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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."
Yay election year motivated spending.... lets see them get anything the following year :p
That's new! ROFL. Lets see, which member's districts will this money go to...
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
How exactly is fusion power a dead end?
You're confusing "distant destination with rewards that are worth it" for "dead end".
Friendly clue from Europe:
As long as you believe the only politics that exist is "Democrat" or "Republican" your country is never going to arise from it's current venture into corporatism.
Fix it by changing the system. Not supporting it.
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;
I can't speak for the Bush part, but this isn't all rosy. Quoth the Science article:
Is all of the potential loss of research and certain loss of construction worth the fusion goal? I'm not feeling lucky there.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Nope, it's SOP. Obama's against it, therefore they must be for it. Plus I'm pretty sure at least some of them think it's for making nukyular bombs.
"rewards" that might never happen. Just like warp drive has never happened.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Says the expert.
I've SEEN a working fusion reactor. Tokamaks work right now.
ITER merely take scientificially-demonstrated technology, and makes it industrial-scale.
How do you know it will ever work? You're confusing "wishful thinking, daydreams and delusions" with "historical track record of proven failures and almost insurmountable engineering obstacles". You want a distant destination with rewards? Time to remodel our western social structure. But that's too hard, better stick to fanciful sci-fi scenarios and techno-fixes that will never happen. So much easier to cope with than reality! Also means never having to change the old career-suburbs-car model either, too comfortable in front of your Chinese TV!!
Damn and me without a time machine to go tell Da Vinci all those drawings of flying machines are a waste. I mean really hundreds of years of none stop proven failures. He should have just stuck to art.
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.
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.
Here are the recent Slashdot stories:
Who Needs CISPA? FBI Has a Non-Profit Workaround
WW2 Vet Sent 300,000 Pirated DVDs To Troops In Iraq, Afghanistan
Key Test For Skylon Spaceplane Engine Technology
China Plans National, Unified CPU Architecture
Microsoft Patches Major Hotmail 0-day Flaw After Widespread Exploitation
Conflict of Interest Derails UK Government Open Source Consultation
Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief
Bionic Eye Patient Tests Planned For 2013
BOLD Plan To Find Mars Life On the Cheap
'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany
UK Digital Economy Act Delayed Till 2014
The only thing I see here remotely political is the "Analytic Thinking Can Decrease Religious Belief", which is another way of calling religious people stupid and "'Mein Kampf' To Be Republished In Germany", which contains a whole bunch of comments comparing "Mein Kampf" to the Bible.
Seriously dude! How bad do you really really want to believe in the fictional "right wing media" to make you see evidence of it where it does not exist?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Your comment is about five years late. This was an Obama cut that got undone by the House.... it's all (D)s involved.
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.....
it's a dead end because you, like me are nothing but dust without water.
thus fusion power quite literally means death sentence for all organic life.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
So I guess that Obama deleted the funding to hurt Scott Brown then?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I've SEEN a working fusion reactor. Tokamaks work right now.
There's a world of difference between working and practical.
I think we both know that's what the parent meant. After all, there are fusion machines that can sit on a desk, but you don't see anyone proclaiming that fusion power is here yet.
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
If only it were that easy...
Unfortunately, here in the States, we have First past the post or "winner take all" voting, which simply means that the person/party who gets the most (NOT (necessarily) a majority, simply the MOST) votes - wins. Essentially, a vote for any candidate other than the second place finisher is a vote for the winner. As a recent historical example, Ralph Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000. See also Duverger's law, which says that first-past-the-post systems are guaranteed (over time) to become two-party systems. Of course, the alternative is multiple parties and coalition governments, which many other nation's governments are living examples of how well and smoothly that system works, too.
When it comes right down to it, humanity has yet to invent the ideal system of government.
That's the ticket, matey.
--
"Please! This is supposed to be a happy occasion. Let's not bicker and argue over who killed who."
The supply of hydrogen available for fusion is so ridiculously large that the concern you have won't be a serious issue for something like a hundred billion years. And at that point, we'll be struggling to figure out what to do about the heat death of the universe anyway, hydrogen exhaustion will be the least of our civilizations' problems.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Yes, Europe is a place that looks to have figured out how to make government work all right. Let's take our clues from them.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You're confusing "necessary test-bed for materials" and "money hole".
But as you clearly know nothing about the field I understand the confusion.
I must have missed the weaponized uncontrolled faster-than-light explosion 60 years ago that proved the basic principles in an artificial device, and the whole thing being consistent with generally known physics.
Constructing a warp drive would require new basic science. Getting a fusion reactor working with an energy gain might require specific discoveries and a lot of hard engineering, but it's not inconceivable in any way. I also think the recent interview with the Alcator C-Mod guys here at /. made the point that the "failures" for at least the last 40 years have been the failures of funding agencies to provide the resources that the researches expected to be needed all along. ITER will be better know compared to if it had been built 20 years ago (new insights, better materials, better resources), but the basic design for what was needed to evaluate the next level of tokamaks concepts was there that long back.
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.
AC speaks the truth.
Power balance in tokamaks and other magnetic fusion machines is well understood enough, to the point where they're covered in chapters in various textbooks on the subject. They lay out, in black and white, roughly what design decisions need to be made to have tokamaks and friends produce significant net power. The books I have are quite a few years old too.
OTOH, there are quite a few papers out there, outlining why farnsworth fusors and polywells make rubbish power plants.
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:
Pork spending is bad when used on bridges to nowhere, but great when spent on fusion? I wonder how many techie libertarians here were happy at the expense, whether just initially or still, after having thought about it.
Learn to love Alaska
Calling it a major cut is a slight exaggeration, the actual cut is 2%, as opposed to Obama's request to increase it by 8%.
It sounds like they're just shifting some money from Obama's "Green" energy initiatives to fusion research.
Seriously dude! How bad do you really really want to believe in the fictional "right wing media" to make you see evidence of it where it does not exist?
Oh, make no mistake, the right wing media does exist....but not here at Slashdot.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
Pfft. "There remain serious engineering challenges", a statement nobody would disagree with, is far from the bullshit "dead end" claim that started this thread. You have, in essence, made everyone else's point for them by backpedaling to their side of the argument.
The enemies of Democracy are
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?
I'd rather the Irish banks weren't being funded by taxpayers like me (to the tune of E14,000 each per Irish man, woman and child) just to pay back German banks who were feckless enough to lend it to them in the first place.
As for your knee-jerk reaction, the Germans were the first ones to break the Eurozone rules back in the early 2000s.
What I'd like to see is more funding being put forward to Gen 3+ nuclear plants and shutdowns of the Gen 1s. Also a bit of funding towards Thorium fueled reactors ;)
Why? Well, fusion is all nice and everything, but Thorium is more plentiful than Uranium, reduces to a cleaner end product, and could possibly be used to reduce the Uranium waste we already have lying around.
We can use it as a nice step up to fusion, but today, and reduce the coal powered plants and cool off both sides of the climate change camps... for a while.
Captcha: lifters (LFTR).
There probably is.
May the Maths Be with you!
Lots of folks worked on making people fly for hundreds of years. They failed. Then some folks succeeded. Now I can get on a plane across the country for a week's wages.
Obama wanted to cut the funding because he knew the republicans in the house would do the exact opposite.
That's about right. Obummer won't be satisfied until this country is totally dependent on outside sources of energy. His administration is actively shutting down oil refineries. We'll have to do as Iran is doing now - importing gasoline. How does $9/gallon gasoline sound to you?
Actually, that is an interesting comparison. Nobody denies that da Vinci was a a visionary and a genius.
However, it is not at all clear that his designs actually influenced the modern planes and helicopters - as far as I know the helicopter was reinvented and developed independently and only later people figured out that it was kind of similar to da Vinci's design.
So was his work impressive? You bet. Did it have an impact on society at the time? No. Did it have an impact on technological development much later? Maybe, but even that is questionable.
So when it comes down to it, it is hard to make the case that a hypothetical tax payer should have funded da Vinci's projects at the time. Sometimes attempting something too early just diminishes the chance of success. In da Vinci's case, it is now obvious (although it wouldn't necessarily have been at the time) that the lack of engine technology doomed all his attempts at flying machines from the get-go.
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.
Yes! Let's be more like Europe!
World Happiness report ranking:
1. Denmark
2. Finland
3. Norway
7. Sweden
And yes, us "socialist" Scandinavian/Nordic countries have perfectly healthy economies. And we would never accept your two party dictatorship.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/06/world-happiness-report-2012_n_1408787.html
No. Let's not.
Yeah well. How's that working out for you.
In Transparency International's 2010 Corruption Perceptions Index all five Nordic countries were ranked among the 11 least corrupt of 178 evaluated countries
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model
(United States: #24)
it's in my head
If so, I'm not alone:
http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/01/why-is-iter-so-hard-to-fund.ars
And it's been, what, $25B? And the MIT guys say they need another $80B to maybe go commercial by 2040? How many kinds of advanced fission plants could we try for that kind of money - each with a virtual certainty of generating actual power, and long odds of being more reliable than tokamak fusion is ever likely to be?
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Compare those numbers to the amount spent during the Republican primaries recently to show how much contempt they have for these programs.
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.
Most of that "elections" game theory reasoning is only true if you are playing the game by assume there is only one election, and that's it. Then yes you vote for the 2nd place finisher. But if there's going to be more than one election it's a stupid idea, unless you genuinely would be more happy with the 2nd place finisher than the 3r place or other.
Because if people voted for the candidate they actually wanted rather than their second least hated candidate, then even if the 1st candidate still wins, the results could show everyone how many voters really wanted the other candidates. That sends a signal.
Then the voters in the next election might figure that one of the alternative candidates actually might have a chance, isn't so bad, and so vote for that candidate.
Alternatively the 2 Parties might realize that more and mroe people really want something different and change accordingly to try to ensure the other candidates don't win. While this does mean the 2 Parties might still win, the voters could still get the changes they wanted.
If you bunch are trying all that "game theory" crap when voting and are NOT succeeding, perhaps it's time to realize that the Two Parties are better at playing the game than you are. So stop doing that stupid shit which is not working.
Lastly: the first past the post system also works the same way for the "3rd candidate" if that candidate happens to get enough votes. Then suddenly the incumbent gets thrown out. That doesn't happen because either a) the voters stupidly think they are so smart at gaming the system or b) the voters actually prefer the Two Parties. Which may be true despite what people here might prefer to believe - there are certainly very many Obama fans (same goes for the R fans). Often it's as if it's their religion or similar. So it'll take a lot to convince them to vote differently.
Well you know the old joke... we have been 30-40 years away from practical fusion for a few decades now :)... eventually we'll get there... but it's only 30-40 years away
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
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.
I would have been interested to know the reasons why someone modded my above comment down. I think my point deserves better objections than being labelled as a troll. In my opinion, the European Union is not a democracy, and it ruins national democracy. Please explain my why I am wrong.
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)
In which case they were doing fusion so fast they would have made a nice smooth glassy surface too.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking