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'Star In a Jar' Fusion Reactor Works, Promises Infinite Energy (space.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: For several decades now, scientists from around the world have been pursuing a ridiculously ambitious goal: They hope to develop a nuclear fusion reactor that would generate energy in the same manner as the sun and other stars, but down here on Earth. Incorporated into terrestrial power plants, this "star in a jar" technology would essentially provide Earth with limitless clean energy, forever. And according to new reports out of Europe this week, we just took another big step toward making it happen. In a study published in the latest edition of the journal Nature Communications, researchers confirmed that Germany's Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X) fusion energy device is on track and working as planned. The space-age system, known as a stellerator, generated its first batch of hydrogen plasma when it was first fired up earlier this year. The new tests basically give scientists the green light to proceed to the next stage of the process. It works like this: Unlike a traditional fission reactor, which splits atoms of heavy elements to generate energy, a fusion reactor works by fusing the nuclei of lighter atoms into heavier atoms. The process releases massive amounts of energy and produces no radioactive waste. The "fuel" used in a fusion reactor is simple hydrogen, which can be extracted from water. The W7-X device confines the plasma within magnetic fields generated by superconducting coils cooled down to near absolute zero. The plasma -- at temperatures upwards of 80 million degrees Celsius -- never comes into contact with the walls of the containment chamber. Neat trick, that. David Gates, principal research physicist for the advanced projects division of PPPL, leads the agency's collaborative efforts in regard to the W7-X project. In an email exchange from his offices at Princeton, Gates said the latest tests verify that the W7-X magnetic "cage" is working as planned. "This lays the groundwork for the exciting high-performance plasma operations expected in the near future," Gates said.
Is this an advertisement to invest in yet another unlimited free energy scam? Wake me up when some progress occurs.
1. Tokamak -- has never underperformed models
2. Stellarator -- appears like it will work.
3. MagLIF -- Experiments are following model predictions.
The reason why magnetic fusion doesn't work yet is because of the budget needed to build a large enough reactor.
The reason laser fusion hasn't worked is because the models have been failing. Basically using a neodymium laser works in computer modeling but in real life it sucks. In fact a laser beam itself is too coherent.
Anyway, we still have a track to fusion it is X number of years away because ITER was supposed to be built in 1984 and now it's scheduled for 2035 because of budget reasons. Tokamak has always worked as predicted or better.
MagLIF is probably the easiest and cheapest route to fusion. Lockheed seems to have a good approach too.
Uh, do you realize it takes years to build a stellarator? Besides, who do you think will own the stellarators if now the oil companies? They have the capital.
Article says "Topology of magnetic field confirmed."
they still haven't powered the thing up. they still don't know if it will work. headlines like this make me want to slap the writer across the face with a bowling ball in a string bag until they stop lying. and then a few more times just to make sure the lesson sticks.
The key part is omitted, this is a new version (of an old idea) of a field arrangement that is believed to confine the plasma better:
"The stellarator is different from the other toroidal magnetic surface concepts in that both the toroidal and the poloidal field components—which together create the magnetic surface topology—are created from currents in external coils. In the tokamak and the reversed-field pinch2, a strong toroidal current driven within the plasma is needed to generate the poloidal magnetic-field component. The stellarator’s lack of a strong current parallel to the magnetic field greatly reduces macroscopic plasma instabilities, and it eliminates the need for steady-state current drive. This makes it a more stable configuration, capable of steady-state operation. These are important advantages for a power plant....The stellarator was invented by Lyman Spitzer in the 1950s (ref. 3). So why did it fall behind? And why do some believe that it is about to have a comeback?"
Yeah, I was expecting it to continue like Star In A JarJar Binks Meesa Thinks Itsa Good Ideaa! ...I wonder really though whether the new Slashdead Overlords are getting kickbacks in some manner.
Hoping it will produce enough energy to clean up the waste from the last free energy source.
I'm sick of these articles that sound like they are mansplaining the basics of tomahawk fusion that we have known since the 1970s and then claims its a new thing. Moreover, they supposedly have a working commercial reactor when we know that a commercial reactor would need to be ITER sized for positive energy generation. Can we keep this crap off slashdot?
"News just in we're running out of water"
Reliable fusion power would be great. But it's not actually that different from fission power: it still produces lots of radioactive waste.
Lightning in a bottle ?
In Germany? The power companies.
In other countries? Perhaps the state? Not every nation is paranoid about the state running something, I have heard some states even run navies and airforces etc.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I'm going to put mine in the backyard next to the kids swingset!
This is quite the euphemism. The principal fuel in its principal reaction does not produce waste. But this is as optimistic as feeding a baby with starch and thinking that this will save you the diapers.
If you are meddling with plasma fusion, you'll get gamma radiation to die for. And that does something, somewhere.
This article is wrong on so many places.
The W7-X is not a fusion reactor in the sense that it generates more power than you put into.
It is simply not designed for that task. It has been build "just" for plasma research, e.g. let scientists figure out how to control the plasma so they can maybe later, in a couple of years build a fusion reactor that works as an energy source.
This is just the first step in a long road. Art imitates life. Life imitates art.
Heat is waste.
And there's a limited amount the earth can radiate out to space.
Energy always becomes heat.
As far back as the late 1990s, people were projecting that if the energy increase per human being continued at the rate it had been increasing since the 1600s, the surface temperature of earth would pass the boiling point of water within 500 years.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Lemme guess- this fusion reactor is just 20 years from opening, right?
Ok, the magnets work.
But it takes a lot more than that to claim that reactor works as headline does.
'Star In a Jar' Fusion Reactor Works, Promises Infinite Energy
I thought the story was going to be that a company named Infinite Energy was pushing a snake-oil product called Star in a Jar.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
How big is the containment vessel? How much energy are we talking about in that space? What would happen if you fired a magnetic bullet at it? What would happen in a catastrophic failure?
It would be challenging but not chaos. In fact for many nations It would be liberating. It would be bad for Americans though, I think since Iraq II reiterated it, they're still the fiat dollar underpinning oil trade. If they lose their position in the middle East giving them massive credit, their incredible debt becomes an issue. Although cons won't want to directly challenge their biggest debtor & market, or it would end badly.
Normally tritium is horribly expansive because very rare ($30000 per grams...). That would be a killer cost for fusion reactor. So a blanket of Lithium is added to the vessel, and the neutron hitting it, produce tritium and helium. That is where the "tritium is bred from lithium, so essentially free" from parent post come from.
Yeah, right. Stop dreaming about "Sun in a jar" as phisics and numbers for anything viable simply don't add up. Sun produces about 300 Watts of power per cubic meter of matter inside it's core. I do admire the zeal, and many good discoveries will probably come out of the research, but if the goal is to have sustained fusion inside a container, that would produce much more energy then it requires, it's just never, and I mean, never, gonna happend.
With nearly unlimited energy we can control the environment. To much Co2 we can remove it, ect. This is a class 1 civilization... something we should try for, before its to late.
We seem to spending most of our budget on wars though.... Although highly entertaining, wars dont seem to do very much except to cause strife... this is what we need to change... the technology is easy... getting our shit together seams to be the problem. :(
Common folks... lets just spend enough on weapons to keep our nuclear arms operational, and the rest on getting our shit together... just a thought. :)
The technology has been workable since the 1960s, but big oil ,.&*(
no carrier
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm not sure about how expansive it is - it should be similar to ordinary hydrogen gas. But it's expensive to produce tritium and that's a different matter.
But all we talk about is matter.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Why so negative? All those negative vibes is killing our mood.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This technology is expected to be fully developed and commercially implemented in.... 20 years. I've been hearing that one for the past 40 years.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
http://ici.radio-canada.ca/tele/decouverte/2016-2017/episodes/368648
His point is that there aren't really any oil companies left anymore. Most of the 'big oil' companies are now fairly diversified energy companies. Fusion would be great for them, because it has very large capital costs, but huge return on investment, meaning that only companies with experience in power systems and a lot of spare capital will be in a good place to be first movers. They wouldn't want to kill this, they'd want to own it and be the first to provide electricity in the kinds of quantities promised by fusion.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
given that among the authors of the Nature paper are R. C. Wolf and C. Biedermann. This Wolf-Biedermann project will of course produce high energy neutrons which must leave magnetic confinement in order to provide useful energy. When these neurtons strike metallic shielding material in the walls of the "stellerator" they generate radioactive elements via the process called neutron activation. And these radioactive elements release gamma rays, alpha and beta particles, x-rays and other components collectively referred to as radioactive waste. So when this ad from the 1950s claims there will be no radioactive waste, it is not telling the truth.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
If the makers really were promising infinite energy, I think the rest of their math woudl need to be looked at again.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Big Oil is not investing in solar power, wind turbines or storage technology which will be the choice of alternative energy for now. Why should they invest in fusion?
Fake news. There is a finite amount of energy in the known universe. OK mainstream media, time to delist and blacklist this site. Advertisers, turn off the money taps.
Sustainable fusion is only 10 or so years away now. Progress has been steady, it was 10 years away about 10 years ago as well ...
Why should a capitalist corporation bother investing in developing fusion when governments are doing the spending for them? Since they have the politicians in their back pockets they will have no difficulty getting access to the technology for free if it ever succeeds. Big Oil is just investment capital looking for an investment, research is what the public pay for with their taxes.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
* - For some definition of works.
All they've done is create the plasma. All that's left is the fusion part. Just the easy bit left I'm sure they're saying. /s
The oil companies and oil producing nations dont care about things like this because it doesn't hurt them. This project (or any other project that changes how electricity is generated) has a near-zero impact on the demand for oil for use as a fuel.
I want my Star Jar now.
I hope there are none, since Dr Freeman seems to be on an indefinite hiatus.
I'm afraid that this design, like nearly all modern fusion designs, relies on deuterium-tritium fusion. Both are awkward, expensive, and even dangerous to produce and refine. Tritium, in particular has a quite short half-life and is best refined from nuclear waste at fission plants. If you are already producing enough tritium to run fusion reactors, you already have more than enough fission plants to provide far more and far more reliable energy. There are numerous old papers laying out the difficulties, such as http://fire.pppl.gov/fesac_dp_.... Note that it's theoretically possible to generate more tritium than is currently generated by switcing to "breeder" fission reactors, but those have proven extremely dangerous to manage due to their use in creating plutonium, which is quite useful for nuclear weapon building. It's a very dangerous technology, and the generation of tritium on a commercial scale would be tied to creating _far_ more plutonium than is currently created.
The only currently feasible, safer, and scalable source of deuterium and tritium for fusion reactors is solar sails, capturing the more refinable percentage of such particles in solar wind. Since a solar sail is already capturing approximately 20 KW/square meter of sail from electromagnetic solar radiation, that is a vastly safer and easier to handle power source than collecting and shipping the isotopes of hydrogen to the necessary fusion reactor. Much like building a vast array of breeder reactors to generate tritium for fusion reactors, there is _no point_ to trying to run a fusion plant when the collection and refinement plant itself generates far more directly usable energy than can even theoretically be produced by D-T fusion.
I'll simplify by using the metaphor a colleague gave me recently. The refinement of deuterium and tritium for fusion power is like heating homes by burning the signs and posters put up to protest nuclear power plants. It can be done in theory, but it is not efficient and does not scale well.
If there's a difference between "Star in a jar" and "Cold Fusion", then I cannot for the life of me tell what it would be. The summary very strangely doesn't clarify at all, instead simply to contrast SIAJ to Fission. If they're hoping we won't notice that this sounds exactly like cold fusion, they're going to be disappointed. The whole approach makes me think this is marketing-heavy rather than science-heavy, which bodes very poorly for their actual progress.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
it has been fifty years in the future for the last fifty years. Given the recent success of renewables and advancing battery and storage technology, fusion is unlikely to ever see the light of day.
Actually it has been 50 years in the future for more like the past 70 years. However while fusion power is nowhere close to infinite and, given the complexity of the reactor unlikely to be cheap, it would still be very worthwhile to have. Renewable energy sources have limited capacities and require a lot of area which means they have a limited ability to fill our energy needs so while their capacity can certainly be increased going all renewable is unlikely any time soon.
This may not be much of an issue in North America but in places like Europe finding enough area for all the solar, wind and wave power needed is unlikely to happen because people do not want to live next to a wind turbine or even in sight of one. Building wave power schemes has similar issues as people complain about the environmental impact. Battery technology is also a very long way from being able to cope with the massive storage requirements to counter the variability which would then require enormous numbers of pumped storage schemes. So having a pollution free alternative to coal and gas will still be extremely useful.
LFTRs burn up that waste and turn it into ~100X the energy those crappy LWRs ever made.
A college buddy of mine made a homemade expulsive in the lab.
It blew him right out of school!
You are right depending the fusion development, but in case of renewables, the oil companies could invest a lot and be the next big thing. But they don't, which indicates that they are not able to survive in future.
If you have enough energy available, you can make hydrocarbon chemical fuel from water and CO2. It's an enormously inefficient process, but if energy costs are low enough then it can still be cheaper than drilling + pumping + refining oil. (Not to mention, it's carbon neutral.)
It'll be a long time (if ever) before wind or solar prices get low enough to make that an option. LFTRs or an ADS or other liquid-fuel, thorium-based reactor might be sufficient if the operational costs of the reactor can be made low enough. It seems likely that a working fusion reactor would be cheap enough.
Unlike a traditional fission reactor, which splits atoms of heavy elements to generate energy, a fusion reactor works by fusing the nuclei of lighter atoms into heavier atoms. The process releases massive amounts of energy and produces no radioactive waste.
So we can get energy by splitting or fusing atoms? As someone completely ignorant on the subjects of fission and fusion (and with a fading memory of middle school science), I do not understand how this does not violate some fundamental law of nature.
There are about 10^15 tons of deturium in seawater, making each gallon of it as energetic as roughly 300 gallons of gasoline. Big questions are how efficient can we make this process, and at what price as well as if we can breed enough tritium from li6 from slow neutrons or 7 from fast ones if it's not a pure deturium reaction.
Mr. Fusion for my house? Want something I buy every 20-40 yrs to power the house and cars.
Now fusion power is only 29 years away!
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
See subject & this link about "Primer Fields" https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Primer+Fields/ & it makes sense as you can SEE his results right there (very, VERY interesting - all this crap about 'dark matter' falls apart as this model functions from our "frame of relativistic reality" down to the subatomic level as well).
* IF this article's right (magnetic fusion sounds much like electro-static fusion imo)? Then, it only makes the link above all the more sound too!
(Suns/Stars then work on this principle basically... & not only that, but Mr. LaPoint in the video is working on a power source that sounds much like this one (magnetic bottles containing a plasma core reaction that shows 'magnetic stress patterns' around it using metal filings in cones that encase the magnetic field & everything in this universe has a magnetic field - again, see what's in that link above, as I don't describe it well...)
APK
P.S.=> I'm no scientist in this area but I know what my eyes have seen in the link above so take a peek & decide for yourselves if they both make sense together as well... apk
The large oil companies have at least $50 billion invested in renewable energy. Google it.
You mentioned storage technology and wind. Here's example news from just one week last year. Total SA, the French oil supermajor, spent $1.1 billion to buy the battery maker Saft Groupe SA, complementing its 2011 purchase of a majority stake in the solar-panel maker SunPower Corp on a Monday. The next day, Canadian pipeline company Enbridge Inc. it would pay $218 million for stakes in offshore wind farms as it attempts to double its low-carbon generating capacity.
Because not one near-worthless American dime will be spent on alternative energy research in now Big Oil America. I also fully expect any and all solar / wind subsidies to be eliminated (hell, they'll probably be levied a Big Oil Butt-Hurt tax to compensate for the Oil Patch's hard times).
On the plus side, you will actually be able to see the air that will kill you visibly descend.
Even if tritium were "free" it isn't so cheap to contain/store. Anything with atoms that small and in a gas or plasma state has a pretty high potential to be highly corrosive as well. At least inside magnetic containment inside the reactor you limit the issue but outside in the breeding area greatly complicates the design.
Not really. If oil were replaced by a true "global power grid", US dollars would simply become the currency of choice for buying & selling it.
The value of a US dollar is mainly its liquidity... you could walk into a bar or open-air market in the most backwards country on Earth and buy almost anything with US dollars. Even in Europe, if you walked into a random McDonalds, you could probably find someone in line who'll HAPPILY sell you a 10-Euro note for US$20 by the time it was your turn to order.
Currency exchange is expensive, so companies try to trade in US dollars AND KEEP THEM STORED as US dollars whenever possible. When an American buys something for 200 Euros on his Citibank Visa card, and a European buys something for $200 with HIS Citibank Visa card (or some national bank that's owned by Citibank anyway), Citi doesn't buy $200 worth of Euros at market rates and 200 Euros worth of Dollars at market rates... it CHARGES both cardholders as if it did, but REALLY just keeps the Dollars as Dollars, and Euros as Euros, unless it literally runs out of one or the other & can't borrow the shortfalling currency for less than the exchange rate. At worst, our hypothetical 200 Euro & Dollar transactions MIGHT result in ~$40 actually being exchanged.
THAT's why the US Dollar is dominant... you can buy goods and services with it almost anywhere AND often pay less than if you'd uses that country's official currency.
So what happens when the magnetic fields generated by superconducting coils fail? What happens when the 80 million degrees Celsius plasma escapes?
So...I'm not a scientist, and I don't even play one on TV or anything, but....
What happens to the eleventy gazillion degree plasma ball when the power goes out?
I mean, with exactly one exception (which is I believe a single incandescent bulb in a suburban Boston firehouse basement) humankind has never managed continuous, 100% uptime power to a single source.
How long does it take for the chewy plasma center to cool down when you need to power off the candy magnetic shell? What happens when the external power goes out? How much offline fuel, etc?
This is just dumb
you should buy stock in the StayPuft marshmallow company.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
An amazing new breakthrough at the website reddit.com now provides clickbait-free journalism and unlimited information. It's based on a radical new concept known as the "circle jerk", which confines opinions into narrow areas known as "comfort zones". Initial results were not promising until scientists injected marijuana into the circle. Via a process known as "hot boxing", they squared the circle and provided unlimited information by slowing down the perception of time. Since perception is reality (P=mR squared), this provides infinite information.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
You're welcome.
Ive been seeing propaganda like this for both fission and fusion reactors for the last 60 years, and I'm 75. It started with "Nuclear energy will be so cheap it won't be metered". No mention of the radioactive waste storage problem, which was passed along to future generations and now is a HUGE problem. Then came the fusion reactor promises: "Within 25 years .... ". They were trotted out every five years, along about funding time. This one is no different, except its lies are about its promise to be free of nuclear waste. High temperature plasma can produce high energy Neutrons which make metal brittle, leading to failures. They also strike other atoms, knocking out other Neutrons and Protons, creating radioactive elements. Some of the high energy Neutrons are slowed down, becoming Thermal Neutrons, which allow them to be captured by some atoms, making the atoms radioactive. Of course, the projected per KW costs for consumer electricity never include the processing and storage of radioactive waste products. IF they were honest about that consumers would not opt for nuclear power because it would be too expensive.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
What you do here is to whitewash the Banksters and their ideology of "creative destruction". People can sustain only so much destruction of their lifes. Eventually they will decide to go after the Banksters and smoke them out.
So we better take this seriously.
....why do you not leave Iraq RIGHT NOW ? Because you bunch of criminals are actually exploting this nation or you plan to do it.
You nation is built on criminal action and you prove it time and again. 1 Million killed in Iraq for NOTHING. I hope Karma will come for your nation and exact revenge.
Every race that populates the universe enters this period. 99% of them blow themselves up with fission bombs or poison their worlds before they come up with practical fusion. 99% of the survivors who came up with fusion blow themselves up before they realize that technology is fucked and we should just chill and grow vegetables.
There is a bit of a race going on at the moment to be first. MAST at Culham in the UK is one of the world leaders in this field and is due to be fired up in 2017. However this project is EU funded and will get canned because of BREXIT.
http://www.ccfe.ac.uk/mast_upg...
That's what you are spouting here. New York International and their relatives and business partners Timoshenko, Nuland, Levy, Merkel et al staged a coup d'etat in Kiev. Timoshenko harbored phantasies of "castrasting" the people of Donezk, because they consider themselves Russians.
You can have lots of phantasies of killing Russians, but you should also not be afraid of the AK-47, the T34, The SU-34, the Iskander and the Topol-M, then. Fuck with us Vikings and see what happens.
You might also talk to Clinton, she wanted to destroy us Vikings, too.
Kiev burned 50 Russians alive in a building. Do you seriously think the death of Vikings will go not avenged ?
The holy fury of a Germanic man is unparalleled. Our god Thor can come down on our enemies whenever we call him hard enough.
Btw. I am not a Russian, but I know our common history and I can look through all the NATO Bullshit at my age now.
And it had nothing to do with taking out a military nuisance for Israel.
Of course fusion produces radioactive waste! It's a nuclear process. It just doesn't produce the same kind of waste that fission produces. Very very high energy neutrons are released by fusion reactions, and whatever those things hit, and are ultimately absorbed by, will become radioactive over time, and will need to be disposed of. Right now they are just trying to get these dang things to turn on. But when they do, if they don't have some method to absorb the neutrons, then the infrastructure of the reactor itself is going to become radioactive over time and need to be disposed of, and a new reactor built.
All that lithium that blanket the reactor vessel, it won't disappear. Even if the conversion is low, because the cross section neutron capture is low, if it is enough to sustain the reaction, it will produce enough. And you don't need much. To compare price : lithium is 20$ a Kg, 3H is about 30 million dollar the Kg. And we are speaking of needs in grams so very little of your lithium will disappear/be converted , as a cost. Cents.
You are only hurting yourself by claiming that it will provide energy infinitely or forever, which is a lie
Do you feed yourself or does someone help you?
You bet the oil nations are behind the anti nuclear idiots. France heats with nuclear and basically all nations could do that. It would create lots of highly skilled jobs in the consumer nations. But it would deprive some sand nazis of their Rolls Royces and A380 private airliners. And their ability to fund religious wars from China to Boston.
I see what you dud right there.
Hook it to the EM Drive, and we finally get to meet 3-breasted green chicks!
Table-ized A.I.
I don't want to hear "it works" until you have something that makes more useful energy than it consumes.
It can run for a few milliseconds before requiring days or months of repair/refuel before the next run. It can be so far from cost competitive with existing energy generation methods nobody would dare ever build one commercially or even military use.
It can drain the worlds oceans and or destroy gravity for all I care... Before you say "it works" you must have demonstrated extracting more useful energy than you put in.
It's no harder to store than the deuterium or hydrogen. Of course, given its half-life, you can't store it for long anyway.
Common storage mechanisms are: compression, liquefication, or as metal hydrides (including just leaving it as LiT).
this is merely a plasma confinement testing machine, it will consume immense amount of energy and produce nothing.
no fusion plant on earth will use ordinary hydrogen as a fuel as the sun does, that produces far far too little energy for a given volume of fuel
fusion is no closer because of 7-x than it was before it was built
what marketing droid wrote the moronic summary?
Why are so few people in here (at current count 2) not mentioning Lockheed?
They announced publicly plans to demo a milspec prototype compact fusion reactor (energy positive, people!) in 2014:
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/us/news/press-releases/2014/october/141015ae_lockheed-martin-pursuing-compact-nuclear-fusion.html
The civvy reactor is supposed to be ready in 2024.
Also fusion can and will produce unwanted by-products, which is why straight-hydrogen fusion is probably not the way to go. These guys have been pushing their concept on Indiegogo for awhile:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/focus-fusion-empowertheworld--3#/
Have to wonder if they're working with or against the Lockheed team.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This is the tech that's being silenced because....well...$.
When the king heard the words of the Book of the Law he tore his robes.2Kings22:11
in order to increase energy yield, engineers feeding it until it became as dense as your average american. It then promptly collapsed into a point black hole and devoured the earth.
I wonder if all the investors in wind turbines or for that matter conventional power plants have thought about that they are instantly out of business if they actually get this working.
Be it fission or fusion, renewables aka solar power (aka fusion at 93 million miles) aren't going to haul anyone's backside to any of the nearby stars, nor is it likely to make for a good permanent habitat on Mars, and probably not even for the moon (there's that whole half-a-month-of-darkness power storage problem).
If you want to leave Earth, embrace the nukes.
"'Star In a Jar' Fusion Reactor Works, Promises Infinite Energy"
Really? Infinite energy? That sounds like more energy than there is in the entire universe, let alone on Earth.
The "fuel" used in a fusion reactor is simple hydrogen, which can be extracted from water.
And eventually we would have no water left, so still definitely not infinite.
No pesky neutrons to worry about, if the fuel is "simple hydrogen".
This "'star in a jar' technology would essentially provide Earth with limitless clean energy, forever." Wow, this an amazing project. This would certainly rejuvenate the life of our atmosphere. I salute the scientists for their hard work and dedication!
Half a moon in darkness, just like earth. The half in darkness isn't constant, which you can tell because we have months.
How many of these magical "LFTR"-s are there at present? Where?
You mean days...
I remember all of this from the Horizon Book of Science. I read it in 1965. They even mentioned the stellarator.
"To reach the other goals of the device, and provide an answer to the question ‘is the stellarator the right concept for fusion energy?’, years of plasma physics research is needed. That task has just started."
This is a long, long way from "star in a jar works."
Check out the Apostrophe open-source CMS: http://www.apostrophenow.com/
We're only about 20 or 25 years away from practical fusion power. Still. Again. Always.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
Funding has run out, so fake the results to get more money.
Not saying it is a pipe drem...mind you...but the huge technical challenges would probably require trillions of Euro's to solve before you could build a plant for public use.
That is probably 100-200 YEARS away.
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I did not really expect my time machine to work but no, I've already traveled to April 1st.
Its already being done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Coal, Oil, Gas, Wind, Solar all get their energy from fusion. Some of them are even pretty effective long-term storage mechanisms for fusion energy.
They're starting to take it seriously, getting their toes wet, at least.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
Big Oil is not investing in solar power, wind turbines or storage technology which will be the choice of alternative energy for now. Why should they invest in fusion?
Are you sure about that?
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Big Oil is; The supermajors are considered to be BP plc, Chevron Corporation, ExxonMobil Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell plc, Total SA and Eni SpA, with ConocoPhillips Company also sometimes described in the past as forming part of the group.
http://www.bp.com/en/global/co...
https://www.chevron.com/corpor...
https://lubes.exxonmobil.com/L...
http://www.shell.com/energy-an...
Perhaps you should get with the times, "Big Oil" has been investing heavily in renewables for years. But I guess that doesn't fit in your world view, so it is much more convinient to rage about how horrible big oil wouldn't invest in renewable energy. As for fusion, that is a harder question to answer, you would have to actually look into the investors behind each fusion energy project. My guess is that those nasty big oil companies are heavily investing into fusion, as that is what energy companies to.
As ray also points out, you are so far off base it is actually laughable. All those links above took me 30 seconds to find.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?