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International Fusion Reactor Project Moves Forward
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu May 25, 2006 11:37 AM
from the good-political-news-for-once dept.
from the good-political-news-for-once dept.
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. "
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SeaDour writes, "China claims to have carried out a successful test of its experimental thermonuclear fusion reactor. But what exactly made this test 'successful' is not clear. From the article: 'Xinhua cited the scientists as saying that deuterium and tritium atoms had been fused together at a temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius for nearly three seconds. The report did not specify whether the device... had succeeded at producing more energy than it consumed, the main obstacle to making fusion commercially viable.'" China is a participant in the 10-nation ITER project to build a fusion reactor in the south of France by 2015. The article quotes the research head of ITER as saying, "It was important for China to show that it is part of the club. Here are English language versions of the Chinese news release: announcement, background.
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Knocked down by 6 years (Score:3, Funny)
Guess the traditional "40 years away" is now 36 years?
Re:Knocked down by 6 years (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Knocked down by 6 years (Score:2)
Re:Knocked down by 6 years (Score:3, Funny)
We are gnats on an elephant (Score:4, Insightful)
It's amazing to me that we should be able to probe the laws of the universe with our limited energy reserves and stunted perspective.
Will we really be able to create the conditions that led to the creation of the universe in an Earth-based laboratory?
It's really fucking amazing.
Re:We are gnats on an elephant (Score:4, Insightful)
Congratulations on what is easily the most apt user ID on
Minor quibble though - I wouldn't call this "creating the conditions that led to the creation of the universe". Fusion =! the big bang - this is more like recreating a dwarf star (one which can burn deuterium, but not elemental hydrogen).
Though it's still obviously a big deal, from a science/engineering/environmental perspective.
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transporting electricity (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:transporting electricity (Score:2)
Re:transporting electricity (Score:2, Informative)
Transmission losses represent a certain percentage of transmission. All they do is lower the efficiency. Use 2 cables in parallel instead of 1 and you halve the power lost through heat.
Fusion doesn't look like it's gonna be cheap anyway so it's just a balance between transmission costs and the costs associated with citing these facilities closer to their customers
Re:transporting electricity (Score:2)
Re:transporting electricity (Score:4, Informative)
I think you could take care of inductive and capacitive losses by going to DC. If you really could use superconductors for the entire distribution network, then in theory, you'd eliminate the need for high-voltage AC transmission to avoid I^2*R losses, followed by step-down transformers to provide safer low-voltage levels in customers' homes. Funny -- as I recall, didn't Thomas Edison propose DC in the first place?
Parent
Re:transporting electricity (Score:2)
Although, I think that you would want to continue to use high-voltage low-current in these lines because there's a transition current where the material stops being superconductive.
Re:transporting electricity (Score:4, Informative)
Fields inside the conductor are not the issue. The inductive and capacitive effects occur when two conductors, super or not, are near each other, as they would be if they were part of an AC transmission-line network.
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Re:transporting electricity (Score:2)
Re:transporting electricity (Score:3, Interesting)
certain situations where HVDC is advantageous and economical to use over
normal AC distribution.
Also, high quality switching power supplies can convert DC to DC analogous
to how a transformer converts AC to AC with similar efficiencies. As the
price of copper increases, transformers will actually cost more to make
and we may start seeing AC distribution replaced by DC distribution.
If that happens, the real question is whether or not the la
Re:transporting electricity (Score:3, Informative)
This is, in fact, what is done for long-haul lines. The disadvantage if that you need to convert at either end, but as the transmission line length increases, there comes a point where it's more cost-effective to do that than it is to run AC and lose efficiency charging and discharging a big capacitor 60 times a second. And thyristors have gotten a lot cheaper. You also avoid corona discharge, dielectric losses, and so forth.
Re:transporting electricity (Score:5, Informative)
Physics tells us that the energy lost from transmitting electricity (as heat) is RI^2, and power is IV (I = Current, V = Voltage, R = Resistance). So to send lots of power without much heating, you use high voltages and low current. This is whats done currently, to the point where the wires can't really take much more voltage (well, not cheaply anyway).
There's only one proposed solution I'm aware of, which is using high temperature superconductors as wires. These have very low resistance (in some cases theoretically 0) so reduce the energy lost by ohmic heating (the RI^2 thing). Plus they can conduct around 10* the voltage of current wires. The only problem is there still very difficult to make at all, let alone into wires, having only been discovered in 1986. The link below has some more info,
http://ec.europa.eu/energy/electricity/publicatioParent
Re:transporting electricity (Score:5, Informative)
It's not theoretically 0, it's really actually 0. It's a macroscopic manifestation of a quantum-level effect. In high-temperature superconductors, there is a finite resistance, but in 'classical' superconductors, it's really zero: current flows with no applied voltage.
The problem with superconductors as a transmission line isn't so much the temperature (although that is a problem). It's not even the materials properties (high-temperature superconductors are basically ceramics. They're brittle and not very strong, which means they aren't very useful as wires). It's the fact that, in addition to a critical temperature Tc above which they don't superconduct, superconductors also have a critical magnetic field and a critical current density. Exceed any of those, and they stop being superconductors, which can lead to some quite catastrophic failures. High-temperature superconductors have much higher critical field strengths than low-temperature ones, and higher critical current densities, but you can't just run all the current you want through them and expect them to not blow up/melt/spontaneously disassemble.
Parent
Re:transporting electricity (Score:5, Informative)
Only for DC current. AC current always has a finite resistive component to it.
Regarding critical current, one could effectively run up a huge potential (eg millions of volts) and send a trickling DC supercurrent to the receiving station. Of course this brings with it all sorts of high voltage problems beyond the typical substations have dealing with high-tension wires. One being the much larger potentials, the other being efficiently converting DC to DC (as opposed to transforming the AC, as traditional power stations do).
The other thing mentioned is very true, regarding catastrophic failure of the lines. I work with superconducting magnets, where to pack a huge magnetic field, you need tiny wires to get enough wrappings in a small space. So we're basically putting 70+ amps through a 22 gauge wire. That's all fine and dandy when the magnet is immersed in liquid helium at 4K, but if you do something dumb, like change the magnet current too quickly or go past the critical current, you can cause part of the magnet to go normal (as opposed to superconducting), in which case that 70A is going to dissipate LOTS of heat, causing more parts of the magnet to go normal, and ultimately cause the whole magnet to go normal, dissipating the induction energy stored in the magnet as heat, which can boil the liquid helium vigourously, build up pressures, damage the magnet and electronics, etc. Very dangerous. Now imagine a similar scenario but in some transission wires at a potential of millions of volts running through a forest or a neighborhood.
Parent
Re:transporting electricity (Score:4, Insightful)
Superconductive materials transmit electricity without resistance. A 10 meter long superconductive cable will have the same losses in transmission as a 10 kilometer one. I am unsure whether this is because the resistance is zero, or so close as makes no difference, but the upshot is vastly improved effeciency for any proccess that is ineffecient due to electrical losses.
The problem is that most superconductive materials only remain superconductive if they're very very cold. Unless you fancy equipping your transmission lines with cryogenic plants, you can't use them to carry power. There has been a lot of work on "high temperature" superconductors ("high" in this case can mean what we'd consider ambient temperature), but AFAIK we don't have a solution yet.
Ironically much of the research into these materials is tied into magnetic confinement for fusion research - if you're using a magnetic field to confine the fusion plant's plasma, then you'll get much better results with superconductive coils than you would with normal materials (though under the circumstances, we might be able to get away with low temperature superconductors, since the energy lost to running the cryo plant is offset by the energy saved from higher magnetic field effeciency).
Parent
Re:transporting electricity (Score:2)
6 words: dump trucks full of car batteries
That is all.
Re:transporting electricity (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:transporting electricity (Score:3, Interesting)
Using high-voltage AC gets the loss due to transmission down to VERY LITTLE. Like, single-digit percentage points in total transmission loss. High-tension lines in the us are ~700V, while in other places they are commonly something like twice that. Residental power in the US is ~220 at the pole, brought into the house that way, and split into ~110VAC circuits (except for the dryer and maybe electric stove - these pull from both sides for the 220V.)
Anyway all that babbling is prelude to a question: In th
Re:transporting electricity (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:transporting electricity (Score:3, Informative)
Actually... even in residential areas (US and Canada), the line voltage on overhead transmission wires is typically 13800 volts, and long distance power transmission is done at 45000 volts and higher, up to 500 kV for really high power, long distance lines.
Hey Hydro-Quebec uses 735 kV transmission lines [tdworld.com]. They made a nice buzzing sound when you walk under them... :-)
Re:transporting electricity (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:transporting electricity (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless governments step in and mandate, oh say, solar panels on all government buildings. Then economies of scale will kick in and solar will be affordabl
It will be before 2040 (Score:5, Interesting)
More work needs to be done on the spherical Tokamaks such as START and MAST [fusion.org.uk]. Which are showing increasingly promising results. I know from an inside source that more attention is being given to the spherical Tokamak. Especially now that in nearly all the participating countries there is at least a single toroidal tokamak.
From TFA:
"However, environmental groups have criticised the project, saying there was no guarantee that the billions of euros would result in a commercially viable energy source."
This baffles me, just whose side are the environmentalists on again? It doesn't matter that there is no gaurantee. The likelyhood of it being a comercially viable energy source is very high.
Also, bear in mind that everybody knows that fusion will be "along in 20 years" and has been this way for the past 60. However, most countries in the world are producing larger plasma departments at universities and there is a much greater influx of fusion scientists. Many hands make light work. And it has already been mentioned that there are many tokamaks in the world, Russia, China, Japan and America have multiple. The UK has the current largest, Jet, and it also has the spherical tokamaks as stated.
Peace out, baby.
Re:It will be before 2040 (Score:2)
"However, environmental groups have criticised the project, saying there was no guarantee that the billions of euros would result in a commercially viable energy source."
This baffles me, just whose side are the environmentalists on again? It doesn't matter that there is no gaurantee. The likelyhood of it being a comercially viable energy source is very high."
They're pointing out the obvious elephant in the room, that they're spending $10 billion to scale up a reactor design that is guaranteed NOT
Holy racial stereotypes, batman (Score:2)
Re:It will be before 2040 (Score:4, Insightful)
"However, environmental groups have criticised the project, saying there was no guarantee that the billions of euros would result in a commercially viable energy source."
This baffles me, just whose side are the environmentalists on again? It doesn't matter that there is no gaurantee. The likelyhood of it being a comercially viable energy source is very high
I think their point is if 10 Billion Euros were spent on developing solar, wind, and other renewable energies, there would be a much quicker and surer return on investment.
On the other hand, the potential for Fusion is imense. If Fusion has the same benefits as it did in Simcity 2000, after 2050, we won't use anything else.
Parent
Re:It will be before 2040 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It will be before 2040 (Score:4, Interesting)
No, I don't think it is, and I don't think anyone can say that with any certainty.
I tend to class problems in three general ways:
1. Theoretical problems: We're not sure if this is even *possible*. e.g. FTL travel
2. Materials problems: We think this is possible, but we don't know what to build it out of. e.g. a space elevator.
3. Engineering problems: We know this can work, we know how to make it, we just have to work out the nuts and bolts. e.g. The Manhattan project.
Depending on the particular scheme in mind, commercial fusion is all three.
1. There are a wide variety of fusion schemes (the various aneutronic cycles, all cycles in thermal non-equilibrium), that are simply theoretically impossible [harvard.edu] to generate net energy from. Even plain old D-T fusion is *theoretically* hard; sure, we know it's possible, but getting it to proceed at a rate sufficient for useful net energy extraction might just be intractable.
2. What do you build the reactor vessel out of? You need something that can survive the 300-500 displacements *per atom* that it will experience from neutron collisions over the lifetime of the reactor. No such material is known; ITER will generate only one hundredth of that sort of neutron flux, so it can't even adequately explore the issue. There's another test facility intended to do that, but it's doesn't even exist on blueprints yet. Again, proper materials just might not exist, so you might have to replace the reactor vessel inner surface every few years, which dramatically increases the costs of the scheme and makes it much less viable commercially.
3. Everything else, and there's a lot of it, sits here. And there are some pretty big engineering problems as well, but yeah, those aren't show-stoppers. How do you get the energy out? How do you turn a flood of 14 MeV neutrons into electricity?
Parent
Re:It will be before 2040 (Score:4, Interesting)
>How do you get the energy out? How do you turn a flood of 14 MeV neutrons into electricity?
What happened to the idea of coating the walls with a "waterfall" of liquid lithium? It heats up (energy extraction), absorbs neutrons (sparing the vanadium walls and deferring or eliminating the need to anneal in place), and when it absorbs the neutrons it breeds tritium that can be used for reactor fuel. Is it too high a vapor pressure or something?
Parent
Why not? (Score:4, Funny)
Hmm, let's see.. I'm 28 now, 34 more years means... yep, I'll probably have lived a full life by then. Sure, go ahead, build your thingy, you kids knock yourelves out. :-D
By 2040 ? (Score:5, Funny)
Need help from real Pro-physicists. (Score:2)
Why not accellerate the plasma to a speed that helps this out by building the tokamak into something like a particle accellerator/collider ? Build two rings just like a collider but instead use plasma.
It would definitely overcome repulsion by atoms.
In my day... (Score:3, Funny)
I dont' get it... (Score:2)
Re:I dont' get it... (Score:3, Informative)
ITER is not the demonstration power plant. ITER is an experimental research fusion reactor that (hopefully) will lead the way to building real fusion power plants.
So eight years to build ITER, then a couple of decades of research, running tests, tweaking stuff to find out what works out the best. Then when that is done, the demonstration power plant can be start to be built using the knowledge learned by the couple of decades of tinkering with ITER. And by the time the demonstration reactor is done, we are
Imagine the possibilities (Score:2)
US should sponser an He Prize (Score:4, Interesting)
I bet there are a couple hundred smart engineers/physicists out there that would make this happen.
In France... (Score:3, Funny)
Godspeed!
Thorium reactors (Score:3)
Solar Power Funding (Score:3, Interesting)
How does government funding for photovoltaics compare to funding for Fusion research? Does anyone have the figures? I've never heard of any grand government push to make dirt cheap 50% efficient solar cells. Imagine if you could buy a 1m square 50% efficient solar cell for $10. That sort of technology could change the balance of power in the world.
Re:10 Billion Dollars? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Manhattan Project (Score:2, Interesting)
Thats what happens when politicians are un-educated rubes."
That's really funny coming from a poster that thinks progress in fusion research is directly proportional to how much money is thrown at it.
I bet you also subscribe to the "if only we spent the space program money on solving poverty/homelessness/starving people in Africa!" line of thought.
Re:Manhattan Project (Score:5, Insightful)
I am interested in your ideas and would like to subscribe to your brochure.
Please explain more fully how you get "progress increases with economic resources thrown at it" from "the complexity of integrated circuits, with respect to minimum component cost, doubles every 24 months".
Perhaps you didn't mean "derivative", but there's no way to make sense of that statement that I can see.
You are especially being disingenuous by using Moore's law as your implied cost/benefit curve, as nothing other than electronic circuits has experienced an exponential curve for so many decades. You have to consider the cost/benefits when doling out money. Fusion is on anything but an exponential curve; in fact it's damn near on a constant curve, making almost zero progress over time, as evidenced by how it's been "40-50 years in the future" for 40-50 years now.
A weakened version of your claim, that all else being equal more dollars will progress more than less dollars, is trivially true but useless, because that progress could very well be very minimal even for a gigantic investment, and perhaps ironically given your argument, fusion is almost certainly the canonical example of that case.
Parent
Re:Why not the US? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Why not the US? (Score:3, Funny)