Slashdot Mirror
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.
Looks like a sphere with an empty column down the middle
And here is that cynicism personified. Notice how anonymous coward here doesn't mention any sort of concrete goals he thinks should have been met, and haven't. Notice how he talks about a money pit, but doesn't talk about allocation. It always always always reads as repeating complaints you've heard somewhere else.
Tell me, how much slippage on the NIF timeline would be too much? Or ITER? What scientific results do you think have been unsatisfactory?
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.
Isn't that true of pretty much every technology that's still in the development stage? There was a time when microprocessors weren't worth the materials they were made with, but they seem to have paid off in the long run. If we can get fusion to pay off, the benefits could potentially far outweigh what we've gotten from the microprocessor.
I think you forgot to change accounts before posting.
And, yes, it is a false dichotomy to say we can only fund one. But the other reality is that we have only so much money for the sciences and one dollar spent on one project is one not spent on the other.
Of all major industries, energy has the smallest percentage total revenue directed to funding research. That's already hinting at a problem.
And there's the fact that a fuckton of that is going to "exploration", i.e. finding more fossil fuels we don't really need.
Solar is good. Solar is wonderful. Solar has legitimate problems too. You seem to be perfectly willing to sell out the long term future for the medium term, which is the weirdest case of short-sightedness I've ever seen.
You seem to be perfectly willing to sell out the long term future for the medium term, which is the weirdest case of short-sightedness I've ever seen.
And at this point, I think you are deliberately misstating my argument. Fusion is a dream at this point that the most knowledgeable in the sciences say is at least 60-80 years away from economic viability. Don't believe me? Look at the ITER roadmap, publically available. And the reality is that the visionaries are usually overoptimistic. You and I will be dead before it becomes viable and our children as well. And that is assuming this becomes viable as there is always a risk when talking about advanced tech like this. Even if you are convinced the science will work out, political upheaval could mean that we can't see the project through to the end. Just imagine a more indebted US and Europe having to cut science and a China that no longer has a market to sell to and collapses on its own centrally managed bureaucracy. Insert your own worst case scenario and you see why century long, multi billion dollar research projects are risky.
So, fund it? Sure. But not at the expense of something that is a sure thing and will have a huge benefit now. You state that solar is somehow selling out the long-term... unless you mean over a billion years from now when the Sun goes nova, I'm not sure how this is remotely accurate.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Yes, as we all know, that big shiny thing in the sky burns wood.
Newsflash: humans use approximations when convenient for explaining something, and do not use strict definitions at all times.
And it's insane when you compare fusion research funding to military spending in general, or what we spent on the Iraq war specifically. If we'd spent a fraction of those amounts on energy research...my God. It's not for sure that throwing money at energy research will solve all our problems, but come on, our society runs on energy, and the cheap energy we got from long-chain hydrocarbons is never coming back.
When I think about threats to the future of stable society, lack of cheap energy is #1. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would have all kinds of interesting ideas as to why the government isn't pumping more money into solving this problem.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
And how much of that is precisely because we keep cutting funding or simply not devoting the resources that could make it viable in, say, 20 years? No, fusion is seen as a long-term investment so there's every incentive to make long-term funding decisions that seen no reason to get a result in 20 years vs 60 years if it means spending three times as much (at least) in 20 years. That it creates some sort of morale problem seems to be missed or ignored
Exactly.
Break ground in 2008, 5 years before construction begins (2013), another 2 before assembly of the reactor (2015), 4 more years before commissioning (2019), and only starting full operations in 2027. That's 19 years. It should not take 7 years simply to build the building that will house the reactor, unless money is so tight that they have to pull money out of multi-year budgets. If you throw enough funding at it they should easily be able to go from breaking ground to first plasma in a fifth of the time their roadmap shows. The building that takes 7 years to build should be able to go up in 3 months easily.
The Skunkworks high beta fusion reactor seems very interesting. 100MW reactor the size of a semi trailer and the complexity of a jet engine. Uses radio waves to heat the plasma (like a microwave oven). Confines plasma in a cylinder as opposed to a torus. In a tokamak reactor the confining magnetic field is created by the motion of the plasma. Thus the strength of the field decreases further from the plasma, creating an inherent instability. This creates a negative stability feedback because if the tokamak plasma expands the confining field gets weaker. I believe this is one of the reasons tokamaks need to be so huge to function.
The high beta reactor has a confining field that increases in strength as you move farther from the plasma, making confinement inherently stable. The machine was designed by Dr. Thomas McGuire who did his PhD thesis on fusors at MIT. It may be possible to build a full reactor by as soon as 2017 for a cost measured in millions, NOT billions.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)