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Princeton Nuclear Fusion Reactor Will Run Again
mdsolar writes with good news for the National Spherical Torus Experiment. Tucked away from major roadways and nestled amid more than 80 acres of forest sits a massive warehouse-like building where inside, a device that can produce temperatures hotter than the sun has sat cold and quiet for more than two years. But the wait is almost over for the nuclear fusion reactor to get back up and running at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. "We're very excited and we're all anxious to turn that machine back on," said Adam Cohen, deputy director for operations at PPPL. The National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) has been shut down since 2012 as it underwent a $94 million upgrade that will make it what officials say will be the most powerful fusion facility of its kind in the world. It is expected to be ready for operations in late winter or early spring, Cohen said.
Public cynicism about fusion seems to have peaked at almost exactly the same time as there are a lot of new ideas and experiments ready to go.
Even the needlessly big, expensive NIF has hit some amazing recent roadmarks recently(scientific net positive), while at the same time their funding is being slashed. Lots of new clever experiments seem to be promising(like Larwenceville plasma physics' Focus Fusion record heat density), in an era where no one in policy positions seems interested in chasing the tech.
I'm glad Princeton is getting back in the game, but everything I hear says there won't be enough funding to actually get the staffing they need.
Looks like a sphere with an empty column down the middle
Spherical Torus?
I wondered the same thing. However, the National Spherical Torus Experiment web site has this explanation:
The magnetic field in NSTX forms a plasma that is a torus since there is a hole through the center, but where the outer boundary of the plasma is almost spherical in shape, hence the name “spherical torus” or “ST”.
There are also some links to more detailed descriptions.
I visited these folks when they had an open house a few years ago.
It isn't too often you can visit a place that's working on fusion reactors.
Looks like a sphere with an empty column down the middle
In other words, it's a torus. It may not be of the standard donut dimensions people are accustomed to when they think torus, but it's still a torus. It's like saying that a rectangle with dimensions of 50x51 is a square-like rectangle. Simply calling it a rectangle would do.
Not to be confused with a spherical taurus in a vacuum.
Maybe it's a moon sign....
There's nothing anti-nuclear about reporting positive events in fusion development. I don't care how much bias you're used to seeing, there's no point in screaming "bias" when bias is clearly not present.
I'm an Elliptical Pisces,
what's your sign?
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I think you forgot to change accounts before posting.
Oh, I'm so damned slow. I didn't catch that.
With that critical piece of information, I think this is snark directed at his detractors.
Newsflash: humans use approximations when convenient for explaining something, and do not use strict definitions at all times.
I've read of tokamak's plasma described as a pretty good vacuum.
Of course it makes no sense!
Why would a nice, stable form of baseline power with a compact, energy-dense fuel supply interest anyone? Amiright?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
It's like saying the Earth is almost spherical, instead of saying it's a lump of matter with an undetermined shape.
There was a good bit of debate among nuclear physicists around the time of the oil crisis on how to best accomplish practical fusion. A Manhattan Project or Apollo Program type approach seemed wasteful given the large available coal resource and it was pretty clear that the problem was bigger than either of those to examples. So, a long term program timed to pay off when the coal ran out was adopted. That decision now frames how many PhD's are produced each year in related fields and how we intersect with the international research community etc.... But, we are probably getting the most bang for our research buck using this moderate approach.
Global warming was not a concern at that time. Fortunately though, other smaller research efforts initiated at that time have delivered sooner and those can provide a solution to end carbon dioxide emissions.
It's the other kind of anti-technology post, the kind that goes "Let's stop and wait for $DISTANT_TECHNOLOGY, for it will be so much safer and cleaner than the known-quantity reactor types we have today." Of course, when the new tech does reach break-even and plans are drawn up to build, the same people will pop up start regaling us with 'unexpected problems' pulled out of their own colons. Each one will be cited as a reason for stopping development and construction so we can 'do more studies'.
Folks, don't forget last week, when the same effect arose in discussion of a new California solar plant.
So, you agree that fission is unsafe. I wonder if their are alternatives available today that are replacing it? http://will.illinois.edu/nfs/R...
Actually, the fuel source could be expanding. One of the "neat" things about fission is breeder reactors. It's part of the concern with the status quo, because most older reactors are no good for expanding our fuel supply.
multi-account?
In other words, it's a torus.
No it is not. There is a very clear defintion to what a torus is, and this is not. It may be seen as a torus-like shape, but not a torus. Proper use of terminology is important in science and engineering.
It may not be of the standard donut dimensions people are accustomed to when they think torus, but it's still a torus.
Again, its not a question of what people are accustomed to, but rather a question of definition. And no, the shape named "thorus" is not defined through the shape of a donut.
It's like saying that a rectangle with dimensions of 50x51 is a square-like rectangle. Simply calling it a rectangle would do.
False analogy. Both linguisting points are absolutely not comparable. In the case of the shape of the Tokamak built at PPPL, it is neither a sphere nor a torus. It's something else, which has no specific name. In your analogy, the 50x51 surface IS a rectangle. A better analogy would be, assuming there is no name such as rectangle for a 50x51 surface with straight angles, calling it a square-like box.
What does a redundant mod on a recursive post mean?
More expensive, worse for proliferation and even less stable....
With a name like that, expect things to go squarely pear-shaped...
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
Proper use of terminology is important in science and engineering.
When we get to any actual science or engineering then I will pretend to care. Until then it really is not important in a forum like slashdot to anyone but a few overly pedantic people who don't know when to pick their battles. Just because people here generally care about science and engineering doesn't mean we can't deal with a little obvious imprecision in a description of a shape. No one will be negatively affected by the fact that it isn't truly a torus and most of us are well aware that it isn't actually a torus by the proper defintion. It's like pointing out that the Saint Louis Arch is actually a catenary instead of a parabola as is commonly assumed. Interesting but ultimately not genuinely important 99.999999999% of the time.
Of course, we need to fund more oil power. Don't you think the fossil fuels industry has people working around the clock to discredit and defund this. I would guess even some of the skeptical AC comments on this article are coming from the fossil fuel industry.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Topologically, a teacup with a handle is a torus. No BS.
The spherical approach seemed like a great idea until they actually built them. Now it's pretty clear the economics are no better than the conventional MFP approaches. See the Disadvantages of this article, especially the first two items listed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_tokamak
I was going to mod you up for this but I thought it might undermine the logical structure of reality.
What other equivalence is there?
Resembles my last X-Ray: Digestive track of an overweight dude.
Table-ized A.I.
"there was no engineer involved"
A cup of hot tea can produce infinite improbability which is better.
The first airplane only flew 120 feet. Clearly air travel should never have been researched after such an abysmal failure in one of the first attempts.
The first airplane only flew 120 feet.
... and sixty years later we were walking on the moon. Sixty years after the first fusion reactor, where are we?
No, any more than I will bother reading that sleeping pill you referenced from - I kid you not - the Institute for Energy and Environment at the Vermont Law School. My local nuke happily chugs away producing 6 GW at, last time I checked, 1.63 cents/kwh. For the vaunted Germans to get anywhere near that, they had to revert to burning lignite, the filthiest stuff it is possible to dig out of the ground. And no, America's nukes are not in general experiencing shortened lifetimes. In fact, we keep finding that we cab run them longer than we originally planned.
But all power plants eventually need replacing. And if you liberals turn out to be correct on climate, apocalypse and all, we are going to need to replace all of our baseload plants other than hydro with new, standardized nuclear much earlier than we once thought.. More power to the fusion researchers, for when they do find their Holy Grail they will keep our economy running for billions of years to come. But what we have available right now is standardized fission. The French got it working, and so can we.
Actually, the opportunity cost of nuclear power delays climate mitigation. It's the wrong choice. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-C...
One bajillion comments, and nobody's mentioned Thorium yet? I am surprised. Am I the only one around here who thinks a liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR) is a very good idea?
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
General Atomic's San Diego Tokamak is till running and performing very useful research, particularly in magnetic controls. http://www.ga.com/magnetic-fus... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
Last time I was at the Princeton lab, the thing that impressed me even more than the fusion reactor (it just goes "phht") was the flywheel room. Imagine an indoor soccer field that's just rows and rows of massive 12' flywheels, all spinning up with grid power until they're suddenly all magnetically braked, to get enough juice to force two hydrogen atoms together.
Steampunk authors can't dream up anything as cool as physicists and mechanical engineers working on big problems.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
(same ac)
But an interesting read, nonetheless.
char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}";main(){printf(f,34,f,34);}
If the robotic overlord reads it to you, it'll make sense.
The first airplane only flew 120 feet.
... and sixty years later we were walking on the moon. Sixty years after the first fusion reactor, where are we?
Back home?
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Amory Lovins, the Institute for Creation Research of the energy industry. For the uninitiated, opportunity cost means that the capital used to build a nuclear plant producing power at low known rates could have been used to cover several square miles of Environment with its windy-day energy equivalent in wind turbines at a mere ten times the cost per kwh delivered. Deal of the century, clearly.
So are you saying we should shut down most medical research? Modern medicine has been around for at least sixty years and we still don't have a cure for cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's, ALS, Parkinson's or internet stupidity.
As well...my analogy was incorrect. The analogy should be the time from the first research into powered flight until the first successful powered flight.
Guess what....that was a heck of a lot longer than 60 years.
New wind PPAs are going for 2.5 cents per kWh, http://www.greentechmedia.com/... new nuclear PPA's are going for 15.5 cents per kWh. http://www.rmi.org/Knowledge-C... Looks like you've got you numbers wrong. You can get six times more wind power and have it delivered much sooner for the same cost so there is a large opportunity cost for nuclear power.
A topologist and an engineer walked into a bar.
The engineer kicked the shit out of the topologist for using the same words to mean different things than engineers use them to mean.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Since this seems to be the pedantic thread... it was actually 66 years later.
That article seems to suggest that the evidence for Whitehead demonstrating the first powered flight is dubious at best. If Whitehead really did succeed first, why didn't he snatch up any of the government contracts being offered at the time?
Scientific breakthroughs don't occur on a set timeline unless you're writing a TV show. We've been "flying" in one form or another for hundreds of years - balloons, gliders, and -- with the advent of the internal combustion engine -- airplanes. One could argue that nuclear physics is significantly more challenging than achieving powered flight. After all, a reasonably competent amateur can build an aircraft -- www.sonex.com -- in his garage over a couple of years. The same can't be said for processing fissile materials and building a research reactor.
Newsflash: humans use approximations when convenient for explaining something, and do not use strict definitions at all times.
Bah silly humans, you don't even have a working protocol for inter individual communication and you think that you are going to master fusion.
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
More expensive because your little horse in the race has a ton of subsidies.
Without them, solar's a VERY expensive beast to push.
As for proliferation. You run more than one reactor. So you burn down any and all byproducts until you essentially have lead.
As for less stable.
Explain stability issues in a liquid fueled molten salt reactor.
Explain how this is better than burning fossil fuels in the megatons every year and blowing most of the waste up a smokestack and into the environment...
Yes, the final byproducts of a fission system tend to be nasty and short lived or long-lived and relatively harmless. But they CAN be contained.
You know what "contains" the stuff the fossil fuel companies blow into the atmosphere?
Nothing. MAYBE outer space. But other than that...nothing.
So, pick your poison. Something you can lock away for a couple hundred years and be done with it, or breath it in over the course of your lifetime.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
molten salt reactors crack to pieces after a couple years' mild use.
... and aren't still any close to walking on mars.
And you know this HOW?
Oh. Right. You don't.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The technology was tried and it failed. And, the clean up was hugely expensive as well.
Please indicate where it "failed".
Your history is faulty.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Fuel in water cooled reactors is clad and most of the neutrons are intercepted by water before the reactor vessel is exposed. The cladding is changed with the fuel so it only has to last a year or two at high irradiation. After that it lingers at after heat conditions in a spent fuel pool. But in a molten salt reactor, the reactor itself sees a hard neutron spectrum and is damaged just like the sacrificial cladding (which is not meant to last all that long under power production conditions). No wonder it does not last and cracks after only a short period of use.
Funny, since, in MSR and LFTR designs there's no cladding, fuel ducts or grid spacers .
That's pretty much it. You've proven that you don't know what you're talking about and are trolling.
The actual problem you seem to be groping after is the corrosion factor and deplating effect on noble metals.
Some of these can be solved with chemistry. Some can be solved with maintenance intervals and part replacement.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Annually replacing the reactor leads to a great deal of high level waste.