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China's Fusion Reactor Reaches 100 Million Degrees Celsius (abc.net.au)
hackingbear shares a report from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: The team of scientists from China's Institute of Plasma Physics announced this week that plasma in their Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) -- dubbed the 'artificial sun' -- reached a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius which is six times hotter than the core of the Sun. This temperature is the minimum required to maintain a fusion reaction that produces more power than it takes to run. The Chinese research team said they were able to achieve the record temperature through the use of various new techniques in heating and controlling the plasma, but could only maintain the state for around 10 seconds. The latest breakthrough provided experimental evidence that reaching the 100 million degrees Celsius mark is possible, according to China's Institute of Plasma Physics. "While the U.S. is putting new restrictions on nuclear technology exports to China, inventions and findings of EAST will be important contributions to the development of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)," writes Slashdot reader hackingbear. The reactor is currently being built in southern France with collaboration from 35 nations. According to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, it is expected to be "the first device to consistently produce net energy, producing 500 megawatts of clean and sustainable power."
after which time the facility and everything within about 8 miles surrounding it ceased to exist
Itâ(TM)s almost as hot as the Ghost Pepper sauce I sent Caesars as thanks for making DEFCON 25 a miserable experience with their thieving security goons.
Oh, really?
Apparently not. If it were, it would be maintained, wouldn't it?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
a team of scientists ... reached a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius for 10 seconds.
Great! So soon I can get my Chinese takeout much faster, right?
So serious question: how many oceans will that boil? It's one thing to have the moon that hot, it's another to have the head of a pin that hot. Or are the just going after temperature quantity rather than size/mass? (which is not a bad thing.)
If I remember my fusion stuff correctly, they were trying to have high temps via lasers at a single point, and drop some deuterium at that same point/instant and get it to fuse. They got it working, but not enough to be self-sufficient.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
Some of the researchers still felt it was too cold in the office and would prefer to bump up the thermostat a little more
The protons in the core of the sun are in a temperature distribution, like a bell curve, and the average of this bell curve is way to cold for fusion. The only reason fusion happens is there are so many protons, a very few have freakishly high temperature way up the high end of the bell curve. Only those statistical outliers are fusing.
Ummm yeah... just... yeah
That is 212 million degrees in Fahrenheit. If they did it in America it would have been much hotter.
I'm afraid that all deuteriam and tritium based fusion reactors rely on fuel that is in extremely limited supply, especially tritium. Since the main source of tritium on Earth is nuclear decay from fission reactors, if there are enough fission reactors to generate enough of the very inefficiently used fusion fuel to generate significant, they can generate many times more energy from the fission reactors without having to engage in dangerous refinement of the tritium.
It's theoretically possible that thallium, which is much more plentiful than hydrogen isotopes, can be used for susion. But I'm sad to say that hydrogen fusion _cannot_ be effectively used for energy. Every technology that harvest or generate enough of the hydrogen isotopes manages and can harvest so much other energy that hydrogen isotopes re only a useful research byproduct, not a comparable energy source.
One Hundred. Million. Celcius! *pinky finger in corner of mouth*
More useful to look at the energy of the particles. 1eV = 11,000 kelvin
So this is a pretty feeble 9 keV. The electrons in your old tube TV have about 3-4 times the energy
You might get some D-T reactions, but you're not going to get any D-D.
Call us when you get to 100 keV kinds of levels.
One fusion dirty secret is that it produces neutrons that cannot be confined by electromagnetic fields, because they have no charge. They will damage the reactor, and the only way to get rid of them is to use some a-neutronic fusion reaction such as hydrogen+boron.
But hydrogen+boron fusion require much more input energy than hydrogen+hydrogen. Is 100 million degrees hot enough?
While the U.S. is putting new restrictions on nuclear technology exports to China
How about instead, saying "While China is repeatedly caught attempting to steal nuclear technology from the United States"...
OK, and a linked article bashing Trump admin policies based on testimony of officials who briefed New York Times journalists under condition of anonymity? Yep, this is without question legit and unbiased.
China's Fusion Reactor Reaches 100 Million Degrees Celsius
Plasma energy sounds really large when you express it in temperature. But a more convenient gauge may be the voltage needed to accelerate the particles to velocity magnitudes correspondng to that sort of energy. This is also directly applicable to fusion systems, such as the Farnsworth-Hirsch or Bussard's Polywell, which use electric fields to accelerate the particles into the reaction volume.
Both electrons and hydrogen nuclei have a charge magnitude of 1, so dropping them across a potential difference of N volts adds N electron volts of energy to each particle. Then, if you let the plasma thermalize to a Maxwellâ"Boltzmann distribution, the electron temperature will be (by definition) the temperature of the distribution is about 2/3 that corresponding to the average electron energy.
So to go from degrees Celsius degrees (of a thermalized plasma) to electron volts: .003% drop in the bucket. (Kelvin step sizes are the same but Celsius starts at 273.15 Kelvin.)
- Subtract 273.15 - a
- Divide by 11,605 to get electron volts.
- Multiply by 2/3 to get the average energy of the electrons and ions.
That's an acceleration voltage of 6,025 volts (or 9,037 if you're going to react them before they thermalize). That's right in the ballpark for high-end vacuum tube technology - like the second anode on a CRT. (Those ran about 3000 to 6000 V in the 1940s, and about 25,000 V when modern color tubes were being replaced by flat panels.)
You can see why we all had high hopes for things like Polywell, where (if it worked as expected) a "gassy vacuum tube" that would fit in a strip-mall store's back room, with all supporting equipment (mostly mid-20th-century style electronics), and provide 100 MW of DC at cross-country power line voltages.
Of course many of the other methods for directly heating plasma heat the electrons much more than the ions. So the average energy of the plasma may be substantially lower.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The Sun can be cooler because it has a couple of things going for it: it's optically dense and gravitationally confined. That is, the core is SO big and SO dense that radiation doesn't just leak heat out into space. So the plasma doesn't cool down immediately. Also, the plasma density is maintained by the weight of all the mass of the rest of the star.
Lab experiments, and in fact any plasma on earth, have neither of these advantages going for them.
That is why the Sun can maintain its fusion reaction and why it is so hard to create fusion on earth.
You post as AC. People aren't impersonating you. You do know how that works, right?
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
See subject: Your MASSIVE FAIL in this life is you're nothing more than a chattering little do-nothing "ne'er-do-well" online & you know it...
* Is that the best your "phantasyland FAKE NAME" (for your fake lie of a so-called 'life') can manage?
When a FAKE NAME do nothing like YOU does better than I have? Then talk (you're all talk & no action)...
You can't help you're an immature little BUTTHURT no-mind, lol! I blew you away in TONS OF PLACES and easily dust your no-mind bullshit blatherings.
APK
P.S.=> The TRUE PRICE of your UNIDENTIFIABLE FAKE NAME do-nothing selves like you that I can ALWAYS CASH IN ON (lol) is that I can use FACT/TRUTH on them to SHATTER their all TOO fragile delusional egos that they actually know A DAMN THING in computing, lol... apk
Here's a question for you nerds. How can nuclear FUSION *and* FISSION both produce energy? I never understood that. You would think that smaller nuclei would be high energy and heavy nuclei be low energy or vice versa. If you can get energy by splitting the atom AND by fusing smaller nuclei into larger ones, that seems like free energy. Between both processes you can generate an unlimited amount of energy.
Proton-boron fusion requires temperatures 10x higher than D-T.
What's more, because of the higher atomic number for boron, Bremsstrahlung radiation will cool the plasma (if it's thermal) faster than the fusion reactions heat it.
If the plasma isn't thermal, it's actually really hard to keep it nonthermal (entropy tends to win very quickly.) So it seems to me that aneutronic fusion reactions are hopeless for a plasma where losses due to Bremsstrahlung are larger than the fusion power will be.
--PeterM
By neutron activation of lithium-6. There are a number of proposed ways to do this.
There is a company called General Fusion http://generalfusion.com/ that is attempting to use liquid metal fusion containment. Sounds very cool, in an almost steampunk sort of way. Being a physics noob, I'm wondering if anybody who actually knows this stuff can comment on whether or not their idea makes any sense?
None of them can see the clouds; The polished wings don't care.
maybe other tokamaks could do it to (100 deg. C and 10 sec) but dont, because pushing the device would "damage" it and require extensive amount of "paint" after the "run with new insight"... something the other tokamaks research BUDGET doesnt allow?
"oh no sir! we cant put that much dynamite into the gadget. it might xplode" wasnt much of a issue when developing the abomb (not ass bomb), methinks.
How long will it take before Americans will claim Chinese "stole" this technology from them ?
If there's one thing the Chinese are known for is cheating and lying.
WTF???
Have you ever even met any Chinese people you stupid cunt?
All of my Chinese friends are awesome.
You, on the other hand, are a massive cock sucker.
It will run at 400 - 600 seconds and will produce more energy than it consumes, that is all. There is no power plant attached nor will there ever be: https://www.iter.org/sci/Goals
And the power production is not clean as long as we use deuterium + tritium, the reactor vessel will have to be replaced around every 10 years and discarded as highly radioactive waste.
Regarding sustainability: ITER will attempt to breed tritium ... lets see how good that works. Otherwise we had to farm tritium from the sea, which is energy intensive and causes another spot in the chain to work with an radioactive element.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Yes,the catch is:
they want american funding and like to attract european and american PhD students to their facilities (*facepalm*)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
That, and proton-proton fusion is SLOW, and only really possible inside a star-sized gravity well. Earthly fusion is done with MUCH easier ingredients.
Yes, you have a Chinese friend therefore you are not racist....ok!
Lol
You said it ZIP: Where's your work everyone can see/use? It's not. It's HOTAIRWARE/NOTWARE (lol) "I'm a much better programmer than APK" - by Anonymous Coward ZIP on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57449082) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
The BETTER PROGRAMMER w/ no programs, lol - @ least you can say your "code" has NO BUGS - of course, it also does ZERO (like you) since it does nothing @ all, lol!
You hotair BLOWHARD talker, lol!
You f'd up ZIP https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
Yet 100,000++ users of my ware & dozens of even REGISTERED /.ers like/use/praise MY work https://news.slashdot.org/comm... vs. your HOTAIR talk punk!
* LMAO!
(Let's see how YOU take it when I publicly SHIT ALL OVER YOU by letting FACTS of YOUR FUCKUPS vs. ME https://science.slashdot.org/c... do the job for me)
APK
P.S.=> You STUPID & LAZY all talk chimpanzee - KEEP IMPERSONATING me - I'll expose your BLOWHARD INCOMPETENCE publicly, lol... apk
They are probably seeking a technology exchange so they release a fake project.
You said it ZIP: Where's your work everyone can see/use? It's not. It's HOTAIRWARE/NOTWARE (lol) "I'm a much better programmer than APK" - by Anonymous Coward ZIP on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57449082) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
The BETTER PROGRAMMER w/ no programs, lol - @ least you can say your "code" has NO BUGS - of course, it also does ZERO (like you) since it does nothing @ all, lol!
You hotair BLOWHARD talker, lol!
You f'd up ZIP https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
Yet 100,000++ users of my ware & dozens of even REGISTERED /.ers like/use/praise MY work https://news.slashdot.org/comm... vs. your HOTAIR talk punk!
* LMAO!
(Let's see how YOU take it when I publicly SHIT ALL OVER YOU by letting FACTS of YOUR FUCKUPS vs. ME https://science.slashdot.org/c... do the job for me)
APK
P.S.=> You STUPID & LAZY all talk chimpanzee - KEEP IMPERSONATING me - I'll expose your BLOWHARD INCOMPETENCE publicly, lol... apk
You Frenchies and Chinese... Clean Coal 4Ever.
You need to be MEDICATED and perhaps INSTITUTIONALIZED. Get the fuck OFF SLASHDOT with your Tourettes Syndome of the Keyboard nonsense, you jackass.
Found the racist
We're doomed!
Dooomed!
Doooooooommmmmmmmeeed
Ya you know a few people so it makes the legendary corruption baked into the very Chinese culture moot
https://www.business-anti-corruption.com/country-profiles/china/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_in_China
Yes but if there's another thing the Chinese are known for it's having trouble maintaining a reaction. So there might be something to it.
Pleased to observe that I am not on the opposite side of the planet to China if that stuff gets out of control.
My understanding is that the energy output, per cubic meter, is about the same as the human body, 50-100 watts or whatever. Just that there are a lot of cubic meters in the core of the Sun, so it adds up. As the AC says, proton-proton fusion is slow, even at the pressures and temperatures at the core.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Sure the raw material may be plentiful but how do you get new hydrogen?
The Sun can be cooler because it
doesn't care what you think about it.
My understanding is that the energy output, per cubic meter, is about the same as the human body, 50-100 watts or whatever.
Humans output around 100 watts abut are somewhat less than a meter cubed (we'd weigh about a ton at that size). Human power density is more like 1000-1500W/m^3, so we have about 10x the power density of the sun.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
This is 1 million times more than what is required to produce a usable form of energy (electricity) through a very reliable methodology to perform the conversion heat -> mechanical energy -> electrical energy (water + heat -> steam which moves a turbine -> generator coupled to the turbine creating electricity). It also seems hot enough to be useful for other purposes like running a huge amount of heating systems.
So, I think that we are already pretty covered on the temperature front, what about focusing on other (tiny) aspects like making the heat generation last for a bit longer (perhaps it is just me, but holding it for just a few seconds or even hours seems still quite far away from what is required to reach the intended goals) or doing something on the actual usage front like actually generating a form of energy that people could use (again perhaps it is just me, but 100 million degrees sounds a bit too much for any direct application I can imagine).
On the other hand, you might continue focusing on this or similar competitions because everyone/everything needs a purpose and this might be a realistic one for you. Being the absolute best at something is certainly very difficult and usually attracts people who want to watch/pay you, to even feel inspired to become like you. Who am I to judge anyone's life aspirations? If you don't damage anyone (should getting money from naive rich suckers be considered damaging someone or an acceptable, even desirable, outcome from the tremendously unfair, self-perpetuating wealth distribution?) and you are happy, I personally have no problem with any life approach. Some people run faster than anyone else, others have the longest nails, you have the hottest temperature. Good for you!
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Probably not, more likely plasma instability but D-T fusion isn't going to power the world. Damn all D and far less T.
How else would it be able to sustain fusion? I am _NOT_ saying its done by intelligent extraterrestrial beings... but it might be!
Humans... are somewhat less than a meter cubed
This confirms why Oklahoma always felt like The Twilight Zone: most of 'em aren't human.
Holy shit, something we can agree on!
Even better, the GP's values are wrong. The sun has a power density of around (3.846E26 Watts / 1.4E27 m^3) = 0.27W/m^3. Humans are thus nearly 10,000x more energetic than the sun per cubic metre
I always sign my shit. Unlike you!
ZIP
P.S. => If you can't take the heat. GTFO
> The Chinese research team said they were able to achieve the record temperature through the use of various new techniques in heating and controlling the plasma, but could only maintain the state for around 10 seconds. The latest breakthrough provided experimental evidence that reaching the 100 million degrees Celsius mark is possible
100 million degrees is a record for plasma, perhaps. If it proved that reaching 100mK was possible, it's only in the tokomak design, because the Z Pulsed Power Facility achieved 1 billion K in 2006!
>_ ...a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius which is six times hotter than the core of the Sun
Do we need that? Something at 1 million degrees wouldn't be as useful? Climbing the Everest, because "it's there" is not something you do without risk. And there's that old thing called "diminishing returns"...
On a positive note, maybe we can use that to live in some other place in the Solar System which has plenty of water and a passable gravity (whatever it might be). The only thing remaining is devising some sort of planetary shield to fend off dangerous cosmic particles/rays -- which might be done with an stationary array of satellites, maybe -- again with that kind of power source.
This is looking more and more like Stargate(TM)...
Such things make us:
1) wish that they (the Chinese) succeed;
2) wonder if it isn't interesting to keep good relations with them and, it follows,
3) think that being confrontational might be a losing proposition in the long term.
They just need to use F11 to stabilize it, then run it off of Unobtanium.
Generally when people are talking about the Sun's power density, they are talking about the region where fusion actually occurs, in the core, not the entire visible sphere, which is the number you are using. That would be a bit like talking about the energy density in a tokamak by averaging the power output over the volume of the entire tokamak structure rather than just the actual fuel confined in the magnetic field.
The Solar core is 19% of the Solar radius, and thus the energy density in the core, where fuel is burned, is 150 times higher - 40 W/m^3.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Also you are rating the human metabolic rate about a factor of 3 too high, is is about 1000 W/m^3, so the ratio of heat output per unit volume is 25 times higher for humans. But the density of the solar core is 160 g/cm^3, so the energy output per unit mass in the Sun is 6 times higher than in humans.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
but is it hot enough to break down a Twinkie?
Fusion reactors are still generating neutrons.. activation is still a problem. There must be at least some radioactive crap that can leak out and make the evening news.
There is some but it's far less of a problem than with fission reactors. The half lives of the waste products are short and there isn't much high level waste to begin with. In the event of problems the reactor shuts down almost immediately and there is no residual heat to cause the sorts of problems we see with fission reactor failures. Additionally fusion reactors do not contribute to weapons proliferation either. Basically fusion power is pretty much the holy grail of power generation if we can figure out how to do it. It's got huge upside, minimal dangers, essentially zero emissions or problems with carbon footprint, the fuel is not renewable but is so plentiful it doesn't matter, etc.
I'm sure some idiot news organizations will go all chicken little the first time a fusion reactor has a problem but the reality is that it's close to the safest power source we know of if we can make it work.
It's a great achievement, not doubts, however the problem with fusion is to control plasma long enough to have sustained reaction, thus getting netto energy surplus.
At the moment the biggest problem is that plasma leaks through magnetic confinement dropping temperature and shutting down fusion, and short bursts of fusion require more energy for heating plasma than one gets back.
The ITER (international tokamak project) aims at breaking even, there are also other approaches, for which major players are:
- stellarator (W7-X), a very promising way undergoing tests in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- laser fusion, most notably National Ignition Facility in US (some time ago they had a breakthrough with their laser): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
- compact fusion, some specialists say it's a viable method, however so far no-one has achieved fusion this way (AFAIK): https://www.lockheedmartin.com... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
There are also other ways, but they're unlikely to have positive energy balance (aka produce more than require).
Personally I am looking forward for the German stellarator (which seems the most promising) and this compact fusion if shown to work (is small, kind of portable but it requires HE3, which might be produced by other, bigger fusion reactors to complement each other). However, at the moment, people should pursue all viable ways.
Melt straight to China!
Deuterium and worse of all Tritium is impossible to contain and biologically disastrous. So you need massive containers just to slow down the loss of that stuff.
Oh the sun cares! That's why it comes back every single day; to check in on us.
And can't be contained. So yeah, apart from the stuff that is far worse for humans than uranium, it's perfectly safe...
Would never work.
What they need is to apply some machine learning to ferret out this crap. Let the poster see it on their device, so they are not alerted to the fact that no one else can see it, and just hide it from us normal people.
Oh yeah. Ban the guy that regularly bypasses all the filters here...that'll work.
STOP repeating thesr fucking lies /.
See how STUPID "ZIP" (Zach Patterson) the CHIMP is (tried to take credit for what I solved before him) https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... (he needs to LEARN TO READ)!
I even SHOW ways to do it YOURSELF https://tech.slashdot.org/comm... (he couldn't).
Delphi/FreePascal/ObjectPascal HAS no issue w/ null-term'd string bufferoverflows - C does, C++ can UNLESS you do what I said 1st loser.
Tell us about CODE SIGNING (which has been STOLEN & ABUSED) https://www.helpnetsecurity.co... MY METHOD CAN'T BE (upmodded +2 INTERESTING in CODING FOR DEFCON no less) https://it.slashdot.org/commen...
"I'm a much better programmer than APK" - by Anonymous Coward ZIP on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57449082) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
BIG TALK - Yet ZIP has nothing to show in programs. I can https://news.slashdot.org/comm... from registered /.ers liking/using/praising my work (& 100k users worldwide too). He can't.
LIAR ZIP says he has no account "I don't have an account, so I don't have mod points" https://news.slashdot.org/comm...
Yet LIAR ZIP says he downmods my posts (IMPOSSIBLE MINUS AN ACCOUNT on /.): "I down-modded a few of your post on other threads" - by Anonymous Coward "ZIP" on Thursday October 11, 2018 @11:31AM (#57461058) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
APK
P.S.=> KEEP IMPERSONATING ME CHIMP - this comes out every time, lol!... apk
You said it ZIP: Where's your work everyone can see/use? It's not. It's HOTAIRWARE/NOTWARE (lol) "I'm a much better programmer than APK" - by Anonymous Coward ZIP on Monday October 08, 2018 @11:27PM (#57449082) FROM https://yro.slashdot.org/comme...
The BETTER PROGRAMMER w/ no programs, lol - @ least you can say your "code" has NO BUGS - of course, it also does ZERO (like you) since it does nothing @ all, lol!
You hotair BLOWHARD talker, lol!
You f'd up ZIP https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
Yet 100,000++ users of my ware & dozens of even REGISTERED /.ers like/use/praise MY work https://news.slashdot.org/comm... vs. your HOTAIR talk punk!
* LMAO!
(Let's see how YOU take it when I publicly SHIT ALL OVER YOU by letting FACTS of YOUR FUCKUPS vs. ME https://science.slashdot.org/c... do the job for me)
APK
P.S.=> You STUPID & LAZY all talk chimpanzee - KEEP IMPERSONATING me - I'll expose your BLOWHARD INCOMPETENCE publicly, lol... apk
>100 million degrees is a record for plasma, perhaps. If it proved that reaching 100mK was possible, it's only in the tokomak design, because the Z Pulsed Power Facility achieved 1 billion K in 2006!
No, not "100mK" :)
The SI prefix "m" = milli = one thousandth, like:
So there's a material here on Earth that can withstand temperatures six times hotter than the core of the Sun (is that the hottest part?).
So now we can land on the Sun during the day right?