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The Bizarre Reactor Scientists Hope Will Save Fusion Research (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: In a gleaming research lab in Germany's northeastern corner, researchers are preparing to switch on a fusion device called a stellarator, the largest ever built. The €1-billion machine, known as Wendelstein 7-X looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet. Stellarators have long been dark horses in fusion energy research but the Dali-esque devices have many attributes that could make them much better prospects for a commercial fusion power plant than the more popular tokamaks: Once started, stellarators naturally purr along in a steady state and they are not prone to the potentially metal-bending magnetic disruptions that plague tokamaks. Unfortunately they are devilishly hard to build.
no...you didn't.....c'mon man.
So how are they heating up the plasma? The discussion of the comparison with the tokamak talks a lot about the instability of the latter, but not much about how they'll replace the heating mechanism (the pulsing of the plasma, is supposedly replaced with something more steady).
Nope. With these kind of magnetic confinement machines and the way they scale, the bigger the better (quite literally).
This is why we need to build a stupendously huge and expensive machine like ITER to demonstrate anything approaching economic power output for the energy required to confine and heat the plasma.
Title doesn't mention "new", neither does summary.
The summary also correctly implies stellarators are in fact old. Stellarators have long been dark horses
looks a bit like Han Solo's Millennium Falcon, towed in for repairs after a run-in with the Imperial fleet.
Sure, in the same way a croissant does.
Meaning, not at all.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Whirr Whir Whir Whir CLUNK.
"They told me they fixed it! It's not my fault!" as they furiously poke at buttons.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
They're just spinning in circles at this point.
We blew $5 trillion on useless wars and $20 trillion so that wall street could get some short term bonuses. A billion dollar fusion engine isn't even a rounding error.
Wendelstein 7-X’s bizarrely shaped components must be put together with millimeter precision. All welding was computer controlled and monitored with laser scanners.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Went and looked for answers to my own question:
This report from DOE
http://web.ornl.gov/~webworks/...
has figures showing that they forecast the cost of fusion power to be between 68 to 80 "mill/kWh", (apparently mills are thousandth's of a 1999 dollar) which is more expensive than any alternative they examined. Wind power they forecast to cost between 20 to 40 "mill/kWh".
If the people at DOE who wrote that report are good forecasters, then fusion is DOA. Alternatives will be less expensive.
Yes, you can make "technology advancement" arguments that the DOE forecasters are wrong, but the cost of wind and solar generators are dropping all the time, too, and storage options might get radically cheaper as well. I think investment in solar + wind + storage actually dwarfs investments in fusion, so the market seems intent on fulfilling DOE's prophesy.
Fusion may really only come into its own when we go live in the asteroid belt or the outer solar system.
--PeterM
For all of this, in the very best case W7X will only sustain fusion for thirty minutes (according to Wikipedia). That is an extremely long way from being practical.
Even assuming it works very well, we are an extremely long way from solving all of the problems required to build a practical working fusion reactor.
Some of the problems remaining to be solved:
I'd also note that solving each of the above problems is not going to be cheap. It is hard to imagine how a fusion plant can be made for less money than an existing fission plant, and those plants are already not competitive. Chances are it would be better and cheaper to build lots of batteries with all that lithium and a lot of wind turbines and solar panels. That would get you the same amount of energy, probably.
Sources: matter2energy, Do The Math
How was this word salad modded up?
Dat device tho.
CLI paste? paste.pr0.tips!
I messed up, 10000 tons of lithium will cost roughly seventy million dollars. However, since you need "enriched" lithium with more Li-6 a price north of $100/kg is probably more realistic, which still puts you in the billion-dollar range on how much your lithium blanket is going to cost.
They havent been given the budget needed to build a breakeven facility -- basically people like you set them up to fail and then say look it failed!
The bullet points where you give numbers make no sense. 10000 tons of lithium? Design studies for DEMO, which would have several GW of thermal output, have a blanket volume on the order of 500 m^3. Even if assuming that was all lithium, you are talking about 300-400 tons, much smaller than 10000 tons. 10000 tons would be a block of lithium about 27 m on a side, which is much larger than the whole reactor vessel design.
Scaling the costs is very difficult to do. A production reactor would be far cheaper in many ways, because you don't need as much diagnostic access. A lot of compromises have to be made to just get enough space between the magnets of many designs for diagnostics, plus the costs of diagnostics (millions of dollars each for the many of them), plus the costs to use, maintain and analyse them. This is part of why designs for DEMO are only about 15% larger than ITER, but of a much more compact design considering it is producing nearly 4-8 times as much thermal output.
As any student of history knows, Greifswald was the location of assorted secret Nazi research projects during WWII. This thing wasn't built recently, they dug it up from the mine where it was buried in 1945 to hide it from the advancing Russians. Look at the photo of the cryostat, that's classic 1940s engineering design. The reason for the "schedule slips" mentioned in the article is because they've had problems disarming all the booby traps left to kill Russian investigators. Next thing you know a previously unknown German research institute in the Owl Mountains will invent an antigravity device, and another heretofore-unknown research group at Hillersleben will announce the creation of a death ray.
Remember, you read it first on Slashspot.
So, it's round.
A lot of words to use to say that.
Did you use Markov chains to generate that post?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
All of these are engeneering challenges and not insurmoutable barriers. Each and everyone of them has been studied and solutions proposed (how to handle the neutron flux, what materials to use, how to remove helium and how to make an efficient blanket of Lithium to assure self sustainable fueling starting from raw deuterium and lithium.
These will all be sought out an tested on Iter and then Demo.
Getting 10% of your electricity from wind is trivial. Daily demand varies more that 10% so all you have to do is what you've been doing for the current mix of coal, gas, nuclear, and hydro. People smarter than the both of us have spent a long time looking at this and have convinced me that having more than 30% of power from wind and strange things start to happen with the grid.
We can make wind power work but it would involve massive changes to how the national power grid works, which would be very expensive. Not only would it be expensive, because putting large power cables over or under the Mississippi river is not easy, but it would create a vary fragile network. If there was a catastrophic loss of connection on one of those Mississippi crossings we'd see blackouts and brownouts nationwide.
Even if we could power the world with wind we would not want to. Making wind power work means relying on wind in California to power a Florida with calm winds. There's a lot of ways that could fail, badly.
Wind power, right now, costs three times what nuclear power costs, right now. Even a quantum leap in wind technology cannot make it cheaper than what nuclear fission could cost if only the Department of Energy would allow the building of a modern liquid fuel fission reactor. The Department of Energy has been subsidizing wind power for decades and it still cannot compete with fission power from the 1970s. I don't see a great future for wind power. Wind power will never go away, it's just too easy to get in many places, but it cannot power a first world economy.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
It makes no difference if this device "works" or not, no one will use it commercially.
That's because the cost of the equipment needed to extract the energy from the system costs only a little less then an entire wind farm producing the same amount of energy. This problem effects any heat engine type source, including coal and fission, which is why no one is building these any more. Natural gas turbines, hydro, wind and PV do not have this portion of the system. These sources have always been, or recently scaled down to, prices points below the older sources.
There's really not a lot of math involved, and people have been running the numbers since the 1970s. In spite of repeated statements from the power industry that they're not interested, the fusion field keeps sending out press reports like this one about how they're going to save the world. Meanwhile wind and PV are the two fastest growing power sources in history, and by the time any of these devices work the grid will have already completed its switch.
A small number of know-nothings will now protest something about direct conversion in aneutronic systems, ignoring the fact that not one such device has come within multiple orders of magnitude of working, and we have very good reason to believe they never will.
Others will protest that wind can't do X and Y, and in this case they're absolutely right. But unfortunately they don't pay for the construction. The banks actually pay for the construction, and they're giving all the money to the wind farms regardless of X and Y.
If you want to run the numbers yourself, I wrote down some of them a couple of years ago: https://matter2energy.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/why-fusion-will-never-happen/
You do realize that the banks repaid the bailouts right?
https://projects.propublica.or...
Also, it was "only" $600B
http://www.politifact.com/new-...
It was a temporary cash influx to keep the banks from folding. I am actually surprised it wasn't handled through FDIC insurance, but I don't know much about the banking industry.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Wind cannot stop blowing everywhere on the continent, no matter what.
Except when it does. Sure, it'll be less common than for smaller regions, but there's evidence from Europe's experience that you can see significant becalming over a whole continent. Also, the local surpluses and deficits mean you either have to overbuild your grid in addition or put in enough local storage or variable generation/consumption to smooth out wind power variation.