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China Just Made a Major Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Research (techienews.co.uk)
New submitter TechnoidNash writes: China announced last week a major breakthrough in the realm of nuclear fusion research. The Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), was able to heat hydrogen gas to a temperature of near 50 million degrees Celsius for an unprecedented 102 seconds. While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research (that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius), it is the longest amount of time one has been maintained.
Good job china.
There have been some "big announcements" in other hard science fields from China in the past decade or two that have turned out to be bogus. Can someone comment on the likelihood of this being real?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
>> Kraft Diner cooks in 1ms.
And everyone in the diner dies too. But I wonder how long it would take to cook Mac and Cheese at that temperature?
The goal of nuclear fusion research is to produce clean, renewable energy. It seeks to do this by replicating the same conditions that power the sun.
Clean is misleading here - the public's idea of "clean" does not line up with any known fusion reaction that we can hope to achieve. They're all going to produce radioactive waste, just less so (and generally less nasty stuff) than fission reactors. But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
... good god, no. Never. No one for a thousand years to come will ever seriously think about trying to smush two protons together hard enough for them to fuse without a sun-sized gravity well to assist with it. It takes an incredible amount of time for any two hydrogen atoms to fuse in the sun, on the order of millions of years.
Replicating the same conditions that power the sun
I realize that journalists need to summarize their stories, but fusion is a topic that is already understood more-poorly-than-normal by most people. They need to not be making people think about Spiderman 2.
Except the general public doesnt understand fission or the relative radioactive material release of fossil fuels. The best thing we could have is fusion = sun = natural = clean.
Very exciting until you see that the results have not been verified in any way.
If the claim is true, I would be very interested in reading how it was accomplished and what were the conditions. I would be particularly interested in finding out if the heat was contained or if energy was being continually driven into the system.
Claims are just that until verified and the apparatus and results are published.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Thank you for the informative post; I always wondered about stars and how they used up the hydrogen fuel within them.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Funny Sunny Long Time.
Only if "JESUS" was an acronym for:
Just
Every
Stunned,
Uneducated,
Simpleton.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Now THAT is going to make for a super nice pizza crust.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What kind of monster is 'cooking' a diner full of staff and customers in the first place?
While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research (that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius), ...
Sadly, even at such temperatures, the LHC was, like the Mythbusters, also unable to successfully flash-fry shrimp in a shrimp cannon.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I don't know about you, but I'm not getting any cheap, shoddily made helium atoms.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Wikipedia has two great articles (go figure, the good ones are outside of election coverage topics) I would recommend:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Also, it would seem that I misremembered the half-life of a proton in our Sun's core. It's a billion years; my millions of years is wrongish.
A very hungry one, I imagine.
My expectation is that LENR will be used for heat production. If you want gigawatt-scale electricity production, then the options are fission reactors or high-temperature fusion. The problem with using a low temperature process for thermal electric power generation is that thermal cycles perform better at higher temperature differentials. In terms of using LENR for electricity generation, this means that the practical issues of turning the heat back into electricity wipe out the benefits of using LENR to make surplus energy.
If the goal of the reactor is simply to make heat, then LENR is a much more feasible option. It is likely that LENR systems can generate enough heat to be a useful electric-heating device. Detailed cost-benefit analysis will depend on the application. There are enough electric-heating applications in existence that LENR almost certainly will find a niche market (and possibly a main-stream market.)
The trouble with LENR is we can see it work, but we don't know why or how...
Another problem is that nobody has been able to see it work reproducibly. Or work at all for that matter, in any verifiable way. The crank piece you linked does nothing to change my impression of that. As for military involvement in (let's say it) cold fusion, that does not exactly inspire confidence.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
My expectation is that LENR will be used for heat production.
It's actually mainly used for hot air production.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
It takes billions (not millions) of years for hydrogen atoms to fuse in the sun - that is precisely why the sun has a billions-of-years lifetime. So in building a fusion reactor, we need many orders of magnitude higher reaction rates, and to achieve them at many orders of magnitude lower densities. One way of doing this is to have much higher temperatures. The solar core temperature is about 15 million degrees and TFA has 50 million degrees for this new result, and 80 million degrees for half a second at a European reactor. This sounds unimpressive, but the reaction rates are very sensitive to temperature - proportional to about T^8 as I recall, but I didn't quickly find an online reference for this. 75 million degrees would therefore give a boost of about 5^8 which is about 400,000.
In the sun, the first reaction in the chain (proton+proton->deuterium) is the rate limiting step. In a reactor, we can provide deuterium enriched fuel and bypass this step. I don't know what the reaction rates are, but I suspect that this will be a greater benefit that the higher temperatures. You can do even better with tritium in the fuel, but your reactor becomes an intense neutron source, leading to induced radioactivity in nearby materials. Some proposed designs use these neutrons to breed more tritium from a lithium blanket around the reactor. (Once I get beyond the proton-proton chain reaction, I'm just relying on pop-science knowledge, so corrections from the more knowledgeable are welcome.)
Stars a bit more massive than the sun burn hydrogen via the CNO cycle, which has even higher temperature dependence (from memory, about T^17). I've never heard of anyone suggesting using the CNO cycle in a fusion reactor - presumably there are good reasons, but I don't know what they are. One problem is you need to wait for radioactive decays, but these have half-lives on the order of 1 to 2 minutes, and a commercial reactor would be running for much longer than that.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
The author of the article must have been running around the street, naked, screaming "fusion is here", "fusion is here". I'm not that excited. For one nobody has said anything about efficiency. Its easy to maintain a plasma if your dumping enough energy into it, so how much energy did they dump into it? Nobody knows. You have to confine the plasma, and get more energy out than you put in. I'm not convinced that they did this. Congrats for producing the longest lasting plasma "flame". But I can make a plasma "flame" in my microwave for minutes at a time. So tell me how much energy did they produce? I'll bet they didn't break even or everyone would be running naked through the streets.
Was wondering how this stacked up against the German test - which is oddly not referenced in the summary.
Cheers!
https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEEE-brief-DeChiaro-9-2015-pdf
Dear reader, I quit reading this document as soon as I saw convicted fraudster and scam artist Andrea Rossi cited by it unironically -- as you should as well.
Hot fusion is also going nowhere until anuetronic fusion becomes practical (pro tip: it's quite a bit harder to do) because the fast neutrons eventually destroy every known material used as the plasma-facing "first" wall. That's something the ITER fanboys are not telling you (for obvious reasons).
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
(And for those of you who think LENR is a myth: https://www.lenr-forum.com/for... )
So if I link to a pdf of some slides claiming an observation of flying pigs does that mean that pigs can fly? Show me a peer reviewed article in a _respected_ journal and I'll be interested.
The trouble with LENR is we can see it work,
If that were the case then we would have a working way to extract energy from it by now. The problem is that only some, "special" people can see it work and nobody else can. The most likely explanation for this is that those "special" people are not doing their experiment correctly especially since there has been a long history of this in this field.
anuetronic
Typo; it should say "aneutronic".
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
The LHC experiments concern high-energy particle physics, not fusion research. It is operating at energy scales well above plasma [unless you want to talk about "quark-gluon plasma, which is something else entirely] and at conditions which have nothing to do with nuclear fusion.
Actually you can do it relatively easily with a Farnsworth fusor.
It's not practical for power generation, but it easily smushes protons together.
My Large Hardon lasted well over 104 seconds... don't know what the Chinese are boasting about here.
D-T reactors would activate the reactor materials, but the wastes would be relatively short-lived (most in the range of a couple hundred years). There wouldn't be any transuranic wastes.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
As for military involvement in (let's say it) cold fusion, that does not exactly inspire confidence.
I completely agree that there is absolutely nothing of substance in any of the so-called evidence of LENR/cold fusion presented so-far. However I actually don't think it is a bad idea for the military to be involved in checking out the claims because the security implications are enormous. Any fusion reaction will produce neutrons and if these are moderated and then incident on uranium you can produce plutonium. This is essentially how a fast breeder reactor works.
Plutonium can be chemically separated from uranium for more easily than separating two isotopes of uranium. So having the military know that cold fusion is impossible is a good thing otherwise they might take terrorists claiming to have used cold fusion to build a nuclear device seriously.
Adrian Ashfield is a shill for Rossi, and the author of that paper is NOT who it is claimed to be.
Hence, "SCAM!" The E-Cat is a: unproven LENR technology and in fact b: proven to be a fraud, as are all blackbox demonstrations throughout history.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
the problem with the E-Cat is that it can't be shown to "work" without electrical input from the mains which in turn is NOT properly metered so (this is part of the blackbox scam) we don't know how much energy is going IN to the system.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
You tell us, McCubre hasn't stepped near a fuel cell since 1992 (New Scientist, 11 January 1992, 1803, p. 12ff). His work since then has been entirely theoretical.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
I wish I had mod points. This paper summarizes all the hype and bad research in one big gish gallop.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I think running some heaters up to 2 trillion C might warm things up a bit, no?
North Korea also put a satellite into space!
And all we have to show for it is a lousy 102 seconds. :(
Don't forget that the plasma in a Tokamac touching the containment vessel walls doesn't just cool the plasma, it also damages the reactor which in turn also reduces stability and efficiency, not to mention causing the need for replacements which are expensive and time consuming.
Most people totally freak out when you prove that they themselves are radioactive. (Carbon 14 decay)
It's even more fun if they live in a brick house, or are holding a banana.
Hydrogen is not fissile
Which gives you more radiation???
A. Flying from JFK to LAX. B. Going through that darn TSA scanner to get on the flight!
Answer is... A! (Wild surprise from the audience)
Which is worse?
A. Being an average flight crew employee B. Being an average nuclear power plant worker.
Answer is.... neither is "worse" you insensitive clod. "A" undergoes more radiation exposure but they both unfortunately have to work long and weird hours.
But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
Wow... people like the original poster are the true problem. Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
> The german stellerator Wendelstein 7-X aims for up to 30 minutes of confinement.
Unlike the Tokamak the Stellarator in theory runs continuously. The Wendelstein team just decided that 30 minutes would be enough for all experiments and designed the cooling system to last about 30 minutes.
Clean is misleading here
But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
Snowballs thrown... no, YOU'RE misleading!!!
But seriously, people like you are the true problem. Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Radionuclides emit radiation. What you need to understand is the behaviour of radionuclides in the environment. Until you do xkcd comics are only going to explain external radiation exposure to you. The difference between internal and external exposure is one damages you and the other probably won't do much of anything to you.
What radionuclides do in the body and how they get there is the understanding required, you insensitive clod.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The name change ("cold fusion" to "LENR") also does not inspire much confidence. Cold fusion is clearly a damaged brand... So why not try marketing it again with a new name?
So Potassium is a great example of internal radiation, which is in biological equilibrium with your body almost always. That's routinely discussed for laypeople.
In my example of professions, both things I noted are based on external exposures; there are no internal exposures.
How radionuclides get in the body just follow the same path as how any chemicals get in the body; breathing, eating, absorbing, etc.
What is your problem with my statement?
Clean is misleading here
But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
Snowballs thrown... no, YOU'RE misleading!!!
But seriously, people like you are the true problem. Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/
Actually you are being unintentionally misleading. Certain radioisotopes can be ingested via metabolic processes, for example plutonium chloride is very water soluble and is readily absorbed. Within the body the radioisotope continues to emit radiation and some become organically bound to cells and other parts of the body and that's when the damage occurs, cumulative, slowly and, over time.
Dempending on what and where the radioisotope gets deposited, it eventually means cancerous death for some however it can also mean disease that manifests in the next generation ( transgenic) because of damage it does to the DNA of unborn children.
That's why these artificially made elements don't belong in the environment and keeping them contained is a question of how good our engineering is.
Personally I'm hoping Fusion works because it will produce far less waste products than the industrial processes of Fission reactors.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
All of the waste of fission reactors are contained in the cladding. You actually get more radiation exposure living next to a coal plant, since the heavy metals are released into the atmosphere.
I don't want to discount your point that internal exposure is greatly more important for alpha emissions, but you cannot say that the environment has any alpha-emitting radionuclides that you can accidentally get into your body and worry about. Literally all radionuclides that you need to worry about for internal exposure are intentionally and deliberately ingested. The most recent case was the intentional poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko; that will not be happening to ordinary citizens.
TL:DR stop spreading irrational fear about nuclear fission power plants.
In an actual application, you'll need to capture almost every neutron emitted by the fusion reaction to breed tritium; otherwise you'll run out of reactor fuel.
You'll also want to make the parts behind the breeding blanket replaceable - those chunks of metal will be the radioactive waste produced by a fusion reactor.
because the fast neutrons eventually destroy every known material used as the plasma-facing "first" wall. That's something the ITER fanboys are not telling you (for obvious reasons).
That's weird, I've been aware for a decade or more now that ITER is working on assorted possible first-wall technologies and the JET in Culham, England is being repurposed as a wall material testbed. Maybe they didn't tell you but they've been telling everyone else.
The walls are going to be sacrificial, needing to be replaced using remote handling equipment. It's part of the "E" in the acronym "ITER", standing for "Experimental". Lithium, converted into tritiurm and deuterium by neutron bombardment is one possibility for walls as its product is a fuel source for further fusion. Other tougher materials might last longer, possibly decades or more before needing replacement though. ITER is a testbed for such research.
"Most" people "totally freak out" when you prove that to them?
Hmm... I'll accept some extrapolation and we can work with that. But what do you mean by "totally freak out?" I also suspect there's some selection bias? I'm assuming (having not checked) that the vast majority of people that I know are actually aware of this or would be able to reason it out pretty quickly and just accept the fact.
Out of curiosity, what sort of numbers do you have for folks you've shared that tidbit of information with and what area of the globe is that?
I'm going to hope two things... One, I'm going to hope that there's a whole heap of selection bias. Two, I'm going to hope we've got *very* different definitions for "totally freak out." It's radiation, you're being exposed to radiation all the time - it's not just in you but all around you. We've got a big ol' giant ball of radiation coming up right now. We're literally being bombarded with radiation all the time.
But, damn it, that's the good healthy, natural, radiation! ;-)
Seriously, "most" people are "totally freaked out" when they learn this? Many years ago, my daughter came home from elementary school and, after a while, she broke down in tears. The teacher had told her that someday the Sun was going to go out and that all of the life on Earth would cease to exist. Her younger brother was listening in and he joined her in the tear shedding. I still have the chance to remind them of that. That's what I'd call "totally freaked out."
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
One of the notorious characteristics of supposed cold fusion is that it does not produce neutrons.
Actually I understood that the way they "detected" that a nuclear reaction was taking place was by the production of neutrons. Indeed without neutrons how can you possibly say that fusion has occurred because then all you have is an unexplained heat gain which could be due to one of any number of things.
Neutron detection is hard to get right at these low energies and I understood that this was the explanation why so many people were fooled into thinking that fusion had occurred. This was certainly the reason behind the originally wrong discovery claim.
So Potassium is a great example of internal radiation, which is in biological equilibrium with your body almost always.
What really freaks laypeople out is when you tell them that radioactive potassium in their body gives off anti-matter. For the curious, K-40 sometimes decays to Ar-40 by emitting a positron and a neutrino.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Wow... people like the original poster are the true problem. Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:
I think there's a reading comprehension fail happening here. You've declared me to be an enemy of nuclear power, and then made the same point that I was alluding to. And since we're trading comics: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff... - intentional or unintentional, there has been plenty of propaganda to make people irrationally fear radiation.
Since you felt so strongly about this that it needed repetition, I'd like to hear how I'm "the true problem". Would you agree, that there is a stigma attached to the concept of radiation? Is it your general view that the average schmuck-with-a-vote believes that the barest hint of exposure to radiations will cause their lumpy demise?
Not really sure where you're trying to go with this, except for being so twitchy that you pick arguments with people who probably agree with you.
Right, but I believe that the same irrational fear that causes people to wet themselves when they think that another fission reactor might get built (so we need to run the old ones forever .... doh) will be played upon by the anti-nuke crowd once fusion reactors become more of a practical reality. "It's only radioactivating the reactor itself" isn't going to be a good defense against Greenpeace when they send people to chain themselves to the front doors and sing Kumbaya.
Try reading it again, a little harder. I'll give you hints, "stigma" means a taint to reputation, often unfair. "Electorate" can be used as a pejorative (and is, quite often) since it is made up of terribly uninformed yet active-enough-to-leave-the-house yahoos.
...
I realize I was a little unclear about my meaning, but it's been interesting to see how many come out of the woodwork to argue (in agreement) with me
The Sun is 5500 C A trillion degrees reminds me of Al Gore saying that the Earth is millions of degrees just 2 kilometers down. I'm sure that it is possible, it just seems incredible.
What is your problem with my statement?
It's an over-simplification. The reality is more complex.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I'll just leave this here ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Running down a tangent in this conversation, I had thought that fusors used deuterium. Wikipedia repeats this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Have you ever seen one where someone used plain hydrogen gas as their source? I'd like to read up on that.
All of the waste of fission reactors are contained in the cladding. You actually get more radiation exposure living next to a coal plant, since the heavy metals are released into the atmosphere.
Which is also has not been subjected to any enrichment by nuclear industry processes. I specifically referred to artificially made elements.
but you cannot say that the environment has any alpha-emitting radionuclides that you can accidentally get into your body and worry about.
Yes I can, I just don't know how much of them Fukushima, Chernobyl or other accidents have released.
TL:DR stop spreading irrational fear about nuclear fission power plants.
Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's irrational. What you're doing is how social proof spreads ignorance.
If you were discussing what an iron analogue was and how bio-accumulation in the environment worked, then perhaps you could say that. From my perspective though it appears that you are skipping the complexity of how that works and instead transmuting your idealized version into a belief system that has little to do with the reality of how radio-isotopes are concentrated in the food chain.
Ignoring a body of knowledge doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Please elaborate. Even though you shouldn't trust someone because of their title, I literally work as a nuclear engineer in the nuclear industry and deal with these issues on a daily basis. I have the scientific and engineering training to calculate, assess, and actually understand the problems you are posing.
No sorry, I meant to be on your side.
The true problem is a stigma attached to the concept of radiation.
I do hear people in the U.S. fearing any exposure of radiation is negative.
Apologies with my reply to your other comment, I really wanted to back up and support your case, sorry that wasn't more clear.
Meanwhile check out MrKaos, the true enemy referenced earlier who replied to another of my posts here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Drafting a response to try to change his opinions with facts now...
The toxicity of plutonium has been generally over hyped. Wikipedia says it's about the same as nerve gas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Which is also has not been subjected to any enrichment by nuclear industry processes. I specifically referred to artificially made elements.
Fission power plant fuel has minor enrichments to the level of 3-4% U-235. Artificially made elements that occur through the transmutation of U-238 and other transuranics in the fuel material are also contained within the cladding. What "artificially made" elements are you referencing? Humans do not come into contact with "artificially made" transuranic elements that are of concern for internal exposure in their daily lives.
Yes I can, I just don't know how much of them Fukushima, Chernobyl or other accidents have released.
Sorry but
Yes: http://science.time.com/2013/0...
You: http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
Can: http://www.who.int/ionizing_ra...
You literally get more radiation living next to a coal power than you would living next to Three Mile Island at the time of the disaster, or presently.
Coal source 1: http://www.scientificamerican....
Coal source 2: http://www.reboundhealth.com/c...
Do you life next to the damaged Fukushima reactor? You have a problem. Do you live 15km away from the Fukushima reactor? You are getting less radiation exposure than living in Colorado. Were you exposed to radionuclides after the Chernobyl disaster in Belarus, Ukraine, or Russia? Take the iodine pills the Soviet Union gave you immediately; after that your biggest health risk is the stress of living in what you "perceive" to be a toxic environment (though it was later proved not!).
Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's irrational. What you're doing is how social proof spreads ignorance.
Not that I should make an appeal to authority or that you should trust me solely based on my credentials, but since you "called me out" for not understanding it I will inform you that I am a trained nuclear engineer working in the nuclear industry, wasting my time posting on the internet fighting someone like you because the level of misinformation out there is too much to bear. Please listen to experts and stop your conspiracy theories and stop spreading true ignorance of the basic reality.
LENR is most useful for nuclear waste cleanup and NASA missions as it primarily generates heat. The best we can get out is something like 3x the energy put in -- which is great, but considering it's heat and not electricity, there's loss in capturing that energy and putting it to use. (unless you actually only want heat) In space, it's perfect -- especially for say... Mars exploration. Still, NASA can use good old radio-isotopes instead just fine. Why bother with a LENR setup when plutonium will work without any fancy LENR reactor?
LENR seems to depend on neutron capture and electron capture (to create neutrons from protons) followed by some neutron decay back into protons which effectively transmutes some metals into other heavier metals. This isn't fully understood, but it's not surprising either. Our atmosphere converts Nitrogen into Carbon 14 from cosmic neutron bombardment all the time. I can only guess that there is some chemistry which coupled with pressure and electricity allows the proper alignment of electrical fields between some elements and deuterium to induce a form of fusion.
Some alkali and alkaline metals, given enough energy, may more readily transmute than others. Most of the experiments involve deuterium permeating an alkaline metal at high pressure under an electric current.
The reason it's done at low temp and has little usable output is b/c it doesn't involve directly fusing protons or nuclei with protons -- it's all neutron capture, electron capture, or nuclear decay / radioactivity. There's also very little fission.
LENR is fascinating, but I have serious doubts it could ever be used as a large scale power generator. It's not exactly easy to create or maintain compared to a nuclear fission reactor, and it'd have to be enormous to match the output. We'd be better off using solar panels and solar heat collectors for the effort.
1) it was with hydrogen, not D or D-T, which makes it easier to do
2) JET is limited by its flywheel storage to 30 seconds, but routinely hits 100 million degrees for 30 seconds
3) ITER is designed to hit 200 million with actual fuel, and do that for something like 10 minutes
This is a classic example of the sort of overblown press releases the sciences put out these days. It is precisely as interesting as those "new solar power record!" papers we constantly see here, which when you read the fine print are records compared only to other craptastic tech that mainstream systems have been beating for decades.
> TL:DR stop spreading irrational fear about nuclear fission power plants
Why bother even saying that? Do you think this person will be convinced? Do you think people like this are the reason that fission plants aren't being built in any number, and the "fission renaissance" is as dead as The King? It isn't.
Fission, fusion, coal, anything using a Rankine cycle for energy extraction, is no longer economically competitive. They haven't been since around 2008, when wind turbines hit ~$2.50 a watt. Now they're $1.50 a watt. Darlington B was whispered at a *minimum* of $8.25 a watt. Vogtle is around $7.25. Crystal River was $11. That's it, that's all, that's the entire reason fission is dead.
Fusion is done like dinner, but keeps itself alive though massive funding efforts and a dearth of other big science to spend on. There's no way it will ever be economical, and everyone knows that. There's plenty of papers written by the industry itself saying just that, and they go back to the 1970s.
Is that going to look like the Gates of Mordor?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
But when you drive down I-65 in Indiana and all the windmills aren't turning, what do you do?
1. Write a letter to Congress by the candlelight asking to re-institute regulated markets and then loosen regulations on nuclear plants and coal plants
2. Pray to the sky fairy for better storage technology next year before your third kid dies from lack of electricity at the local hospital.
Does it really matter that $WindPower can reach astonishingly low $/kWh "some" of the time?
Who was it who said, "perfect is the enemy of good"? Clean is a subjective term. Fusion is significantly less dirty, so it is clean.
Regime change in Syria on one level, is exactly the right thing to do. The problem is that it creates complications based on how it is executed.
Looking at the recent track record, stating that regime change is the right thing to do requires extra-ordinary proof. Not just that it is required, but that there's any hope of turning the situation into anything but a human cesspit costing an incredible amount in terms of both treasure and blood.
Few argue, in 20/20 hindsight, that taking out Saddam was correct.
Everyone is mute on whether taking out Gaddfi was correct -- we're just lucky that we're not saturated with constant news of what a colossal ****-up Libya is now; otherwise people might actually have an opinion on that disaster which would be negative for a certain presidential candidate.
So, let's ignore lessons of recent history -- things that we should know from watching the nightly news over the last 15 years -- and make a simplistic statement that this time we'll do it right.
but that is exactly what you are going to do.
I'm a reasonable, smart guy. I trust facts and evidence, science, where available, any published law I can find, policy, organizational charters, studies, conference minutes. I'll consider any information you present, including its likelyhood for bias.
Great, I'm happy to defer to your knowledge of reactor operations if I want to learn more about Accident Sequence Precursors or Basis Design Issues. However I don't see how that is relevant if we are talking about biology and the way radioisotopes are absorbed and concentrated in the food chain. Are the metabolic processes that absorb radio-isotopes into the food chain part of the studies to be a Nuclear Engineer?
I was calling you out on the oversimplification of the facts. To highlight the oversimplification, where does your comic make the destinction between internal and external radiation exposure, or what happens to the energetic levels of a radio isotope inside the body when it is organically bound?
By not disclosing your position, you are not disclosing your bias towards defending the interests of your profession and employer when providing it. It seems pretty disingenuous to me to placate everyone from an implied position of independence, whilst maintaining a undisclosed bias. And being pretty rude and condescending about it too.
I note your freak, quick to judge I see. I have some doubt that you can conduct a civilized conversation without acting if everyone is stupid for not understanding your point of view because your having a hissy fit when a differing one is offered. Your not the only smart person here and if you don't have the patience to defend your point of veiw when challenged then it must be pretty fragile.
I'll get to answering your other points as I get time over the next couple of days.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Wind turbines are big oils solution to renewables. They make money three ways - subsidies, oil fired power stations as backup, and the actual electricity they sell.. And as a polluters bonus to power the world with wind turbines we would create an eco footprint so huge it almost makes even oil look clean..
1,000 x 200m high 5 to 10 MW wind turbines = 1 x large 1 GW nuclear power station.
Except wind requires 50 x the territory + 500+ MW of gas or oil power backup capacity +
Below the speed of light Special Relativity is one of the most accurate theories in physics - above the speed of light..
I'm a reasonable, smart guy
Bias runs both ways.
Are the metabolic processes that absorb radio-isotopes into the food chain part of the studies to be a Nuclear Engineer?
Yes.
Your not the only smart person here and if you don't have the patience to defend your point of veiw when challenged then it must be pretty fragile.
If you had knowledge the world was round and MrsKaos was posting on a website about how it is obviously flat, and your shipping business depending on it, wouldn't you say something?
I'll get to answering your other points as I get time over the next couple of days.
I'll be here, "freakishly", waiting to help answer any questions you have.
I do listen to experts. I'll disclose that there is some new work in this area that I am yet to get around to reading.
Perhaps you know of similar works in other Nuclear Industry effluents, like plutonium or strontium 90 or the other more energetic radio-isotopes you have to study that you can refer me to. I saw Tritium as the one that is often cited as "benign" as a good place to start.
According to these scientific studies on the effects of tritium, your comic is an oversimplification of how Nuclear Industry effluents (Tritium in this case) behave.
Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter. This characteristic makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects. From those works;
Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing 3H can be even more damaging than drinking 3H bound in water. Consequently, an estimated radiation dose based only on ingestion of tritiated water may underestimate the health effects if the person has also consumed food contaminated with tritium. (Komatsu)
Studies indicate that lower doses of tritium can cause more cell death (Dobson, 1976), mutations (Ito) and chromosome damage (Hori) per dose than higher tritium doses. Tritium can impart damage which is two or more times greater per dose than either x-rays or gamma rays.
(Straume) (Dobson, 1976) There is no evidence of a threshold for damage from 3H exposure; even the smallest amount of tritium can have negative health impacts. (Dobson, 1974) Organically bound tritium (tritium bound in animal or plant tissue) can stay in the body for 10 years or more.
It's often said "of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones" and while it's more benign than most other radioactive effluents it's toxicity should not be under-estimated.
Tritium can cause mutations, tumors and cell death. (Rytomaa) Tritiated water is associated with significantly decreased weight of brain and genital tract organs in mice (Torok) and can cause irreversible loss of female germ cells in both mice and monkeys even at low concentrations. (Dobson, 1979) (Laskey) Tritium from tritiated water can become incorporated into DNA, the molecular basis of heredity for living organisms. DNA is especially sensitive to radiation. (Hori) A cell's exposure to tritium bound in DNA can be even more toxic than its exposure to tritium in water. (Straume)(Carr)
First, as an isotope of hydrogen (the cell's most ubiquitous element), tritium can be incorporated into essentially all portions of the living machinery; and it is not innocuous -- deaths have occurred in industry from occupational overexposure. R. Lowry Dobson, MD, PhD. (1979)
References;
My ism, it's full of beliefs.