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Experts Urge US To Continue Support For Nuclear Fusion Research (scientificamerican.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: A panel of 19 scientists drawn from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recommended yesterday that the Department of Energy should continue an international experiment on nuclear fusion energy and then develop its own plan for a "compact power plant." A panel of 19 scientists drawn from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recommended yesterday that the Department of Energy should continue an international experiment on nuclear fusion energy and then develop its own plan for a "compact power plant."
But as the National Academies' report noted, major challenges must be overcome to reach these goals, beginning with how to contain and control a burning "plasma" of extremely hot gas, ranging from 100 million to 200 million degrees Celsius, that can produce more heat than it consumes. The report calls the resulting plasma "a miniature sun confined inside a vessel." The world's biggest experiment intended to create and draw energy from burning plasma is under construction at Cadarache, France. It's called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, and its centerpiece is a large, doughnut-shaped, Russian-inspired reactor called a tokamak. Several member nations have already developed their own national programs, and the assembled National Academies experts concluded that the United States should eventually follow, once the ITER experiment shows there are ways to contain and manipulate a sustained fusion reaction. "It is the next critical step in the development of fusion energy," says the report.
But as the National Academies' report noted, major challenges must be overcome to reach these goals, beginning with how to contain and control a burning "plasma" of extremely hot gas, ranging from 100 million to 200 million degrees Celsius, that can produce more heat than it consumes. The report calls the resulting plasma "a miniature sun confined inside a vessel." The world's biggest experiment intended to create and draw energy from burning plasma is under construction at Cadarache, France. It's called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project, and its centerpiece is a large, doughnut-shaped, Russian-inspired reactor called a tokamak. Several member nations have already developed their own national programs, and the assembled National Academies experts concluded that the United States should eventually follow, once the ITER experiment shows there are ways to contain and manipulate a sustained fusion reaction. "It is the next critical step in the development of fusion energy," says the report.
Nobody has hit ignition yet. This includes the massive complex at Lawrence Livermore. Know how long they have been trying? The "laser bay" set in Tron was filmed in the prototype for the Livermore system. It was built in the 90's, at four times the original cost, and still isn't up to "full power," apparently because they don't know how to get it there.
So, yeah, fusion research in the US has been a total debacle. Hopefully the Europeans can get it to work, but they're already spending the money, so why does the US have to? I think we have the sunken cost fallacy going on with the National Ignition Center.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
You deliberately pretend that you don't understand that we have to reduce emissions drastically right now, and actually have to get to negative emissions (taking CO2 out of the atmosphere) as well, because we've gone too far, because of denialists like you.
You hold out that some tech 50 years from now will save us from global warming. We are already at 1 C above pre-industrial-revolution global average temperature, and we have already locked in probably 1.5 C above pre-industrial-revolution global average temperature, and on our current trajectory we're heading for 4 to 5 C above, which is a different kind of planet than humanity has ever known.
Whatever we do right now will start bending the curve in 50 to 100 years. That's how frickin' big this problem and system is. That's how long it takes to turn this Titanic (climate trends) so we have to start immediately and drastically.
You undoubtedly know all this but your agenda is to keep feeding uncertainty to the ignorant. You are an intergenerational criminal.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I haven't had a chance to look up who is on this committee, but an office mate of mine was on a previous similar committee that prepared a report recommending fusion research funding a few years ago. The committee included a lot of scientists that would not benefit from fusion funding, including other plasma physics researchers (e.g. astrophysical plasma and plasma processing research) and people from industry. Often such committees specifically avoid people with such conflicts of interest, using direct participants & potential grant recipients only for answering questions.
There is not enough fuel. Tritium is very unstable and must be continually produced to provide a fuel source. If you're producing or harvesting enough tritium, you either have a fleet of fission reactors already producing far more energy than fusion reactors can harvest from the tritium byproducts, or you have solar sails collecting tritium and potentially harvesting _vastly_ more solar energy than the tritium can produce.
There are some interesting boron fusion designs, rather than tritium and deuterium, but none have yet proven able to harvest more energy than they consume.