. Read on for information about the researchers who will answer your questions.
Dr. Martin Greenwald is a Senior Scientist and Associate Director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center. His experimental work focuses on turbulence and transport, density limits, and pellet fueling of magnetically confined plasmas. More recently, Dr. Greenwald has been heavily involved with data management, computation, simulation, networks, and remote collaborations for fusion research.
Professor Ian Hutchinson is interested in plasma control in tokamaks, as well as spatially resolved measurements of the radiated power coming from the plasma. He is the author of the standard fusion textbook Principles of Plasma Diagnostics. Prof. Hutchinson also works on particle-in-cell simulations of astrophysical and laboratory plasmas.
Assistant Professor Anne White researches turbulence phenomena on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, developing new diagnostics to resolve the small fluctuations which cause energy and particles to leak out. She is the recent recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award.
Professor Dennis Whyte pursues research into plasma–material interactions; that is, the way the hot plasma in a magnetic fusion reactor interacts with the surrounding solid materials walls. His team is also developing novel diagnostics for fusion nuclear science, which is critical as fusion reactors start producing power (and neutrons) over long periods of time.
Nathan Howard and Geoff Olynyk are Ph.D students on the Alcator C-Mod project. Nathan, who is in the final year of his studies, studies turbulent transport phenomena experimentally and through simulation. Geoff, in his fourth year, is working on disruption mitigation, which is a way to quickly and safely shut a tokamak plasma down in a few thousandths of a second.
Professor Ian Hutchinson is interested in plasma control in tokamaks, as well as spatially resolved measurements of the radiated power coming from the plasma. He is the author of the standard fusion textbook Principles of Plasma Diagnostics. Prof. Hutchinson also works on particle-in-cell simulations of astrophysical and laboratory plasmas.
Assistant Professor Anne White researches turbulence phenomena on the Alcator C-Mod tokamak, developing new diagnostics to resolve the small fluctuations which cause energy and particles to leak out. She is the recent recipient of the U.S. Department of Energy Early Career Award.
Professor Dennis Whyte pursues research into plasma–material interactions; that is, the way the hot plasma in a magnetic fusion reactor interacts with the surrounding solid materials walls. His team is also developing novel diagnostics for fusion nuclear science, which is critical as fusion reactors start producing power (and neutrons) over long periods of time.
Nathan Howard and Geoff Olynyk are Ph.D students on the Alcator C-Mod project. Nathan, who is in the final year of his studies, studies turbulent transport phenomena experimentally and through simulation. Geoff, in his fourth year, is working on disruption mitigation, which is a way to quickly and safely shut a tokamak plasma down in a few thousandths of a second.
What do you think of the efforts at http://www.emc2fusion.org/ and http://www.talk-polywell.org/bb/index.php ? They seem to be making real, measurable and open results but the mainstream physics community seems to ignore this progress.
> fusing light nuclei together
Light nuclei? They're just photons.
-- Soruk
Not to raise any fears -- rather out of genuine curiosity -- what happens when the magnetic fields that hold the 90,000,000 degrees Celsius plasma in place fail or loser power on the Alcator C-Mod? I understand it's probably in prototype mode but what sort of safety advantages or disadvantages do Alcator C-Mod designs offer over conventional large scale designs? Does the plasma come into contact with the toroidal super conducting coil? Then what?
My work here is dung.
When will fusion power my house?
As a non-scientist, what are the biggest stumbling blocks for effective fusion reaction? is this truly throwing money down the energy hole, or are there verifiable, measurable benchmarks that lead us from one point to the next. Something like, we got x to work, now we need y, when we get y, we get z and then we get fusion. Is it technology holding us back, politics, or the science?
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
How do you explain the safety/benefits of fusion to a generation of people terrified of nuclear anything?
Are there any good guesstimates on how small a tokamak-based fusion reactor (which produces more energy than consumes) can become? Theoretical limitations on size of the reactor would have obvious implications for pragmatic issues. AFAIK there is very little limitation on how small fission-based reactors can get.
Attitudes make the difference between Space and Time: we want to MAX our temporal, and MIN our spatial extension.
Do you see Stellerators, or Quasi Helically Symmetric Stellerators as being a more practical design for power generation than tokamaks?
Or not?
Does the plasma current ever hit the wall on a tokamak?
In a lot of areas where research is done on things which don't work yet -- rockets, bridges, transmission systems, etc -- there's a general idea of how things might be able to "scale up" to meet the goals.
Is tokamak fusion really in sight of being commercially viable source of energy? If we need unobtanium to make a commercially viable reactor, wouldn't it make sense to wait until the materials are viable before making even larger tokamaks? What do we learn from making these new, bigger, more expensive reactors?
Or are we trying to build ever-bigger spark gap transmitters as a way to make radio better? Maybe we should look at other schemes?
Or, alternatively, we know of a nice, large, gravity-fed fusion reactor fairly nearby, is the engineering simpler to harness energy from that on a large scale?
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
As practicing researchers, can you tell us about the health of the pipeline of young researchers coming into the field? Is there a glut of trained physicists at this stage, or is there still a need for trained specialists to enter the field, especially with ITER and follow-on machines coming online in the next couple of decades?
20 years is up where's the fusion you promised?
Why aren't IEC reactors based on Farnsworth's designs taken more seriously? From what I understand, IEC's have been more effective at producing fusion, and they are cheap to build. People even build them in the garage. From everything I've read, no one really takes the "fusor" seriously in the fusion science realm, and it's considered a dead line of inquiry. I've never understood why.
Drinking habits can be dangerous. You can choke on the cloth and the nuns will wonder where their clothes are.
Is fusion power going to be feasible in the next 60 years (extrapolating my expected lifespan)?
just skip the Microwave Power Plant in 2020
Do you think a program of the size of the Apollo program could kickstart fusion to general availability? Or would a rather smaller program suffice?
Will patents get in the way of your research?
I've heard things like pebble bed reactors and other emerging technologies make safety concerns about 70's era reactors out of date.
With what we know now, can we make nuclear power as safe (or at least "seem" as safe) as coal and other fossil fuels? Are nuclear pundits fighting against science, or are their concerns still legitimate?
From the outside fusion research looks like a desperate field that's always struggling with its fundamental research/engineering questions. I know more than most laymen: I know the reactions work, I know the sun is powered by (very slow) fusion, I know fusion reactors have produced at least around 50% return on the electricity put in. Still, it feels like it's possible it'll never work, even knowing that difficult problems take time to solve.
This is the outside view. What does the future of fusion look like when you experts look at it from the inside? Does it look like a gamble? Or does it look more like "just give us proper funding and we'll give you your reactor."?
The late Dr. Bussard of EMC2 [emc2fusion. org] claimed that the fundamental concepts of Tokamak fusion did not provide a platform for cost-effective positive-return power reactors. With the enormous ITER project reactor still not expecting positive return, at what point, if ever, will Tokamak research benefit the power grid?
Would having access to cheaper Helium-3 (if we can ever get the space infrastructure to mine the lunar surface for it where there is plenty) tip the scale on development of real fusion? I presume we have yet to get past breakeven, even with using the better He3 + H reaction, so maybe a comment about the immediate probability that He3-H fusion can be made to work in a lab to generate power would be in order.
Given $1Tn, the pick of the best brains in the world to work willingly on the project, a large enough location away from any and all governmental regulation and every facility you could ever need - WHEN WILL IT BE COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Thanks for taking the time to do this, I went to a lecture given by someone who worked on the JET reactor and it was fascinating.
...? Are there major surprises which come up or is it all working on a few well known problems for a long time?
Given that fusion creates (shorter-lived) nuclear waste, the cost of it is unknown and the timeframe is unknown, how can you justify the relatively large amounts of money going towards fusion research reactors when so little goes towards fission research reactors?
I know that the economics of larger reactor = more economical are well known with tokomaks. Does this mean you have a good idea of the minimum cost / generating capacity of the first commercial reactors, and if so what do those numbers look like?
What is the main technological challenge you're facing? Is it containing the neutron flux, getting the waste products out, separating the tritium,
Thanks again.
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
I understand that long term, we would want fusion, but we face increasing energy problems over the next 50 years and severe energy problems before 2100. Wouldn't it make sense to allocate research and development resources to something that we know works?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
But about capturing the power? Are we generating heat that will drive steam turbines?
What schemes to capture and harness the power exist?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Do you see any merit in the "dense plasma focus" approach to commercial fusion power production, specifically the work of the Lawrenceville Plasma Physics group?
In 1995, Robert W. Bussard submitted this legislation to all relevant Congressional committees, copying all US plasma physics laboratories.
Needless to say, the legislation wasn't passed.
Do you think the time is right?
Seastead this.
I haven't really found a concise statement on this so far. Assuming the current state of the art in plasma dynamics, how do fusion reactors scale with respect to size and magnetic field strength? Both in terms of the Q value of D-T reactions and D-D reactions. So, what happens when you scale up the size or magnetic field strength by a factor of 2?
(What Q values have been achieved with D-D fusion anyway? I've seen 0.7 for JET in a real-world D-T trial in 1997. What's typical fori D-D? How much effort does it take to get D-D to the current level of D-T?)
Do the guys at http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ have a real chance of achiving their goals? They seem pretty confident but do they have merits to be so? if so, why can't the goberment just fork 100mil to them?
Hi,
I was wondering if I could get an expert opinion on the latest cold fusion fad going around:
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Andrea_A._Rossi_Cold_Fusion_Generator_%28E-Cat%29
Is it just bunk or is there more to it? Thanks in advance!
Could you break down the various barriers/bottlenecks to the introduction of commerical fusion?
What are the technical problems in the state of the art, what other factors (political, economic, etc.) do you see at play?
How do you and your labs collaborate with others, and how is technology transferred? Is there much international cooperation?
Are there policy communities (China, India?) that might be more primed for the introduction of fusion technology into their grids than in North America? What would need to happen for North America to start using fusion?
I have many more questions, but those are the ones that popped into my head first. This is such a great opportunity -thank-you for taking the time today!
Is the ITER project good science?
Or, is it a politically motivated, pork laden boondoggle?
Researchers studying different types of reactors (Bussard polywells, tokamaks, LENR like the Rossi eCat, Farnsworth fusors, etc.) seem to spend an inordinate amount of time making negative public statements about each others' work.
Are there any researchers outside your own field that have attacked your work? Do you see this as a problem? Is it an unavoidable consequence of trying to gain funding when fission is the favored technology? Does all non-fission research suffer when fusion researchers fight among themselves, or is this just part of the normal scientific debate?
A safe, clean, reliable, inexpensive source of energy many orders of magnitude greater than anything we have is (or could be) a solution to many of our problems, economic and environmental. Lowering costs of everything means, well, a lot. Better world standard of living, health care, food supply....it goes on. The future of manned space exploration depends on this. Without a new, very powerful source of energy, we aren't going anywhere. Is fusion the answer? Is it the answer? Is it at least a step in the right direction?
Is the NIF approach even plausibly capable of generating electricity in a useful way, or is it purely a research platform / smokescreen for nuclear weapons research?
As so far as I know fusion experiments have sought to make fusion happen but not to harvest the energy. Obviously for a workable system, one would need to be able to harvest this energy. How could that be done at all? In Nuclear power plant, the water is directly in contact with the uranium/plutonium but that is obviously not an option here. How could the heat transfer be done?
I've always heard that fusion was very, very difficult without Helium3, which is in short supply Earth-wise, but more available on the moon.
How is your process dealing with the Helium3 issue (if at all), and how did you overcome the difficulties involved?
Ironically, if we still had a space program, we'd probably have had fusion since the mid-80's since we'd be mining all that Helium3....
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
I wouldn't call ITER cheap either, but it's an international project (and the Chinese aren't locked out, as is currently the case on the ISS) and the cost is distributed over several decades and billions of people. Germany's share is on the order of $2bn over 35 years. That's $0.70 per capita per year. Much less than a lottery ticket, but with much better chances than 1 in 140mio for winning the jackpot.
Do you find yourself hamstrung by patent issues? Are there approaches you would like to take that are just not worth pursuing because existing patents would get in the way?
and even ignoring all questions of whether they can generate net useful, saleable electricity... how likely do you feel that descendants of tokamaks like ITER are to produce economically viable electricity (including capital cost amortization), given their large scaling requirements, and on what sort of timeframe? What about inertial confinement alternatives based on the HiPER approach? As an ousider, it seems to me that the HiPER concept can be scaled down much more, and hence looks more attractive as a generation method.
Teach me to love you, you squishy poet from beyond the stars!
So I'm not a physicist (software guy) but I've taken a few physics classes. At an early age I found a tattered copy of George Gamow's One Two Three . . . Infinity which, although incorrect in some parts (I guess that's why they revised it and that's why 'speculations' was in the title), was perfectly written for my then fifth grade mind. It set me on a path toward science and a few weeks ago I saw the same 1960s Viking Press edition and flipped through it noticing what was slightly off and remembering it. I've since grown to love other obvious books like Hawking, Penrose, Hofstadter, etc.
So, quite simply, what are your favorite books for all minds young and old? Also, can you annotate which are written for the layman's entry into the given field and which are written to encompass the field for the researcher? I find that some books start off with the jargon so strong and the references and footnotes so thick that you start to have to reread every paragraph as they're clearly condensing entire historic papers into lengthy sentences. Any fiction books worthy of influencing your work and desires?
My work here is dung.
There are many potential routes to economic fusion. Assuming each of these concepts were funded at ITER levels, how would you rank the potential for economic fusion (cost competitive with nuclear) coming from each of the following concepts within the next 25-30 years:
1/ Field Reversed Configuration - eg Helion Energy, Tri Alpha
2/ Electrostatic Confinement - eg Polywell/EMC2
3/ Magnetised Target Fusion - eg General Fusion
4/ Laser Inertial Confinement - eg NIF, HiPER
5/ Heavy Ion Inertial Confinement - eg Fusion Power Corporation
6/ Tokamaks - eg ITER, DEMO
7/ Stellarator - eg Wendelstein 7-X
8/ Levitated Dipole - eg MIT LDX
I mean, how does the physical size of the reactor influence how hard/easy it is to achieve breakeven fusion power? I imagine there is some minimum size that one needs to have in order for the fusion to produce more heat than escapes the reactor. If you'd double the size of iter size of ITER (8 times the reactor volume), how much more fusion power it could produce?
How about magnetic field - for example - if there were superconductors available that could support, say 20% stronger magnetic field than currently used ones, how much more power would one get?
Both the Dense Plasma Focus and thr Polywell seem like novel approaches to break even fusion compared to much larger and much more expensive programs. I was wondering if you could give me your take on these technologies currently being researched, I'm particularly interested in Lawrenceville Plasma Physics' DPF research @ lpphysics.com
I figure everyone that is actively working on this project has an overall understanding as to what needs to be done before their part of the project "kicks in." But what of Logistics? Consider that glory of glories, tomorrow, it works. Someone is going to eventually call up and ask the question, "Great work team! But where do I plug in?"
I figure, right about now, that in the back of the room that holds the team meeting for this project, 3 or 4 Engineering Gieniuses are vapor locking.
Don't know. How much money has the government got?
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Where are the answers posted?
Achieving break-even fusion seems like it has to be an eventually achievable goal. After all, stars show us that it's just a matter of scale in the end and it's been achieved non-sustainably with fusion bombs (some have argued that sustainable fusion power is achievable now by detonating fusion bombs in giant underground chambers). The question I have is, once we have sustainable fusion reactors, are they really viable as a general-use power source? The reason I wonder is because, unlike stars which run on plain-old single proton hydrogen, most sustainable fusion reactors seem to require tritium or other reasonably exotic isotopes. There aren't really any natural processes that concentrate tritium that I'm aware of, so we either need to concentrate it or make it ourselves through other nuclear reactions. That's fine for experimental reactors, military applications, space missions, etc. where it doesn't matter if the fuel costs more per unit of output energy than other power generation methods. The question is whether the fuel can be supplied in a way that is economic and sustainable for regular power generation. Has anyone done any work on what a future fuel supply chain for fusion power would look like?
Don't get me wrong, even if fusion power will never be viable versus say solar power (which is, after all, just a way of capturing the output of a natural fusion reactor), I still think that it's worthwhile developing it simply for the increased understanding we'll gain, let alone the applications in space and other endeavours where fuel cost is not the primary concern. I'm just wondering if we'll end up with the situation where we have workable fusion reactors, but fuelling them economically will be the next advance that will continuously be 20 years away. Also I wonder if they will be another power source that looks good on paper until you consider the externalities. You know the sort of thing: marvellously clean and cheap reactor fuelled by a chain of very dirty and expensive mining and fuel processing operations.
Obviously there are a number of potential fuels for fusion and some are cheaper and easier to get than tritium. In an ideal world, we would be able to use regular hydrogen in which case we're swimming in fuel. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that, even if we could replicate the conditions of the core of the sun, a reactor that could power the city of New York running on regular hydrogen fuel would need to mass many times more than the entire city, so it seems like we'd need to develop some truly amazing fusion technology to use regular hydrogen for fusion fuel.
How do you extract the heat once you are successful in fusion? Is there a safe zone where it is just right to run water to convert to steam? With fusion running so hot and containment being such an issue it makes me think that extracting the energy could also be a fair challenge.
If the president came to you and said, "We have a national emergency. We need this to become a viable form of energy as soon as possible. You have the entire resources of the nation available. I will use my executive powers to make it happen. Whatever resources, funding and people you need..." What kinds of things would you ask for? How long with the entire backing of a nation and the political will to make it happen would it take?
Focus Fusion Society http://focusfusion.org/ is posting research on their project to do aneutronic e.g. Proton Boron (pB11) fusion. The concept sounds great, and as an engineer several parts of their design such as direct extraction of electric power are elegant. Is this credible research or pie-in-the-sky? I have not seen much mention in mainstream fusion research.
Sorry to tell you, but the whole He-3 story is a bunch of crap.Neither is He-3 rare, as it is absolutely no problem to make Tritium out of Lithium - you just need to wait 11 years for half the tritium to turn into He-3.
That said, D-He-3 fusion is as hard to achieve as D-D and certainly much harder than D-T fusion. Worse yet, in D-He3 fusion there is a parasitic D-D fusion process that is actually favoured (by nature) over D-He-3. The whole thing is just irrelevant and a huge strawman.
My wife wants to know if any of you guys look like Val Kilmer.
Making fusion power with a massive laser and a tiny bit of deuterium, is what's holding them back, it's rediculous! How about speeding a matter stream of deuterium atoms around a toroid, in a vacuum using superconductive "pinch points" around the circumference? it would set up tiny shockwaves of very high temperature and pressure. As the system is refined the matter stream could become self propelling, sacrificing only a very small percentage of deuterium atoms per cycle. And the potential power generation could be accomplished not through heat, but by using the spinning matter stream as the armature (rotating center) of a generator/alternator.
Really!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
Do you have an estimate for how much fusion will cost per kWh relative to today's technologies, like fission, coal, and natural gas?
I'm interested in knowing whether fusion will bring down the cost of electricity. A pet idea of mine for some time has been that commercial fusion power could bring down the cost of desalination enough that access to fresh water will no longer be a problem for countries that can afford to build the infrastructure in the first place.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
nuclear-fusion-simulation-high-gain-energy
How likely is this approach to pan out in testing? It seems to me that plasma control would be paramount to success. I've read elsewhere that there have been advances is plasma control for tokamak reactors using supercomputers. Could these advances also be applied to this technique?
~Scott
What would it take to prove it cannot be done in controlled and sustainable manner?
We're talking about a process that's currently only ``controlled'' at the center of the sun---with amazing pressures generated by the huge gravity well... is still manages to spew out huge amounts of harmful radiation in all directions. What makes us think that any materials we create on earth could contain a reaction that takes an entire star to control.
(yes, playing devil's advocate; would love to see controlled fusion materialize sometime in the near future---just have doubts about feasibility of the thing).
What is your opinion of General Fusion's (www.generalfusion.com) approach to a fusion reactor design?
$-15 trillion
It takes a long time to build merely the infrastructure needed to house and support a fusion facility. For political reasons, the sooner fusion is on-tap after we know how to achieve it. It probably wouldn't be a bad thing if there was a massive construction job program right now, given the current slump.
Do we know enough about the needs of a fusion facility to start work on these surrounding projects?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In this case I think the issue is Know Unkowns.
If I understand correctly, the steps needed to get to a commercial reactor are known. How we are going to execute those steps are unknown – and have been harder to solve than planned.
A Unknown Unknown would be brand new unexpected problems popping out. Think Black Swans.
i.e. For a Tokamak reactor to work you need a magnetic field of a known strength. The issue has not been with weird, unexpected issues occurring with the field strength (Unknown Unknown), it’s about generating the field in the first place (Known Unknown).
Are we any closer to having a working fusion power plant within our life times?
At this time, it seems prudent to say that the only reaction likely to ever produce commercially useful energy will involve copious quantities of tritium. Would you please address the main points of tritium self-sufficiency raised by Swiss physicist Michael Dittmar?
The issue is raised in part 4 of his study, page 20, The illusions of tritium self-suciency
More background: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24414/
I've seen a talk on Focus Fusion and it sounds like a very interesting concept; would love to hear from experts whether the idea has any real promise.
What is your evaluation of Rossi's device? From what I understand he will be contracting out to massachusett's this year and selling the divices.
He is not asking for additional investment so whether or not it is viable please do not give me the standard he's scamming you blurb.
What about using catalyzers in general to produce fusion?
Fusion is one of those technologies that is always '50 years away', even 50 years ago, maybe even 50 years from now. So, looking at what's actually happened recently:
What do we actually know now that we didn't know 10-15 years ago that gives support to the notion that we're making progress? Or, what are the 'big' things we know now?
Similarly, what are the things we still don't know that we could reasonably expect to find answers for in the next 10-15 years?
I'm assuming it's not that we've figured it all out and it's just a matter of engineering a working prototype.
This may be a stupid question, but...
The power that it takes to generate electricity from a nuclear plant, I assume, is fairly immense. Does the power that a nuclear plant generate put out more pwer than it takes to generate it? I know that, for the most part, it is steam pwer, right? The rods get hot and they boil water that, in turn, generates steam. some of these plants seem pretty massive and must take a lot of power to operate.
Thanks!
"I think you know what I'm talkin' about, Mr. President; We're gonna kill us a mummy!" - Bruce Campbell as Elvis Presley
Fusion energy has for decades been advertised as just around the corner (10-20 years) for being a viable energy generation solution. None of these predictions have come to pass.
Given this poor track record, why should we believe the fusion community and continue to fund fusion research? What has changed?
I am bothered by the fact that people know full well that many inventions come about from different things being combined together, yet as far as nuclear fusion research is concerned, the researchers are largely divided into camps, each of which thinks its own approach is the One True Way. There are the magnetic confinement people, the electrostatic confinement people, the inertial confinement laser-blast people, the inertial confinement electron-blast people, the inertial confinement sonic-blast people, and so on, and so on, and so on. Bah! It seems to me that some of those techniques are "complementary", such that if combined in an overall system, the whole would be a more effective means of reaching the goal. Well? (For some particular examples, see this link.)
The byproduct of fusion is Helium? Or is it some other atomic number they are shooting for now (boron?) Anyway, if the plan is to make this a drop-in replacement for coal and natural-gas burners, then how will you keep the unit up and running if its filling up with waste prodcuts. Does it have to be taken down intermitantly? Then what is the startup-time / power requirements / redundancy requirements of a fusion reactor that has to be restarted every 10 days.
Why are 3 US tokamaks necessary for the US to benefit from ITER? Do they have different specialties or something?
The argument here seems to be that in order to benefit from ITER construction, the US needs to have a domestic program counterpart. However, why, in a technical sense, are all the current facilities necessary in addition to the new ITER facilities? I'm sure particle physicists would love to keep Fermilab up and running, but its a harder argument to keep the hardware (the expensive part) in place in the shadow of CERN. While it would be "better" to keep them all open or even build more, it seems reasonable to close at least one domestic tokamak facility to construct a better international one. Sure the international partners will get more benefit, but they are putting in more money and have had a far more stable commitment to the project.
Since policy inherently involves prioritizing one goal at the expense of others, what qualifies a technical researcher to answer a policy question?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Scientific advancement do not advance on set milestone. And this is particularly important for fundamental research. Sometimes you have to have big budget for 50 years, and only get result the decade after. What your proposal amount to is "we don't get result, so we will limit you and set milestone, if you do not reach them, then poof. you lose". That is not how research happen and I am surprised that Bussard even supported such a bill.
Hoi.
1st: I'm a total n00b in physics, nuclear and fusion and all that stuff, so excuse if I'm being overly general and simplistic.
The current state of fusion:
Throughout the last decades humanity has spent upwards of 25 billion Euros on building Tokamaks, the most recent being the budget sinkhole JET which appears to constantly push back its schedule without even getting the most basic things of feasible fusion squared away - I recall JETs bill is somewhere around 17 Billion Euros now.
Here's my question(s):
Wouldn't this money be better spent in putting some serious scientific brains and research behind cold fusion concepts? Or is it that Cold Fusion is totally dismissed in the serious science community for obvious reasons that escape a novice like me. ... Or is there a peer pressure and the danger of looking silly when getting into cold fusion, despite it maybe being just as feasible and much cheaper than the Tokamak approach? Have to many scams and frauds spoiled the waters for scientists who could offer serious contribution in this field but don't dare to at the danger of being ridiculed?
Please enlighten a layman on these issues, of which some may be political. Thanks.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A professor friend of mine took an experiment to DOE that involved overloading paladium with hydrogen, which would in theory, create a sort of never-ending plasma state that constantly gave off heat because the paladium was always trying to return to equilibrium. DOE said the said the experiment had merit and should be done, but they wouldn't fund it because they didn't want to be associated with "plasma fusion". That was around 2002. Are gov't agencies still scared to work in this realm?
Then why not just say "light atoms"
That would be wrong - they are not atoms. You fuse nuclei, not atoms. Atoms are an electrically neutral object consisting of a nucleus and bound electrons. At the temperatures required for fusion the collisions are sufficiently high energy that atoms break up and form a plasma of free electrons and nuclei (which is why the sun is not transparent despite being made of helium and hydrogen).
In the same vein but different: what are your thoughts on General Fusion. As a physicist myself, but not in the area of plasma/fusion research, their premise seems reasonable and they acknowledge that they may only have a 10-50% chance of success in their design. As experts in the field are there any clear reasons why such a design will not work and, if not, why is there not more support for such efforts within the plasma/fusion academic community?
ITER/Tokamak has been around for a long time with, to say the least, disappointing results in the long haul.
At some point, practical planning would say that a portion of the money -- even a very small portion -- being spent on ITER projects should be redirected to make sure that the pre-occupation with ITER isn't starving other options that may turn out to be better ideas. It's often been the outliers that succeed even in technology areas where lots of attention and money have been spent on some "standard" solution.
I'm not against pure science but in this situation I'm likely to appear so to some: it's annoying to me that ITER, the long term "solution of the future and always will be" is getting so much money that other options are being starved out. Am I completely out to lunch for some reason?
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Right now we have pretty solid mastery of the electro-magnetic force, and can have it do our bidding. Unfortunately, it is very weak compared to the strong force. Supposing that we were to discover that fusion on a usable scale was not a viable source of energy, what do you think that this would mean in terms of future limitations for the human race?
Regarding the notion of Cold Fusion as a whole and not in regard to any particular experiment, do you consider the whole concept of Cold Fusion to be impossible overall, or that it remains an intriguing possibility?
Thank you!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I couldn't find list of accepted questions. So I will add my own, and hope i will not copy some.. So question is: How much modern technology helps with fusion power research / implementation ? I mean - are there any real technical breakthroughs recently that enabled fusion power recently ?
Given that solar energy is so plentiful, and that it will likely be widely available in the time frame that fusion power will be available, would it make more sense to apply the expertise of scientists into using fusion for spacecraft propulsion, which is an application that absolutely requires concentrated and compact energy? It could be a game-changer for travel within our solar system.
In addition, could the techniques used for fusion (both magnetic and inertial confinement) be applied to fission propulsion, for compressing fissile pellets to critical density? And would that be more within reach of current technology than the very high temperature and pressure needed for fusion? Why is no one researching that? It would literally open up the solar system for us.
Question is: What is the single problem with fusion power that we are not capable of solving ?
What are your thoughts on the eCat?
Is there anything people without physics degrees or PhD can do to help get us closer to the main goal? I'm sure there are lots of hobbyists, or people that just want to learn more, that are out there willing to dump a few extra hours into helping.
Hi
Why did it take so ridiculously long to get the countries to cough up the money for ITER?
According to Wikipedia, it was discussed in 1985 by Reagan and Gorbachov but the funding was complete in 2006. I can imagine 10 years for an expensive megaproject, but 20 years??
Is it because the Soviet Union collapsed in the meantime and the USA dropped the project funding?
Personally, I've always wondered if things would be more successful if done in low or high Earth orbit to remove Earth's gravity from being a factor in building a containment facility? (Of course - in this instance, I'm also a complete layman... )
Does this pose a proliferation risk in using such a reactor to breed large amounts of fissionable nuclii along with large amounts of tritium that can make fusion weapons more powerful?
On the flip side, does this present a solution to the nuclear waste problem, that with fusion as a neutron source we could transmute some of the substances that pose problems for long-term storage?
CERN just had a presentation about LERN: http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisplay.py?confId=177379
Any comments?
Given the current climate of fusion power and your vast knowledge in the area of fusion, do you know "how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?"
What is the best estimate of the operating size of tokomak power plant? How many do we need to convert the US away from coal & gas power plants while switching to electric cars? What is the answer if we look at 100-year projections for population, energy usage patterns, and density? Will a tokamak-based power grid be more or less useful in parts of the world with different needs, like Europe, Japan, India, or China?
Might there be an efficient way to confine a target group of nuclei for a short interval during which the fusion occurs?
It could potentially require much less energy to reach ignition. It seems to me to be a combination of both inertial confinement and light ignition - for example, a cool jet of expanding gas is exposed to an ultra-short laser pulse, stripping the electrons from the atoms and leaving behind a dense collection of nuclei, ready for fusion. Are there experiments like this?
I don't want to spark a controversial discussion, here. I just like to know what are the thoughts of the team regarding the ECAT system, which seems to promise wonders, but is weak on details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer
Absolutely, but that doesn't mean we have to take money away from fusion research. Perhaps one or two fewer wars in deserts, or an increase of one or two cents on the top tax rate for millionaires might be more effective?
Particularly for Nathan,
I'm a PhD student in computational fluid dynamics, and I've recently grown interested in plasma simulations. My experience stems largely from aeronautics, where CFD methods are very well studied and well validated for large ranges of turbulent flows. In these cases, we often have well detailed experimental data for verification; of what I know about tokamaks, this level of experimental detail is somewhere between nonexistent and impossible to acquire.
Do you see techniques from direct numerical simulation (DNS) or large eddy simulation (LES) becoming important as a primary tool in tokamak/plasma research as they presently are in more standard fluids? Can you remark on some of the computational challenges that makes tokamaks more difficult than say, multi-species combustion simulations?
While I agree with you, what are the odds? Democracy has been subverted by the world's wealthy. The behaviors exhibited by them now resemble those of a bacteria colony more than anything else - a form of life not famous for thinking ahead.
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So was/is there anything to Bogdan Malich's Aneutronic Fusion Migma that can be applied to any of the current projects?
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
Yes, that's why oil companies keep looking for oil deeper in the sea. After they deplete those reserves, there should be something we can use. Fusion would be OK.
I've followed fusion for many years. My mature opinion is that it is very hard for Q >> 1. Isn't bold outside the box ...witness the global luddite denuclearization in the aftermath of what happened in Japan.
thinking needed here? Hans Bethe and other's have proposed fusion/fission hybrid power. Both technologies
have their strengths and weaknesses. With fusion it's those darned neutrons...with fission it is waste and safety
The route to a more electric civilization is paved on the hybrid electric car, and a hybrid fusion/fission powerplant.
Am I right?
To maintain the magnetic Tokamak bottle, I understand you want the superconducting Niobium-Tin coils to keep on conducting for years.
Has there been any study of whether they could quench if the material degrades or gets transmuted because of the continuous neutron flux?
Another question: besides Tritium, do you expect materials of the reactor to become radioactive because of neutron capture and if so which isotopes and which half-lives would you expect to be the longest-lived waste products?
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Considering that we're running out of coal, oil, rare-earth metals, and even water in some cases - how much fuel do we have for fusion? How long will it last with earth-accessible fuel? Will this drive us to go harvest Jupiter?
I've seen analyses that say there is no economic way to manufacture tritium for a deuterium-tritium reactor. A workaround would be to use deuterium-deuterium fusion, but the energy breakeven point for this is 2500 times harder than D-T fusion (which we can't even do). What's the story here?
I suppose the disappointment that so many feel about fusion comes from the fact that it was so darn easy to make it happen in a bomb. But every fusion bomb is first a fission bomb - diagrams for the public make it look like you just set off your basic Hiroshima-type inside a big tub of lithium deuteride (I think it was) and presto, let the megatonnes fly. The staggering heat/pressure numbers inside the tub for a microsecond are all you need to make a fair percentage of it fuse.
All of this happened by 1952, just a few years after we applied ourselves to the problem. The first transistorized radio was 3 years in the future. SIXTY years later, we can only make fusion happen if you have several square miles you wish to demolish in doing so. Talk about feast or famine.
And we have controlled fission. Is there even a ghost of an idea for controlling fission in some way that would touch off controlled fusion? If so, what barriers not only keep it from working, but even keep it off the list of ideas being researched?
I agree that fusion would be "OK" but it's a much harder problem to solve than say, a thorium reactor. We've built working thorium reactors. The Chinese and Indians are building them now. It's a resource issue. Is it better to spend money on fusion or thorium. Fusion is a better long term solution, but perhaps effort is better put into Thorium - a lower risk bet with a more certain payoff.
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I took single class in fusion from a cheerfully cynical professor some years back, so please bear with me. It's my understanding that we don't have a good understanding of particle transport in tokamaks, i.e. "anomalous transport". Is this still true? What are the difficulties, and what approaches are people working on right now?
Relatedly, do we really understand H-mode and other enhanced confinement modes? What are the challenges in achieving the "advanced modes"?
Papers/citations would be great, if that's not too much trouble. Thanks for your time.
Actually, the thing with He-3 is that He-3 - He-3 fusion produces no neutrons, which means no radioactive byproducts.
Yes, He-3 - He-3 fusion is a royal bitch to accomplish. Much harder than D - D fusion. But it shuts up the "Ahh! Radiation! Ahh! Evil!!!" rants nicely.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
At a glance I did not see if anyone else has ask what you all think about Andrea Rossi and his E-Cat? I've been following waiting and hoping that they will find out what exactly is going on or if it's a hoax? What do you know of that story and what is true or not? If true any speculation on the catalyst?
.. and replaces said rants by "this-is-never-going-to-work" rants.
Sixty years later, the US military decided to keep using B-52 bombers (build in 1952) until 2044 or something absurd like that. The west today is where China was at the end of the 17th century. The richest country in the world, but perfectly stagnant and predictably on the way to ruin.
I saw a talk about Levitating Dipole plasma containment, and the speaker mentioned that the technique could be applied to fusion reactors that, on a similar scale to ITER, would be much cheaper (much, much less superconducting material required). Is there any money going into LDs in general, and fusion applications in particular? It seems like a very elegant configuration.
Are there any instances where governments have (or talked about) restricting research into fusion power in order to keep "nuclear secrets" out of the hands of the "bad guys"
For example, has the "born secrets" clause of the Atomic Energy Act been used to restrict fusion research, the dissemination of info/theories/results, and the sharing of information?
What about the "arms control" regulations that restrict the export of military and "dual use" items, are there restrictions there that have gotten in the way of full disclosure and dissemination of fusion research?
And they can print more $s when needed!
I had a question about Bose-Einstein condensate and fusion, but decided to Google it before asking. There are a number of results claiming it is not only possible, but prototypes have been built. I'm a bit suspicious. If nothing else, it seems a misappropriation of the term Bose-Einstein condensate to some other solid state phenomena (real or imagined). So my modified question is this:
Is there any credible evidence or theory to support using using Bose-Einstein condensates as a path to practical fusion? Or is it of limited use like a Farnsworth fusor, or is it (to quote a famous physicist) a bunch of "hokum?"
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Randall Mills has been claiming for almost a decade that hydrogen can exist at a lower energy state than what most scientists agree is the ground state. I'd think that this is something that could be independently verified or disproved in a very conclusive manet with little effort by a laboratory with the equipment, experience, and knowledge of MIT. Sometimes the best way to prove or disprove a theory is to do a little actual lab experimentation. Theory is great, but independent evidence is better.
Growing up during the first energy crisis, fusion was a pretty frequent topic of conversation at my house. My father got his Ph.D. in nuclear physics at U.C. Berkeley and took an interest in fusion. At that time, I remember, the path to fusion was considered to be a long road. And, the important timescale for completing the effort was when the coal would run out. 2070 might see substantial fusion power implemented given the level of effort put towards developing fusion. And, because developing fusion required bringing along new students in several generations, once the level of effort was set, there would not be much of an opportunity to speed things up in a later crash program. So, now, nearly half way along the path that was set out 40 years ago, Is it going OK? Is fusion on track? It seems like it, but how do you feel?
In the 1970's you people promised it's only "20 years away". It is now 2012, and there is not even an experimental power plant that is even reliable. It is now 42 years later. Where is my electricity that is too cheap to meter? Where is my fusion powered car? Hey futurists, stop making promises you can't keep. I remember watching as a child a video about having an ounce of plutonium being able to power a personal vehicle for one million miles. Where is that development? Quit dreaming dreams you have NO chance of fulfilling in your life. Yeah, "someday" it will probably be done, just don't waste my taxpayer dollars on it. (Solyndra anybody?) Why should I even give consideration to a failed wet dream? Quit wasting my money that is taken from me by the government under threat of armed enforcement.
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Er, none of its own. The question is, how much money have you got?
I've a question about fusion. If you know the process works (the sun), and you know in order to get the process to work it is a question of putting enough energy into the process; what is the delay on just ramping up the lasers until ta-da fusion? Or is the question of making it commercially viable actually much more subtle in that you also need better solutions for things like harvesting the energy from the fusion reaction or other technical challenges?
It's just that we seem to have been on the cusp of fusion for as long as i've been alive, get on with it already!
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but I am a layman with only a rudimentary understanding of tokamak based fusion. If the entire reaction is enclosed within an intense magnetic field capable of holding it all in place, how do you remove the spent "fuel" when it runs out and introduce new fuel? Does the entire magnetic field and the fusion reaction have to be shut down every time it runs out of hydrogen or deuterium or whatever is used for fuel? It seems like that would be a major roadblock on the way to breakeven energy production. Or is there a step I'm missing, because it seems to me (and I know, my opinion plus $5 will get you a value meal) that inertial confinement fusion is a more workable concept simply because the spent fuel continues along its previous trajectory, while new fuel is almost immediately introduced. Granted, it doesn't work yet, but that is a technological problem, not so much a theoretical problem. The NIF seems to be making progress on the ignition front, now someone just needs to find a way to freeze uniform pellets of deuterium (and keep them frozen throughout the process) and fire them in rapid succession. Thank you folks for taking the time to answer questions from folks like me who really don't know what we're talking about, but want to understand.
I'm sure one of the most frequent questions you get is "When? When will we have large-scale commercial fusion power?" And of course I'd like to know that too, just like everyone else (including you, I bet!). But I have a slightly different question: How sure are you that it *will* happen? Is sustainable, large-scale, fusion power generation something that's pretty certain to happen eventually, and it's just a question of when? Or is there still doubt as to whether it can ever work at all? Is it inevitable or up in the air?
Sorry, I missed your title. Without it, your comment didn't make any sense.
Sorry, the point is that we can invest limited resources developing fusion, which is unlikely to pay off anytime soon, or invest those same resources in thorium, which is very likely to have a short term energy payoff, giving us the leisure to develop fusion.
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How can I explain to my kid how you can get energy from two seemingly opposite things.
1. Breaking things apart. Fission
2. Putting things back together. Fusion
Thanks
Eliminate accidental Speeding Tickets
Money helps but doesn't solve all problems. People need to be trained and that takes a looong time. We are talking about PhD+10 years perhaps, in many areas of physics. I believe that eventually we will have workable fusion. I don't know if ITER is the best way but at any rate many experts think it's a good way forward. Plus given the constraints and the expected returns, ITER is like pocket change in the grand scheme of things.
In the meantime we have fission, which works really quite well, if we do not put plants in areas likely to be flooded or prone to earthquakes and where people in charge are technically competent and responsible.
What's wrong with this picture ?