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Good News For US Fusion Research
zrbyte writes "Fusion research would get a major boost in a Department of Energy (DOE) spending bill approved today by the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Appropriations. The panel rejected an Obama Administration proposal to cut funding for domestic fusion research in the 2013 fiscal year, which begins 1 October. It would also give more money than requested to an international collaboration building the ITER fusion reactor in France. This will allow the Alcator C-Mod fusion facility at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge to be kept open, which the Administration had proposed closing."
...to make this negative, and blame it on Bush.
Yay election year motivated spending.... lets see them get anything the following year :p
Let's see, a series of anti-global warming stories, anti-environmental stories, etc, shortly followed by a pork barrel promotion story blaming the sitting president for, of all things, cutting funding to a dead end science experiment. Gee whiz, I wonder why Slashdot is once again carrying Republican talking points and pushing a Republican agenda? Oh rriiight, it's an election year so the right wing media is ratcheting it up a notch and slashdot is doing its usual duty for the right.
That's new! ROFL. Lets see, which member's districts will this money go to...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
shouldn’t they be spending on securing more oil-fields in foreign countries?
It has to be a typo. Everyone knows Republicans (who control the House) are scientific Neanderthals and Democrats (like Obama) are scientifically enlightened. What kind of world are we living in when people won't live up to their assigned stereotypes?
Shouldnt they be working more on that whole being the economic shithole of the world thing?
That means in 10 years, it will be just forty years away, right?
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
A day without fusion is like a day without sunshine!
I gatta get me this shirt (on thinkgeek)...
if (it != oneThing) it = another;
This is politics to help Scott Brown in Mass. Here are few more items from http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/04/fusion-wins-big-in-house-spendin.html?ref=hp
"Overall, the panel would provide DOE with $26.3 billion, about $365 million below its 2012 budget, and $1.76 billion below the Administration's request. DOE's Office of Science would get $4.824 billion, about $72.2 million less than its 2012 level and $190.6 million below the request."
"The bill instructs DOE to use the extra funds to keep open the Alcator C-Mod fusion facility at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, which the Administration had proposed closing. It also wants DOE to "fund continued research, operations and upgrades across the Office of Science's domestic fusion enterprise."
The cuts to the rest of the DOE energy research are pretty deep. Congratulations House for porking up Scott Brown.
LFTR, LFTR, LFTR. Seriously. We need a Manhattan Project-style sprint to commercialize Thorium-based energy. That'll give us 1000+, carbon-neutral years to figure out the whole Fusion thing. And hoverboards.
More wasted pork on impossible tech. The money would better spent on a Mars sample mission or a Europa mission...
Waste of money.
I'd rather see that cash go towards an X-prize for working fusion power designs.
So the House really does do the exact oppposite of whatever Obama proposes. They can actually be tricked into doing something worthwhile. The more you know.....
We already have a technology that would give us energy independence for the 40 + years it will take to get the fusion reactors working!
10,800 LFTR would produce enough energy at 100 MW's each to fill all the US needs utilizing existing store of Uranium to start the fission process. They produce only 1% of waste and its only radioactive for 300 years apposed to the 10,000 years for Uranium. Alternatively they could build 1080 1000MW reactors to do the same job at a small fraction of the cost of conventional reactors and THEY CAN"T GO BOOM, and require no expensive multi-layer high pressure containment vessels. We could start building them within 2-3 years if we put our mind to it just like the original bomb making projects. Also it helps to eliminate proliferation of nuclear weapons by getting rid of existing stockpiles. About the only draw back that they legitimately have is that there isn't huge maintenance costs associated with it so its almost a build it and forget it with very low maintenance because it is done with fluids, just keep pumping in the ingredients and the process keeps going. Also another good thing about it is we are using ingredients that we just throw away from conventional mines. Also the ingredients are 3 times more abundant than Uranium and only has to be enriched to 20 % purity as apposed to 90% used in nuclear bombs! Unlike wind energy we don't use 350 pounds of precious metals to make each one and the energy density is much higher. Solar reflective arrays, which are currently the best method and most proven method of converting solar it electricity is not produced locally (from deserts) so less has to be done to improve the existing power distribution system. More reasons are against other methods and for LFTR but there are too many to mention here. Go LFTR...GO!!!
Glad to know Congress is good for something!
The fusion research give back was a sop to Sen. Brown of MA. Overall, this bill is a step back... did @zrbyte read the article?
I'm fine with funding fusion, but the fact is that we haven't been and aren't anywhere near payoff on fusion research. While this Administration has tried to focus resources on technologies with near-term benefits towards supplementing and eventually substituting our energy supplies with cleaner sources, this Congress is sticking with their usual pork buddies: oil, coal, and uranium. That they threw a bone to Scott Brown was an afterthought, the cost of doing business for when they get to their real priorities: cutting social insurance and 1%er taxes.
The overall DOE budget is cut $365 million below the 2012 budget, $1.76 billion below the Administration request. ... mostly to keep Alcator C-Mod open. ... a drop in the bucket for the billions ITER will require from the US over 10 years.
To pay for this:
- Fusion Energy Sciences program: +$72.6 million
- Various domestic fusion research programs: +$48.3 million
- ITER contribution: +$73 million
They're cutting from this:
- DOE's Basic Energy Sciences: -$36.9 million, $142.5 million below Administration request, mostly by canceling or delaying construction projects.
- Biological and Environmental Research: -$69.8 million, $83.4 million below request.
- Advanced Research Projects Agency: -$75 million, $75 million below request.
Other winners:
- Fossil energy research: +$207 million
- Fission energy research: +$765 million
Luke, help me take this mask off
That's the ticket, matey.
--
"Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who."
I'm sorry, but it's a big WTF that the administrator that's all about clean energy initiatives even consider under-funding or potentially closing research sites for Fusion. Fusion *is* our long term energy story. It's the only way the world gets through the next couple hundred years without a major meltdown due to other energy supplies failing us and having a domino effect on food supply.
We should be pouring even more money into this. The faster we get to Fusion the better. ITER isn't the only project, either. The National Ignition Facility ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility ) really deserves more Green$ than most of the bullshit solar panel and wind farm companies.
Politicians: Stop canceling and underfunding the *really* important long term science initiatives (like SSC, ITER, NIF, just to name a few...). They're important. These are our future. The rest is just what passes the time.
Short changing the future is not change I can believe in.
We know fusion exists, and that the reaction can produce more energy than it takes to maintain. If that weren't true, we wouldn't be here. That's not to say there aren't issues with fusion power, but comparing it to warp drives -- a fictional technology -- is silly.
The same idiots who deny cannabis's medicinal benefits agree it should be grouped along with crack and ecstasy.
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
One more Leftist Jihadi happily doing what he can to undermine the chances of nuclear fusion research going ahead, because if it successfully did and ended the West's dependence on Muslim oil, guess what - there would be no reason to consider that region of the world strategic any more, and those savages can be left to their own devices without getting some trillions of dollars over the years which they then use to wage jihad, or spread islamic supremacy in non Muslim lands.
The sheikhs in Dhahran, Manama, Abu Dhabi or Dubai must be paying him well. If fusion power became mainstream, his source of income would be gone, which is why he's busy shilling for the Mohammedans without looking like it. Pretty brilliant!
So in other words, ITER fusion (tokamak) and old school crap fossil fuel are getting a boost at the expense of forward-looking science research, which got majorly AXED.
Is this a good thing at all? I tend to agree with the few who think that the Tokamak research is a distraction, keeping funds away from other forms of fusion research that are more viable.
From the ITER wikipedia page:
Slashdot is far far far FAR LEFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dammit
Slashdot is far far far FAR LEFT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Dammit
Slashdot is on the FAR far FAR left!!! Dammit
I can't BELIEVE the number of trolls here! It's like a god damned Gen Con in here!
On topic: W00t. This is great news, and I sure hop ethey can keep the funding going in the future. THIS is something worth going into debt for, not blowing up helpless people who just want to be left alone anyway.
Don't you understand? This is obviously a ruse to throw Slashdot commenters off the trail of their anti-science agenda. Or it could be a disagreement about priorities and funding. But I think it is more fun if I make broad, sweeping generalizations about people I don't generally talk to.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I've been kinda enamoured with Thorium salt fast breeder reactors lately, seems to me it's a much more attainable goal. Fusion would be cool and all, but isn't TSFR technology, like, already within our grasp?
Energy is a political money bag, all the way around. It creates dependency and job at all levels, consumes political capital, it uses regulatory resources, it generates taxable transactions for GDP. What is the pols and bureaucrats not to like?
Can't have that pesky freer (in thought and beer) energy, at some point, come along before they have a chance to maintain their control. Low power devices, batteries, more efficient cells, hydrogen storage make this more likelier than ever.
Obama wanted to cut the funding because he knew the republicans in the house would do the exact opposite.
if O attacked fusion to get it this much funding? Seriously. Anything that O pushes for, the neo-cons fight. At this time, it is stupid to have neo-cons in CONgress with O in the WH.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Compare those numbers to the amount spent during the Republican primaries recently to show how much contempt they have for these programs.
When it comes to working fusion engines, all of these mechanisms have demonstrated fusion. So these are types of working, mostly operational fusion reactors :
When it comes to "best understood", tokamaks are easily the champion. When it comes to practicality, polywells beat the crap out of tokamaks, but it is not known how to get them to q > 1 (in fact there is a mathematical proof that it can't work in a farnsworth-hirsh fusor, but that does not apply to polywells).
Polywells depend on the second law of thermodynamics being weaker than is generally understood, on the polywell fusors leaking entropy at a rate much lower than you'd expect, which sounds impossible, but there's the small issue that at least a few experimental results are on the polywell side.
A basic q 0.01 polywell is something a 10 year old might build in a year's time in his father's garage using scrounged up parts, giving it an amateur following. Nobody has built a tokamak for less than 100 million yet.
While tokamaks have the greatest chance of small successes, their theoretical limits are quite low. It is not possible to build a tokamak that has a Q value of more than between 2 and 10 (the exact number is not known as far as I know). For most other systems, Q value limits are 100 or even higher, giving them a better long-term outlook. BUT that could merely be the result of tokamak research being ahead of the other systems.
The only real advantage of tokamaks is that a few international organisations have decided to pursue them. This decision was made in the 1950s for bad reasons and has not been revisited since. But lots of important international figures are pushing tokamaks. Most scientists are convinced ITER is going nowhere (or so it seems in the physics dept here), but the "consensus" view if you must have one is that if we're to pursue the "cassandra" of fusion, then we should pursue ITER. Mind you, I'm in Europe, so support for ITER is not surprising as it is by far the biggest source of physics research funding in Europe.
There's a world of difference between working and practical.
Is there? The Farnsworth fusor (a type of fusion device based on inertial electrostatic confinement) is working, and nowhere near "break even", so therefore useless as a power source. Yet it is a quite practical source of neutrons, for various purposes.
Forget politics. With the extra funding, I predict fusion will be a reality in about 40 years.
I've been kinda enamoured with Thorium salt fast breeder reactors lately, seems to me it's a much more attainable goal. Fusion would be cool and all, but isn't TSFR technology, like, already within our grasp?
You would only spend money on researching one technology at a time? Most of what is being researched in something like ITER falls into two categories: plasma physics (which couldn't be found out before; plasmas aren't scale-invariant and the mathematics of them is furiously difficult) and advanced materials (how to cope with the neutron flux and efficiently convey the heat away without everything being super-brittle). The latter will also benefit fission reactors (including those Thorium salt fast breeders you seem to be in favor of).
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Money doesn't buy intelligence. It just buys more ways to be dumb.
The notion of a naturally free market is an unrealistic utopian idea akin to that of communism. It sounds really great on paper or in words, however, it will never actually appear in the real world due those pesky things called human beings. They just refuse to operate according to the theory.
Go figure.
Revolutionary breakthroughs- the new findings challenge the traditional belief that fusion powers Sun light. The satellite Data on Solar Spectra could be successfully interpreted by new atomic phenomenon (Padmanabha Rao Effect) by which gamma, beta or XRF first causes Bharat Radiation (nearly 12.5 to 31 nm) that in turn causes UV dominant optical emission from within excited atom of a radioisotope. Most significantly, gamma, beta or XRF emission from Radioisotopes produced b Uranium fission powers Sun light. http://www.angelfire.com/sc3/1010/InterpretationSolarSpectra.pdf M.A.Padmanabha Rao, PhD (AIIMS)