New Wave of Fusion and Robot Innovation at MIT 90
An anonymous reader writes "Popular Mechanics has been getting some great access inside the labs at MIT all week, and they've gotten some interesting looks at developing technologies. Robot-assisted rehab with gaming-style controllers comes out of the biomechanics lab, blind and crash-proof UAV testing with F/X cameras is being done at the aerospace controls lab, and work on electric scooters with super-cheap assembly is proceeding at the Media Lab. Perhaps most exciting is a fight for funding while the holy grail of clean fusion power in reach at the plasma center. The article on fusion predicts, "We'd see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century."
Re:fusion energy (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't know if you can say "always will be" 30 years in the future, but I'll admit it seems that way. I remember the same stories back in the 70's, and yes, we were supposed to be building our first commercial fusion plants right about now.
I have to wonder if other approaches, or a look at possibly some new ones wouldn't be a better idea. It seems that the constant with that 30 years is that it always involves "a bigger tokamak than we have now."
Re:I'll believe it when.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:20 years... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you can _make_ all tha hydrogen without emitting any CO2, that would be nice, because it means that you've found an energy source that doesn't emit any CO2.
However, if you have such an energy source, what keeps you from directly or indirectly drawing CO2 out of the atmosphere and produce a hydrocarbon fuel instead of hydrogen ? You'd still have zero net CO2 emissions and would need far fewer changes to the existing infrastructure.
Hydrogen needs a carrier (Score:5, Insightful)
To make hydrogen practical requires a carrier. There has been some experimentation with metal carriers, but by far the most efficient hydrogen carrier, packing in far more hydrogen per unit volume than even liquid H2, is carbon. Amazingly, someone/something long ago put huge deposits of carbon-encapsulated hydrogen in giant underground reservoirs for us to use.
The only problem is, the carbon carrier is *supposed* to be recycled, and we haven't bothered doing that, and instead have just dumped all the hydrogen stripped carbon into the atmosphere as CO2, in quantities large enough to alter the atmospheric CO2 levels to a worrisome extent. As soon as we start recycling the carbon like we're supposed to, hydrogen cars will take off. In fact, the infrastructure is already built!
Re:Fusion power, always 20 years into the future (Score:2, Insightful)
True, but the 'often' in this sentence refers to a select sample, which is the sample of economically viable enterprises. If tokomak fusion is economically viable, it is likely to become more cost-efficient over time. However, if the concept is borderline, it could easily get more expensive over time, as has happened for fission reactors. The physics and engineering of fission are well-understood but costs are not coming down for a wide range of reasons. Plasma fusion on the other hand, requires some difficult physics problems to be solved before we even can build a pilot plant to begin to mature the engineering.
A massive problem for fission reactors is decommissioning costs - what to do with a million tonnes of radioactive reactor? The point that fusion protagonists often overlook is that fusion reactors will face a similar problem decommissioning. In both cases fast neutrons create all sorts of difficult and radioactive materials in and around the core that will be hugely difficult to dispose of. If it were my money, I'd invest in solving the problems with decommissioning and disposal of by-products from fission. But that would not be nearly as cool and sexy as trying to find a brand new way to make the same mistakes.
Re:20 years... (Score:2, Insightful)
WAIT! Quick, environmentalists, rationalize how it's not good enough!