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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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."
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.
Keep in mind this is China's news, the same ones who tell us Taiwan/Hong Kong/Tibet/South sea islands is belonged to China, nothing bad ever happen on Tiananmen square, there is no corruption in China (except a few to make example of, the rest of the world is polluted as bad as China (lol no) and countless other lies about their country to surpress to people/save face.
Spending $20,000,000,000,000 (and counting...) on pointless war in the Middle East instead of energy research is really working out well for the USA.
No sig today...
Ummmm they didn't try to create a fusion reaction...... Or get any energy out of the system at all...... In fact it is at about half the temperature it needs to be for fusion to work. The whole point of the research currently is to create a system for containing plasma heated to 100,000,000K. The plasma can't come into contact with the walls of the chamber because, either it is so low in mass the chamber instantly cools it, or is has enough mass to melt the chamber walls down.
Once they have a containment system that can run for extended periods of time, the current target is 1000 seconds, then they will look to trigger a fusion reaction inside the super heated plasma. At that point the plasma starts pumping out heat rather than needing it.
The german stellerator Wendelstein 7-X aims for up to 30 minutes of confinement. At the moment only a some very earlier tests have been done, that did not aim for long confinement but just to check that everything is okay with the installation. Wendelstein 7-X started operating end of last year and EAST started operating in 2006.
This chinese tokamak aims for confinement of up to 1000s and has reached 102 seconds of confinement after 10 years. At the end of 2013 they already had reached 30 seconds. Wendelstein 7-X will first do some experiments that do not aim for a really long confinement time, only up to 10 seconds. These experiments are planned to last about 2 years, after that they will install some additional equipment, that is planned to take 15 month. The chinese record should thus last for at least 3-4 years. But news from Wendelstein 7-x have been very positive, I would not be surprised if confinement works extremely well.
Jan
did they use a thermometer from alibaba.com?
There are a lot of posts about how we can't trust China, but for any one who has followed fusion work, this should be no surprise. EAST has been one of the major research tokamaks in the world, and results like this are incremental results that were expected to come about. What is more interesting is how cheap EAST and some other Chinese fusion research facilities are, like KTX which I am more familiar with and has been both cheap and fast. Yet they still contribute new results and share info at conferences, so it is not like they are just a lagging copy of other countries.
There's a difference between not being able to exactly predict the future and being willfully purblind in a moronic effort to get back at someone after 9/11 regardless of whether they were responsible. George W Bush was an arrogant fool and a liar.
You seem to not be aware that fusion research is an open and collaborative project between all nations. We share data, equipment, tokamak run-time, and scientists. Your partisan suspicion is understandable for someone not in the know, but it's totally wrong. The fusion scientific community is well aware of what is going on at EAST (and all other major collaborative facilities), when the machine turns on, when it turns off, when there is a leak, when a diagnostic malfunctions, and when things go well.
At DIII-D (USA), we have built a "remote control room" for EAST and KSTAR so that researchers in US can operate EAST on the third shift when our colleagues in China are sleeping. Control parameters will be transferred to Hefei over the internet and diagnostics will be fed back to the monitors in almost real time.
BTW, I am a fusion research scientist based in US, but I do do some work on EAST as well as other machines.