New 'Stellarator' Design for Fusion Reactors 171
eldavojohn writes "The holy grail of fusion reactors has always seemed 'just a few years off' for many decades. But a recent design enhancement termed a 'Stellarator' may change all that. The point at which a fusion reactor crashes is when particles begin escaping due to disruptions in the plasma. A NYU team has discovered that coiling specific wires to form a magnetic field may contain the plasma. This may be a a viable way to create a plasma body with axial symmetry, and a far better chance of remaining stable. Like other forms of containment this does require energy itself, but could bring us closer to a stable fusion reactor. It may not be cold fusion or 'table top' fusion but it certainly is a step forward. The paper is up for peer review in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences."
Princeton 1951 called... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:input-output (Score:4, Insightful)
Picture Chinese handcuffs
Re:If they used... (Score:1, Insightful)
We already can get ALL the energy we need from renewable sources - ITER and its ilk are just money pits, and guess who pays for this bullshit? The PUBLIC.
It's always "It'll be ready in 50 years' time". i.e. in 50 years' time, they'll STILL be saying "It'll be ready in 50 years' time".
Stellarators have been around as an idea for years (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellarator [wikipedia.org]
Anyway, basically what I know about this is that stellarator designs avoids lots of the problems that are present in Tokamak - namely, degrading of the reaction chamber due to escaped neutrons. A fusion reactor using stellarator instead of Tokamak would, in effect, last forever since the material does not become radioactive.
Especially the Germans have been researching this stuff a lot, however, most of the big money is currently in Tokamak designs, including ITER. Which is kinda a shame - since we're not in the Manhattan Project-type "if you have 3 designs and think one of them might work, build all three, here's the money"-situation..so these nice ideas may only be developed further if Tokamak fails to become viable..
Re:Why reinvent the wheel? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:input-output (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, at a fundamental physical level, that's untrue. The only thing that costs energy is erasure of information.
From the chasing your own tail dept. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If they used... (Score:5, Insightful)
Researchers are not involved in corner cases that might never happen. Nor are they worried about reliability yet (in the sense of preventing another Chernobyl, as opposed to the sense of very little downtime). They are just trying to get the blamed thing to produce enough energy to sustain itself, with some left over. (Although, if you're feeling pessimistic enough, you might call that a corner case that might never happen!)
I agree that we need to get a lot of funding to fusion research, but throwing money at the problem won't necessarily solve it. It is a very hard problem. Furthermore, we'd need not just one crazy (I presume you refer to the office of the President), but a whole bunch of crazies (half of Congress), because Congress makes the budget.
Re:If they used... (Score:3, Insightful)
That might be so, but it certainly isn't economical, otherwise we would already have all our energy from renewable sources. Furthermore, very few renewable sources of energy shows any sign of promise in the short term, although solar certainly seems interesting once someone comes up with a "breakthrough". Oh, and we could build more dams, they can certainly be profitable, but often takes a huge toll on mother nature.
Actually, centralized makes a lot of economic sense. There is only one way of generating power that is at least potentially profitable at a small scale, and that is solar cells. But even here, you get economic benefits by simply aggregating them in a small area, which simplifies maintenance and infrastructure. Nuclear just doesn't scale down at all, and everything else, is simply more efficient at a larger scale, whether it's wind-turbines, dams, wave-turbines, geothermal, waste energy from industry, burning of garbage or methane from a landfill, or even gas, diesel, or coal. If you don't believe me, try putting up a small propeller in your backyard, and compare the $/watt of this to a typical 100 meter wind turbine, or to a huge turbine farm with 100 meter turbines. Or compare the $/watt of a small waterwheel to the Hoover Dam. Or compare the efficiency of a diesel-generator you can afford, to one that you can only afford to rent, or to one that is able to power a whole city. These things might scale down, but certainly not in an economical way.
This is certainly a valid criticism for fusion power research. But I hope you don't seriously believe that just because you can't have it today, we should stop researching it. The benefits of such a technology would be incredible, and the money we spend on it is not that much. Still, one can debate whether pouring money into tokamak research is justified given its track record so far, This, however, is not a tokamak, and as such is a potential theoretical breakthrough, even if it might be an unlikely one (I'm not qualified to judge that).
Re:somewhere over the rainbow (Score:1, Insightful)
Even commercial tokamaks, which have quite a head start over the stellarator, are projected to be pretty far off. If ITER's construction and initial operation is wildly successful, it won't be fully operational for 20 years, and it is expected that there will be one or two more iterations (depending on who you ask) before the first commercial tokomak is designed.
Another confounding factor in correctly estimating a date for commercial fusion power is that the funding for such projects has been somewhat irregular, and any estimate of how long it will take to develop such a reactor is, in effect, also an estimate of how much various governments will be willing to spend on that research.
The long and the short of it is that I think this characterization of fusion researchers as grossly over-promising is unfair, and untrue. Making estimates of any technologically difficult project is hard.