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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.
It sounds like you're saying we don't need to worry about our current CO2 outputs because technology will just come along that solves the problem effortlessly.
If only. Managing CO2 atmospheric levels is a difficult problem whose solution spans geography, cultures, economies, political systems ... it's not just about technology. Leaving it all up to The Invisible Hand of technological progress is wishful thinking that we just can't afford. We need to make plans and set goals.
Scientists and engineers have been trying to get a fusion reactor to work for decades. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a working fusion reactor in our lifetimes. But it's a mistake to depend on a technology that is, however worthy, still not viable yet. Wind, solar, tide, geothermal -- and yes, nuclear fission -- are all proven technologies that are not perfect but are viable now.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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?"
Know how long they have been trying?
We haven't been trying. The funding for nuclear fusion has been absolutely laughable. In all of 2018 the united states has spent less on fusion than Total has spent on their garden variety supercomputer to help speed up the processing of depth sounding for searching for oil.
They have spent less money on fusion research in 2018 than a single highway lane expansion project that we have running locally to add a single lane each way for a 10km stretch of road.
We're not trying. We're not even really giving the illusion of trying.
Hopefully the Europeans can get it to work, but they're already spending the money, so why does the US have to?
Because there's more than one aspect of fusion research, there are multiple proposed ways of achieving it, and letting someone else do something in the off chance that they get it working first go is making a losing bet, if they lose we're no better off, if they win, we'll spend a lot of money paying them for their knowledge.