Slashdot Log In
Europe Plans a New Type of Fusion Facility
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Sep 05, 2005 06:34 PM
from the so-i-rewired-it dept.
from the so-i-rewired-it dept.
SR71Blackbird writes "European physicists have put forward a plan for a facility that uses lasers to produce fusion. From the article: 'The laser would be used to compress and heat a small capsule of deuterium and tritium until the nuclei are hot enough to undergo nuclear fusion and produce helium and neutrons. In a reactor the energy of the neutrons would be used to generate electricity without the emission of greenhouse gases or the generation of long-lived nuclear waste.'"
Related Stories
[+]
International Fusion Reactor Project Moves Forward 265 comments
mjgp2 writes to mention a BBC article about an agreement which will begin construction on the second most expensive scientific collaboration, after the ISS : the world's first large-scale fusion reactor. From the article: "The seven-party consortium, which includes the European Union, the US, Japan, China, Russia and others, agreed last year to build Iter in Cadarache, in the southern French region of Provence ... He said that the participants would aim to ratify their agreement before the end of the year so construction on the facility could start in 2007. Officials said the experimental reactor would take about eight years to build. The EU is to foot about 50% of the cost to build the experimental reactor. If all goes well with the experimental reactor, officials hope to set up a demonstration power plant at Cadarache by 2040. "
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Fusion again? (Score:5, Informative)
It's sufficiently urgent that we can't wait for the fusion fairy to visit us. By all means, we should continue research in fusion. It's an exciting field with a lot of potential. But we don't potential so much as a workable energy policy now. We can't base them prototype research facilities that materialize "by the middle of the next decade."
My $0.02
Re:Fusion again? (Score:5, Funny)
This is great news! Now I can upgrade my imaginary working fusion reactor with a much more efficient model.
Parent
Re:Fusion again? (Score:5, Funny)
The only nearby one I know of is visible half the day in most parts of the world.
Parent
Re:Fusion again? (Score:5, Insightful)
2. 16 MW is nothing. Less than one windmill.
3. 65% - put 100 in get 65 out, never going to do anything except exacerbate our fuel crisis...
Parent
Re:Fusion again? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:65% efficiency! (Score:4, Insightful)
This couldn't be further from the truth. It is a VERY controlled fusion reaction, its controlling mechanisms are magnetism, gravity, and other forces. It is so perfectly balanced that it takes a quantity of fuel and an inital ingnition and will burn for billions of years. How much more controlled can you get?
Parent
Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Yeah right (Score:5, Informative)
Fast Ignition. From TFA:
Kodama and colleagues are now upgrading their laser system in order to approach "breakeven" - the point at which the energy output is equal to the energy needed to sustain the reaction. They then plan to further enhance their system so that it reaches ignition, which happens when the fusion reactions generate enough energy to sustain themselves without the need for further heating. Finally, they hope to build a demonstration fast-ignition facility. Physicists in the US are also studying fast ignition.
Parent
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Yeah right (Score:4, Informative)
There are some big problems with it as a reactor design. Needless to say you have to get the tritium pellet positions just so inside a large laser. Figuring out how to do that with a *lot* of spherical pellets is non-trivial. And that's assuming they can make a self-sustaining system. (Something that I tend to doubt a lot - although I became rather cynical about the whole approach)
My personal feeling is that at least in the US, most of those working on this were former weapons physicists. The physics is basically the same. They got to keep their jobs and work on the same sort of thing by bringing up the fabled "alternative energy" mantra. But I honestly doubt it'll ever pay off as an energy source.
Great way to refine the physics of nuclear weapons though.
Parent
People laughed at idea of heavier than air machine (Score:5, Insightful)
A thirty, fifty, or even seventy-five year delay doesnt mean people should write a technology off!
What makes this different? Well rtfa.
Parent
Re:People laughed at idea of heavier than air mach (Score:5, Funny)
You're right. A glance around my house reveals that *all* my machines are heavier than air. 50 years ago who'd of thought we be at this point today.
Parent
This is inertially-confined fusion (Score:5, Informative)
We've heard about fusion happening just around the corner every month for the last 30 years. What makes this any different?
You're exaggerating. Scientists have always been pretty upfront that creating a confined, sustained fusion reaction is an exceptionally difficult problem. The potential payoff is so large that we continue to study it.
What makes this different is that they are building a large test facility for inertially-confined fusion. Magnetically-confined fusion is the more popular approach. The article doesn't talk about the details very much but one of the primary obstacles to inertially-confined fusion are the presence of hydrodynamic instabilities such as the Richtmyer-Meshkov effect. The lasers are directed at a spherical shell containing a deuterium-tritium pellet and are supposed to cause the shell to implode. Manufacturing imperfections result in the RM instability and the less-than-perfect implosion causes the whole thing to fall apart without the deuterium and tritium fusing together. Does anyone know what the status of research on this is? A decade ago, there were still difficulties getting theoretical models of the RM instability to even agree with experiments, which obviously meant that the process of dealing with the instability seemed pretty far off. Are they still having problems with this?
GMD
Parent
Re:This is inertially-confined fusion (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:This is inertially-confined fusion (Score:5, Informative)
As to the subject of hydrodynamic instabilities, IANAP, but from what I gather of it, this problem is far less serious today with the discoveries (many made here at LLE) of things like frequency tripling the beam (to suppress hot electron production in the plasma), polarization smoothing, distributed phase plate smoothing (google for more info on this stuff or just go to the documents section of the LLE site) with the introduction of larger bandwidth of the laser pulse and the simple improvement of irradiation uniformity on target using more beams (our system is only a ~30Kj laser while the NOVA laser at LLNL was a ~40-60Kj laser, the reason we hold the record for neutrons/pulse is because NOVA was a 10 beam system, we are a 60 beam system. The supression of Rayleigh-Taylor [wikipedia.org] instability in imploding targets is VASTLY reduced on our system because of the increase in uniformity.
Fast ignition is exciting because it potentially allows us to examine ignition and high gain in ICF with a huge decrease in price required to build the device to do it by at least a factor of 10. NIF is going to cost ~$4-5 Billion, a fast ignition device which could theoretically attain comparable fusion conditions (as described in TFA) is around $500 million.
Also building chirped pulse petawatt lasers is great for other sicience too. The light is so unbelievably intense from these things that they can initiate nuclear reactions DIRECTLY (photodisruption of the nucleus etc.)! The OMEGA EP will probably allow scientists here to examine Unruh and Hawking radiation in the laboratory....
To anyone who doesn't think that ICF or MFE methods of attaining fusion breakeven and ignition in the laboratory take a look at some graphs like this [wisc.edu]. The power produced by experimental devices has increased by nearly a factor of a BILLION over the past 3 decades. Slowly but surely we will get there, and when we do, it will change the world in ways I can't even imagine.
Parent
Re:This is inertially-confined fusion (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:This is inertially-confined fusion (Score:5, Informative)
Unruh effect [wikipedia.org]
Parent
Re:Three Words (Score:5, Informative)
Whatever are you talking about? The Z-machine at sandia has only produced millijoule fusion yields, the JET at cullham has produced kilojoules.
"Meanwhile, not a penny for research on an electrically- accelerated boron-deuterium reactor."
There's no money for it because that is a nonequilibrium system which was proven impossible [mit.edu] for generating excess energy.
I can't quite make much sense of the rest of your post.....
Parent
Re:Micro-gravity ? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
AI has a problem of changing definintion (Score:5, Insightful)
Fusion, AI, and Flying cars are always 10 years away...
The problem with AI is that it is constantly being redefined. At one point, a robot that would vaccum your house without you lifting a finger would have been considered an example of AI. Nowdays, hardly anyone is impressed by a Roomba. It used to be that a computer that could beat a human grandmaster at chess would have sufficed as AI. Today, we consider that to be little more than a clever computer algorithm. AI will always be 10+ years away if we keep redefining it to exclude any successes we achieve.
If you are talking about "strong AI", where machines can actually think for themselves and are sentient beings, I don't think you're going to find any reputable scientist claiming that is only 10 years away.
GMD
Parent
Re:AI has a problem of changing definintion (Score:5, Funny)
Well, sure, that's because Roomba looks like the umholy offspring of a frisbee and a cockroach. Everybody knows that a home vacuuming robot is supposed to look like this [vegalleries.com].
Parent
Re:AI has a problem of changing definintion (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:AI has a problem of changing definintion (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because the multi-CPU monster that beat him wasn't really more intelligent than my PC. Computer speeds simply outgrew the human mind with no noticable help from AI researchers. Take the eliza test for example - once you could emulate a human, but it'd take you a decade to answer each question, you have created intelligence. Making it fast enough to happen in real-time is just IT progress.
Kjella
Parent
oil companies days are numbered (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:oil companies days are numbered (Score:5, Informative)
It is this carbon that is later burned. Unlike petroleum diesel which burns carbon sequestered in the ground over millions of years, biodiesel is more of a closed system, recycling the carbon.
Per the Department of Energy's statistics, each year the US consumes roughly 60 billion gallons of petroleum diesel and 120 billion gallons of gasoline. If moving the fleet of predominantly petroleum diesel trucks to biodiesel -- without making major modifications to the truck engines, fuel transportation containers, or fuel distribution methods -- is solving environmental problems, I don't know what is.
Biodiesel can indeed solve environmental problems, especially since it's the most viable way to replace oil/gasoline.
--------------
Now I'm curious. What would you suggest instead as a better environmental solution?
Parent
Prior Art (Score:5, Funny)
Fusion + Laser Beams (Score:5, Funny)
Nuclear Weapons (Score:5, Interesting)
Okay, maybe this is a dumb question - but what *is* the forefront of nuclear weapons technology? They blow up really really big and eradicate cities, we've already got that - are they just trying to get a few percentage points of efficiency, or are there actually breakthroughs they're attempting to pull off?
(I'm avoiding the entire flamefest subject of "nuclear weapons evil lol", I'm just curious what there is in nuclear weapons that's worth 85% of two doubtless insanely expensive facilities.)
Re:Nuclear Weapons (Score:3, Insightful)
Some of the lightest warheads are actually pretty fragile and it's an open question if they'll fizzle or go boom. You can simulate the degradation of materials and take a guess.
Some of the warheads are dial-a-yield too. Maybe you could make interesting focused explosions for underground hits. You want your opponents to get the sense that there
Re:Nuclear Weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
-xest
Parent
Re:Nuclear Weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
The usual name for this is (Score:5, Interesting)
And to everyone who has/will ask 'when will these ever get us energy? We've been hearing about fusion for years!'. The new Tokamak being built in France right now is the first one that physicists expect to reach break even point. No other reactors were ever expected to generate more energy than they consumed. They were all for research purposes, to get them to the point they are at now. Probably the same for this new inertial confinement one in Europe.
Re:The usual name for this is (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Lasers, eh? (Score:5, Funny)
The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:5, Informative)
> even IF you get to breakeven and beyond is that
> the energy released has a very substantial
> neutron component.
Which you soak up with lithium, generating more tritium.
>
> isotopes which in most cases, are actually far
> "hotter" than the low-level nuclear waste from
> fission power plants.
Hotter, and therefor shorter lived.
Parent
Re:The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure, if you ignore the fact that it's about 16 times harder to even initiate the reaction, *and* the fact that since most of the energy comes off the reaction as a 15 MeV proton, the Bremsstrahlung losses absolutely kill you.
The more you look into magnetic confinement fusion, the more it seems that there's almost some sort of cosmic conspiracy to prevent us from using it as a power generation scheme. Go with neutronic fusion to avoid losing all your produced power to collisions with electrons in the plasma, and you run up against materials limitations. Try to avoid that problem, and you suddenly have a reaction that is *grotesquely* less efficient, to the point where it's probably not *possible* to even *break even*. To reduce those losses, you need to operate at even *higher* temperatures that it takes just to initiate the reaction, but when you do that, you lower your power density relative to D-T by a similar proportion and make containment that much harder.
Seriously, we do not have the time to keep generating power by fossil fuels until we get fusion to work, because that might never happen, the problems are that significant. Even that big new testbed reactor that's going up in France won't really get us close, because it's not dealing with the materials issue; over the lifetime of a fusion reactor, *every single atom* in the containment vessel will be struck by neutrons hundreds or even thousands of times, and we don't know how to build materials that can withstand that sort of irradiation without swelling, distorting, cracking, and a variety of other things you don't want to see in a nuclear containment vessel.
On the other hand, we know how to make *fission* work, and we should switch to that *now*. By the time we start making a dent in the fissionable fuels available to us, we should know how to build large-scale structures in orbit, and can just switch to solar collection satellites. I sincerely doubt if we'll ever even use fusion for power generation; by the time we ever figure out how to do it, it's likely there will be superior options available to us.
Parent
Re:The problem with D-T fusion is.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
This superficially sounds like.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Time Until Break-Even (Score:5, Funny)
With the latest research and technology, controllable fusion is now only always twenty-nine years away. We're making progress.
It reminds me of downloading a file, where the time to completion stays constant as the file is downloaded because the download speed keeps dropping. Either the file is finally completely downloaded at some point or the system hangs. No matter what it always takes far, far longer than it should have.
more info in the headlines please. (Score:5, Informative)
Supposedly, they're even hoping (as the name suggests) to cause ignition -- where the process actually becomes self-sustaining (so you'll only need the containment lasers). Even more likely to reach break-even then.
The other somewhat newsworthy aspect about this unit is that it will be a civilian facility, not a weapons facility with a few weeks a year allowed for civilian research (which is, apparently, the case for many of the other fusion units).
I was originally gonna skip reading TFA, then I figured... Given how (in)accurate slashdot headlines are, I've got to presume that there's something non-boring about this 'new' plan.
Free Fusion (Score:3, Interesting)
Its called The sun.
Why not work on technologies that use what we got now, instead of wasting it on research that most scientist agree will never realize even a 1:1 power ratio?
Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors? (Score:4, Interesting)
No one is going to give people tritium for plane fuel or tractor fuel.
So how do we use the new clean energy source for portable systems. Burning hydrogen cracked from water comes to mind, but is this really feasible? Is hydrogen energy dense enough to be a good fuel for a comercial airliner? For anything?
Are there other denser fuels that we could make with a rich energy source that would be convenient and portable?
And what other uses besides fuel are we using Oil for? Like what percentage of oil goes for lubricants, chemicals?
I really would like to see a great energy solution that makes all nations self sufficient. It would be a huge step towards reducing violence. But how does it work for the modern world and all its complicated pieces and processes.
Re:Cars, Planes, Ships, Tractors? (Score:4, Interesting)
Another approach is to electrolyse the CO2 into carbon and oxygen, then react this with water to produce oil. However, that technology was developed for producing oil from coal, and there is plenty of coal around, so unless fusion power is surprisingly cheap, we'll probably just use coal.
Converting methane into propane and butane is already done on a large scale, and in some countries these gases are already commonly used as car fuels (LPG in australia).
Finally, if fusion electricity is cheap enough, we can simply grow very dense crops under electric lighting and convert the resulting bio-oils to biodiesel.
Parent
Yurop ? (Score:5, Funny)
Bah - I laugh at these foreign scientists. Just wait until the first wave of creationists start graduating from our high schools. Then we'll show them what scientific advancement is all aboout.
The Public and Nuclear Fusion? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Continuous? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Europe? (Score:4, Informative)
If Siberia has been moved from Asia to Europe, I must have missed it. Siberia is bounded on the west by the Urals, and the Urals mark the boundary between Europe and Asia. It's a pretty arbitrary boundary, but it is well accepted.
Parent