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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?"
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?
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 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
to control the plasma so they can maybe later, in a couple of years build a fusion reactor that works as an energy source
A couple of years seems way too optimistic to do something which have been tried for quite long already and never accomplished. Logically, the exact meaning of control has to be understood within the power plant context; some seconds or even hours isn't a big deal (other than within a very slow step-by-step research), because this is expected to be run non-stop for very long periods (at least, a few months). It would also imply to account for eventual problems and have backup alternatives (security- and service-wise). By bearing all this in mind, I don't think that anyone will be able to "control the plasma" within the next quite few years (if possible at all under the intended conditions).
Even after having adequately accounted for the aforementioned issue and even by forgetting about anything else (e.g., global security and reliability, potential problems of a new technology, costs and real gain with respect to other alternatives, etc.), the transition from a controlled plasma to an actual energy generation is also quite difficult. Imagine that you have a flowing mass as hot as the surface of the sun, forget about all the security or operational issues and just answer this question: how is it supposed to generate electricity (= become an actual power plant)? What the current fission plants do isn't applicable here because the temperature ranges are completely different. The residual heat from the fission reactions is hot (and cold) enough to be almost directly applied to a tank of water (which is converted into steam, which moves a turbine, which is coupled with a generator, which generates electricity). Now you are dealing with the hottest thing on earth, what can you do with it? Potentially, lots of electricity might be extracted from it, but how could it be done? There are some theories accounting for this part too; but again they haven't ever been adequately tested mainly because the prerequisite (extremely-hot plasma standing there for long enough) hasn't still happened.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
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?
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.
Yea; a lot wrong about this.
There is a lot of really interesting research in this field. The real headline I hope to read one day, hopefully not too far into the distant future, is one that states scientists have found a way to hold the plasma for over an hour.
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."
Windscale in a milk pail. Chernobble in a bottle.
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.
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?
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'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.
Wouldn't it be as simple as the containing vessel heating up, and you pump water along it? I mean, the plasma inside can be millions of degrees, and that would probably radiate to heat up the vessel as well when it starts producing energy.
A cubic millimeter of superhot plasma is not gonna heat up the entire containment vessel to melting point, but it might heat it up to say a nice comfortable 500 degrees orso...
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.
Wouldn't it be as simple as the containing vessel heating up
As simple as containing the plasma for very long (but never done), as simple as going to Mars and coming back (never done), etc. Assuming that something you don't fully (not even partially; you and anyone else, because this situation has never happened) understand is easy doesn't seem as a sensible approach. Additionally, when we are talking about crazily demanding conditions beyond anything which has ever been tried, that word sounds even more inadequate (to say it very softly).
Note that the reason for using magnetic fields (a virtually experimental methodology, very expensive and with unclear reliability) to confine the plasma (the vessel surrounds the magnetic field, but never touches the plasma) is that it is too hot for anything else (I mean any material ever). All what they are doing now is trying to keep the plasma for as long as possible, what means making sure that the temperature outside the magnetic field is low enough.
Their theory seems (corresponding section of the ITER webpage, the most ambitious fusion project) to agree with your suggestion: the small proportion of plasma heat getting outside the field is used to increase the temperature of the surrounding water (what, as per my knowledge, hasn't ever been tested). Even by assuming that all this works and by forgetting about all the problems which such a setup might provoke, how could you know/affect in any way the temperature variation? The generation of steam isn't precisely a random process happening under random conditions. The exact temperatures of the water and of the generated steam have to be perfectly controlled. A process like fission is highly stable, predictable and controllable; to not mention that the default temperatures are already quite close to the target (the reactor is precisely designed to make sure that this is the case). I don't know, perhaps something like a range of 90-110 Celsius degree at the water tank under extreme conditions. But what can you do when dealing with millions of degrees? How can you come up with a way to tune up these values to meet orders of magnitude smaller targets? Getting the 0.000000231% of the plasma's heat and, eventually, moving it to 0.000000232% to account for whatever issue? Could you put an example of a methodology allowing to convert 10^6 values into 100 with a precision below 1? Can such a methodology deal with a temperature-variation scenario?
500 degrees
Even my assuming that this would be possible, how do you expect to modify this temperature to reach the 100 target? Whatever you do would imply an additional expense of energy which would have to be brought into consideration while determining the total gain/loss.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
as simple as going to Mars and coming back
I meant a ship with (living) humans on it.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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"?
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!
"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)."
Taking Hillary's loss rather hard, aren't you?
Have you bothered to check out how many GW of solar power generating stations have been and are being built? Check out Wikipedia, it has a nice article about the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ... it's gone exponential, and the data behind those graphs have not been tampered with, fudged or cherry-picked. Also, note that the countries with the dirtiest air are those controlled by tyrants a/o Marxists. Why should Americans have to pay a Carbon Tax so China can continue to massively pollute the skies of our Planet with impunity?
Notice that the graphs projecting future trends for Solar power in the US have a hockey stick shape. You know what that means
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
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...
LOL!
"I love the smell of napalm in the morning. It smells like...Texas pork BBQ!"
Too funny!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Windscale in a milk pail. Chernobble in a bottle.
"Star In a Jar" sounds like a David Blaine stunt until you realize that it wouldn't meet most definitions of either "star" or "jar".
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.
And it had nothing to do with taking out a military nuisance for Israel.
Different groups had different ways to benefit off of a war in Iraq. The far right social conservatives are always hopeful that a mideast war can grease the skids for armagheddon. Halliburton made wonderful profits from supplying war related activities. Wars also serve as a conservative economic stimulus package.
But yeah, in order to settle an old family fight, we were going to go into Iraq to settle that score. Everything else was just gravy to some folks.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
And when we have converted everything to iron, we're finished.
Have gnu, will travel.
hmm is not a star in a jar nuclear...
That's not how this works. Although fusion is a nuclear process, it's just dandy with the SJW community so long as breakthroughs in theory are required to make it work. As soon as someone comes up with a practical way of doing it on Earth, they will find some rationale for opposing it. They always do.
Example: you thought they at least supported fusion so long as it takes place on the sun, didn't you?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/iv...
You underestimate how hot that plasma is. It's past just being regular plasma like I can make in my microwave, and into exotic physics territory. You don't even model heat exchange using the standard laws of thermodynamics, because each individual particle impact is a high-energy collision. Even with the best cooling systems physically possible, your containment vessel is going to melt, and then become plasma itsself. Plus even if you could keep it cool enough, you'd be creating a temperature gradient in the reactor that is going to make it impossible to sustain the temperature required for fusion.
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?
Hey, it's the fat grannygrabber A.K Mark, with his J.D. in international law from DeVry.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Except for when they find a problem and have to shut down a lot of their nuclear stations.
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
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
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.
"'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".
Star in a bar? So it's about Robert Downey, Jr?
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!
Just because you are in computers does not mean you have a clue about physics.
FYI, I have a BEng in Mechanical Engineering and studied for my MEng in Industrial Engineering, precisely specialising in energy (i.e., power plants, nuclear power, etc.). I have also a relevant working experience in engineering/physics. I currently work as a programmer, but this fact doesn't remove all my knowledge about this matter. But why are you criticising me in a so arbitrary way? Are my arguments flawed? Could you please argue against them rather than against me? And also try to base your critics upon actual facts and/or logic, rather than on inventing random ideas like saying that I have no clue about physics.
The energy transfer to coolants is the easy part.
Radiation is quite easy to calculate.
A large water volume can absorb plenty of heat.
I find these references pretty descriptive of your actual engineering/power-plant knowledge. Are you mixing up the water in the cooling system with the one used to generate electricity (the main tank whose temperature is kept around 100 to generate steam, to move the turbine + generator)? You are a big-picture guy, aren't you? (-> this is for saying that I have no clue about physics :)).
The hard part is the shaping and control of the plasma by magnetic means.
I didn't say that this was easy (the only person here using this word to describe what is unimaginably complex is you). Actually, this is complex enough to, IMO, stop considering this option right away. But even in case of having this in place, managing the temperature to be transferred to the water would be extremely difficult too.
If the plasma "breaks out" it will simply heat the walls and nothing dangerous happens
Why would happen anything dangerous? You are plainly dealing with the hottest reality ever with which no material can deal. You would also be dealing with self-sustained chain reactions which might be stopped at will, right? Are you completely sure about that? Aren't these the kind of things about which nobody knows anything because they have never been done? Like all the fission problems about which the nuclear power pioneers didn't even dream that could occur?
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
"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.
There is a huge difference in a MagNOX gas cooled reactor design and a graphite moderated Pu production design. Using Windscale and Chernobyl in the same sentence is a comparison of pomegranate and durien. Not even close enough to say apples and oranges.
I do agree with sentiments about "star in a jar" as that phrase should be reserved for the cheesy adverts for cheap LED lamps that flicker in time to music.
NRRPT/RCT
I feel reassured now that you've pointed out how it couldn't possibly go wrong in any way at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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?