Slashdot Mirror
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.
The thing about reports that try and forecast how much CO2 we are omitting, is all of them are based on current technology.
They don't take into account technological breakthroughs, especially on the order of magnitude of getting a working fusion reactor...
Overnight the entire world's energy makeup would change, as such reactors became widespread.
No we don't know this exact thing will pan out, but when people are talking about problems even 80 years from now - that is a LONG time for lots of amazing technology to come along. It's certainly been the case that even just over the last 20 years a lot of things are around now that were not dreamed of, nor thought possible back then.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It's over an hour long, if you want to skip to the cost/planning information, skip to 55:13 http://www.psfc.mit.edu/news/m...
What things 20 years ago were never dreamed of or thought possible?
Who thought we would be landing rockets vertically with reusable boosters?
Rovers going for years on end on Mars?
But really you could just google countless examples if you actually cared, like this one
And that's from 2011.... here's a (newer?) one...
I can't think of a single one.
If you really can't think of any examples, I feel very very sorry for you. :-(. The world is amazing! Wake up!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
It will work fine, you just have to make it larger - say, 186,000 miles in diameter. We have documented evidence of functionality.
Um... a fusion reactor canâ(TM)t explode. If you lose containment of the plasma it dissipates and you need to restart your reactor.
Fusion is hard. Fission is trivially (and therefore dangerously) easy.
Ahh, this old canard.
Here, this handy little chart should help you understand what is actually meant with that.
In his apparent mad rush to drag the U.S. back to the 1940's technologically, socialogically, and politically, the gods-be-damned Trump administration will likely defund, kill off, and bury any and all research into practical fusion reactor technology, and instead insist on building more coal-fired power plants. Give 'em enough rope, and he'll probably try to outlaw solar power and wind power, too. Never mind what that'll do even in the short term to nationwide air quality and people's respiratory health, his science adviser assures him there's no connection between asthma, and other respiratory diseases, and air pollution.
Meanwhile countries like China will forge ahead and likely master fusion technology ahead of the U.S., and rub our faces in it in front of the rest of the world, making the U.S. look like even a bigger laughingstock than it already has been made to look like in the last 2 years, if you can believe that's even possible. If Trump, somehow, against all odds and against all common sense, manages to get re-elected in 2020, all I can tell you is: better start learning to speak Mandarin and Russian.
There are some pretty well established scalings that have been determined, basically saying if you have a given magnetic field, tokomak radius and shape, you will get a specific Q. The basics of containing plasma in a tokamak have been worked out some decades ago, and some of the final details have been worked out in the last 20 years, like disruption prevention and mitigation schemes.
We know a fusion reactor will work if built big enough (and I'm not talking about the joke about making it the size of the sun). The question is what is the least amount of increase in size we can get away with, because costs scales very roughly with volume of the reactor. How much stronger magnets can we develop and how much heat flux can the first wall takes (gets worse for smaller machines)?
This is getting into the realm of engineering, where the question is not, "Is it possible?," but instead, "Is it possible on a economical budget?"
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.
Gentlemen, we must protect our phoney baloney jobs! Harrumph harrumph!
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
To be fair, Bussard's Polywell failed entirely. One thing about tokamaks is that we're already sure that they work, we know the scaling laws and can extrapolate the behavior.
Fission reactors can't suffer nuclear detonation either (that's right, the climax of Pacific Rim wouldn't work in real life). You need specific isotopes of uranium or plutonium to make a bomb; isotopes which actually impede the functionality of the reactor as an energy source.
Chernobyl suffered a thermal explosion. So much energy built up so quickly the reactor fuel vaporized and blew apart the building. It was not a nuclear explosion. And it should be noted that Western nuclear reactors cannot blow up as Chernobyl did because they're designed with a negative void coefficient. They're designed so if the cooling water starts to boil, it slows down the nuclear reaction. Chernobyl's design used a positive void coefficient - boiling water sped up the nuclear reaction. The moment its coolant started to boil, the reactor was doomed. Positive void coefficient reactor designs were never used in the West because of this inherent instability. The Soviets were more interested in building something cheap, rather than safe.
Even the right isotope of uranium or plutonium, building a bomb is very hard to do. The materials will not blow up in a nuclear explosion by themselves.. There were two supercriticality accidents with a plutonium core during the Manhattan Project. The two halves were accidentally put together close enough where the nuclear reaction became self-sustaining. All that happened was it gave off a bunch of radiation killing the nearest scientist. It did not blow up.
To make it blow up in a nuclear explosion, you have to crush the uranium or plutonium far beyond its normal state. The atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima used a gun. A uranium bullet was fired at another uranium mass, briefly increasing the density beyond that needed for the supercriticality to cause a nuclear explosion. The atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki used explosives to implode a shell of plutonium (this is the method used in modern nuclear weapons). When the shell pieces collided in the center, their density briefly exceeded what was needed for a nuclear explosion. if they don't all meet in the center at the exact same time, then either there's no nuclear explosion, or you get a small nuclear explosion (this is why the yields in North Korea's nuclear tests were so small as to almost not register on monitoring equipment)..Getting all those explosives to go off at the exact same time with the right force in the right direction is really, really hard.
Incidentally, fusion is so much harder to achieve that a fission nuclear bomb is used to create the pressures and temperatures needed to get hydrogen to begin to fuse, causing a fusion explosion. That's where the term "thermonuclear" comes from.
Wait for someone else to develop it, then steal the plans.
But seriously, there's something to be said for waiting if the existing technology doesn't seem to be up to the task. Japan spent several decades working on and pouring billions of dollars into HDTV, determined to be the first country to have HDTV broadcasts and be in control of all the standards. The U.S. didn't do anything. But Japan built their HDTV standard on analog transmission because that was the only technology capable of doing TV broadcasts at the time. Then in the 1990s, the price/performance of digital signal processors (needed to compress/decompress a digital video stream) dropped so quickly that the U.S. was able to develop a digital HDTV standard in just a few years and at far less cost than Japan's effort.
None of the existing fusion reactor designs really instill me with confidence. They don't seem to instill the designers with confidence either as they're always talking about it being decades away. Maybe what we need is to wait for some breakthrough in superconductivity or materials science or quantum mechanics which suddenly makes fusion easy.
My professional experience working with modeling software
Your professional experience working with *climate* modeling software? Or is it just a case of engineering woo on your part?
Ezekiel 23:20