Construction of French Fusion Reactor Underway 389
GarryFre writes "It has been said that fusion is 50 years away for quite a few decades, but now work has actually been started. Digging has begun in the south of France on the planned site for France's first fusion reactor. A tokomak is a torus shaped magnetic confinement device which is necessary to withstand the temperatures associated with fusion that are so high, solid materials can't hold them. As such, the building represents the future core of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.) It will be interesting to see if it takes 50 years to build it."
The sad thing is that (Score:5, Interesting)
As an American.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm looking at France and saying, hmm...
-Leading in important technology to answer the world's problems
-Pushing for freedom while criticizing the US on its record
-Building strong military (aircraft carriers, etc)
-French President pushing US President to avoid Socialism
It's starting to look like there's a new Leader of the Free World.
Mr. Sarkozy, I think you're well on your way to earning it.
Polywell (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Quote (Score:2, Interesting)
Perhaps. As with AI, they could be wildly off when it comes to the feasibility of what seems within reach even to leading experts.
Using "50 years away" isn't about giving an somewhat accurate estimate and certainly not a definitive timescale. When you hear this kind of phrase*, read "we don't even know what's involved in building that" or to businessmen "we're nowhere near talking about cost estimates for an actual system". Note the skepticism about our readiness for just this limited technology demonstration. The real deal, where fusion could replace (oil or whatever we're using in 30-50 years) is decades away, give or take n decades due to unforeseen obstacles or unexpected breakthroughs.
* or any long-term estimate, adjusted for time scale of technology, e.g. in the case of software perhaps 5 years.
Re:As an American.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Aircraft carrier. They have one and it's a pretty crappy one too, they built it too short for flight ops, something they learned when they tried to conduct flight ops on it, it has a balky reactor, it breaks propellers, etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_de_Gaulle_(R_91)#Trials_and_technical_problems [wikipedia.org]
ITER as others have pointed out, is not a French reactor, it's a reactor being built in France by international partners
France is also on the leading edge of stifling religious freedom among the Islamic community, to hell with a controversy with a multi-use building, they are banning Islamic clothing
Re:Oh well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Concrete fails at a few thousand degrees, Steel at only a couple thousand. You don't have to get all that much hotter than a conventional oven is capable of to melt/destabilize pretty much everything.
Fusion temperatures are quite a bit higher.
Re:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole point of ITER was to "demonstrate" that the science is settled. Apparently "the science" is fully settled. Nevertheless they've made several serious design flaws, and are seriously behind schedule (and below expected results for what they've done too). Nevertheless, they're charging ahead, and all smart people hope they succeed.
Btw, there are fusion reactors in most large hospitals, for neutron production. They're called "fusors" and they're basically a rolled up television display. Additionally these (very simple) devices are used for scientific research in most universities. They're very reliable, but have Q levels around 0.1 up to 0.3 for professionally constructed ones.
Imho, I think the American research plan is smarter than the European one. At the very least for the simple fact that Europe is throwing all their eggs in the same (proven to be somewhat unreliable) basket. America may be underfunding fusion research, absolutely, but at least America's underfunding 5 different attempts (including steam-based fusion [nextbigfuture.com], my favorite). But there are others, and there are even hybrid machines (meant to do research and to produce fusion, e.g. Z-pinch, or the Z-machine). Also there are several American tokamaks, just in case that's the solution after all.
The tokamak approach banks on pushing back to all forces that act on a fusing plasma, and it's like placing 2000000 small propellors on the ground to control a raging thunderstorm. I'm not saying it will never work, but I'll be utterly amazed. There are other approaches. Hydrogen bombs, on the plus side, they're proven to be effective. On the downside ... well ask some pacific ex-islands ... they know. Then there's inertial confinement fusion, where you generate a number of (relatively) small forces that converge on the same point. For a short time, huge forces will act on this small point, generating fusion. Steam-based fusion is an example, but so is laser fusion, and essentially Z-pinch too. There's also the polywell, an evolution of the only type of fusion rector in commercial use, the fusor, which is a fusor with a magnetic field to replace the fusor grids (google "should google go nuclear ?"). There's even a few attempts that involve principles that boil down to shooting high pressure gas in what's essentially a funnel, resulting in huge pressures just behind the end of the funnel. And I don't really understand how the Z-pinch is supposed to work.
Re:Oh well... (Score:3, Interesting)
No known material can withstand the temperatures in a LH/LOX rocket engine either. Rockets work by actively cooling the walls - unfortunately, if you use that method for fusion containment the fusion goes out!
Re:Oh well... (Score:1, Interesting)
In France, where nuclear fuel is recycled, the lifetime total nuclear waste for a family of four fits in a single coffee cup.
There is one Japanese company that casts steel nuclear containment vessels that every nuclear power plant project relies on. New traditional nuclear power plants can't come online fast enough because of that bottleneck so other forms of energy are going to be used.
Nuclear batteries from Hyperion Power Generation which licensed the technology from Los Alamos National Laboratory have a better chance of coming online faster.
The 1,000-megawatt Blythe solar power cleared by California state regulators with span 7,000 acres.
What Mr. Peanut wanted to do doesn't really matter. The point is the Luddite didn't accomplish anything even after an oil crisis (see the aforementioned retards in Congress).
Already done (Score:1, Interesting)
The first REAL fusion reactor is in a series of tests right in in Livermore, CA. Here's the link to their lastest progress,
https://lasers.llnl.gov/ [llnl.gov]
They expect to have a reaction that gives off many times more energy than it takes to produce THIS YEAR!!!
Re:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not that the US has a different strategy. There is one giant world strategy. The US and japan will compete for the next reactor, because japan and france competed for this one, and france won. There are only so many nuclear physics researchers in the world and they swarm around whatever the best thing available is.
Re:probably not first post anymore (Score:3, Interesting)
Quite. ITER follows in the steps of the Joint European Torus (JET), and other research reactor. It is not aimed at achieve power plant break even (that is slated for the followon project, DEMO) nor economical breakeven (that would come after DEMO).
Or more likely, economical break-even fusion will come in some other form. There is a large sub-population of fusion researchers that don't expect tokomak fusion to ever be economically viable (particularly without a hybrid fusion-fission fuel cycle). However, almost all fusion researchers agree that it is still important to develop, possibly because it is the only one we know will actually work (achieve Q>1, AKA generate more heat-energy than is put in).
In my opinion, economical fusion will require a completely new design - particularly a non-steady-state design. Focus fusion is one example of a non-steady state design. However, it is currently unclear how much potential it has for economic power generation.
Tritium same problem as Teller's Classical Super (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, Teller thought for the longest time you could make an H-bomb this way, kind of like making a big high-explosive bomb by putting some dynamite next to a bunch of fertilizer or some such thing. It was known as the Classical Super (bomb). One of the contributions of the early generation computers was showing that the Classical Super would never work, that is, unless you fortified it with gobs of tritium, making it completely impractical. That you could get tritium to fuse with deuterium had already been demonstrated, by boosted A-bombs in the US, by the Layer Cake, known as Sakharaov's First Idea in Russia, but this was hardly what people had in mind for a Super bomb.
The details of what both the US, Russia, and maybe Britain, France, and China got to work as a staged nuclear bomb are somewhat sketchy, and whether this is truly a fusion bomb or a monster fusion-boosted fission bomb is a matter of controversy, but the actual H-bomb is believed to be out-of-the box thinking from the Classical Super.
Some engineering intuition tells me the Tokamak is the Classical Super of controlled fusion -- something that will work if you throw enough tritium at it, but the tritium requirement making the Tokamak impractical -- think breeding time and EROEI -- much as the Classical Super was ultimately impractical as a bomb.
Re:Le Daily News - 9/15/2060 (Score:3, Interesting)
So how do fusion bombs work? Did they lie to us and they are actually fission?
[Strange that you got modded up and I didn't, but anyway...]
Nobody "lied." As a matter of fact, fusion bombs do have a fission trigger that provides for a rapid compression of the deuterium and tritium, leading to fusion. The difference is that there's a whole lot more deuterium and tritium present in a fusion bomb than there is at any moment inside a fusion reactor.
Re:As an American.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Their military is, ah, not very large by any standard,
Uh... if Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] is anything to go by, France has almost as many active armed forces per capita as the US (7.3 vs 7.9), and is the largest of the "allied" forces. So no, by many standards they're actually quite a large military.
Re:Oh well... (Score:3, Interesting)
Here is something that clears up who the moron is:
Dear Mr. Fialka:
I enjoyed your story about new efforts to recycle nuclear fuel. It is definitely the right thing to do; our current once-through cycle only extracts about 3-5% of the potential energy of the initial fuel loads.
One myth correction, however. President Carter was a submarine officer, but he was not a nuclear engineer.
He graduated from the US Naval Academy in June 1946 (he entered in 1943 with the class of 1947, but his class was in a war-driven accelerated 3 year program) with an undesignated bachelor of science degree. Even if the Naval Academy had offered a majors program for his class, it is unlikely that it would have included Nuclear Engineering as a option - after all, the Manhattan Project was a dark secret for most of his time at Annapolis.
After graduation, Jimmy Carter served as a surface warfare officer for a two years and then volunteered for the submarine force. He served in a variety of billets, including engineer officer of diesel submarines and qualified to command submarines.
In November 1952, he began a three month temporary duty assignment at the Naval Reactor branch. He started nuclear power school (a six month course of study that leads to operator training) in March, 1953. In July 1953, his father passed away and he resigned his commission to run the family peanut farm. He was discharged from active duty on 9 October, 1953. According to an old friend of mine who served as Rickover's personnel officer at Naval Reactors, LT Carter did not complete nuclear power school because of the need to take care of business at home.
The prototype for the USS Nautilus was completed in Idaho in May 1953, so LT Carter might have had some opportunity to see it in action before leaving the Navy. However, the USS Nautilus did not go to sea until January 17, 1955, so there is no possibility that he ever qualified to stand watch on a nuclear powered submarine.
He never experienced the incredible gift of being able to operate a power plant that was so clean that it could run inside a sealed submarine, so reliable that it could power that submarine even deep under the Arctic ice, and so energy dense that the submarine could operate for years without new fuel.
When I think about the 1976 campaign and the importance of the energy issue at that time, I cannot help but wonder why Jimmy Carter's promoters made such a big deal about his nuclear expertise. My wonder turns to cynicism when I think about the policies that his administration imposed and the damage that they did to the growth of the industry just at a time when we most needed a vibrant new energy industry player.
Best regards,
Rod Adams
Editor, Atomic Insights
www.atomicinsights.blogspot.com
www.atomicinsights.com
Re:Le Daily News - 9/15/2060 (Score:3, Interesting)
So how do fusion bombs work?
By igniting hundreds of kilograms of fusion fuel within nanoseconds. Fusion reactors, OTOH, would typically have milligrams of fuel in them at any given time.
Did they lie to us and they are actually fission?
Kind of. A typical "fusion bomb" actually gets about 2/3 of its yield from fission. The fusion produces huge quantities of fast neutrons. They make the the "tamper" (a heavy tube that's required to compress the fusion fuel) out of cheap unenriched uranium. That uranium gets split by the fusion neutrons, tripling the yield almost for free.
Re:Le Daily News - 9/15/2060 (Score:2, Interesting)
A fusion bomb is started by a small fission bomb. The explosion of that causes a hell of a lot of radiation and fast neutrons. Those are contained for a fraction of a second by a fat lead or other heavy metal wall. The wall evaporates, but the sheer mass of it will contain the radiation and the neutrons long enough for the radiation and neutron pressure to rise enough to cause the deuterium to fuse. This fusion causes the radiation pressure to rise far above what's possible with plutonium. The wall is now far enough away for most of the radiation to leak out, but the sheer amount of radiation will sustain fusion for a short time. In the mean time the surroundings are flooded with radiation and everyone there is quite screwed.
This would not work for sustained fusion of course, so they looked at other ways. Dr Farnsworth (the real one) invented the Fusor, a quite cool device capable of fusion but unscalable (the efficiency starts at negative and lowers as you increase the size: you will always get less energy out of it than you put in it). Fleischmann and Pons claimed they have observed cold fusion that works and doesn't cost much energy to run, but it was impossible to repeat and the theory said it was impossible the way they claimed it went. The Tokamak has been chosen to pursue because it gets more efficient as the size increases, because it had been proved over and over again by different research groups and the theory works.
Re:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. (Score:5, Interesting)
I went to a talk from a fusion proponent recently who was involved with ITER, and had worked on fusion for most of his career. His view is that the media obsess over break even, and don't understand the reasons they've not hit it. His explanation was that they know how to get to break even now, but that wouldn't make for a usable reactor, as the cost of enegy production would be just too high if you're only just past that threshold. Also the cost of hitting break even now is considerably more than not hitting it. So instead of wasting lots of money hitting break even for a headline, they're trying to sort the issues they know to exist that are stopping them from being considerably more efficient than break even.
There were people on ITER who wanted it to be connected up to the grid, so that if they surpass break even (which they expect to), they'd be able to get a considerable PR coup. Problem is, hooking it up would have added considerably to the costs, which given how much it's overrun could have ended up killing the project.
Re:probably not first post anymore (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Tritium same problem as Teller's Classical Supe (Score:3, Interesting)
"Ivy Mike [wikipedia.org]" begs to disagree with you on this point. 10-15 Megaton fusion blast, ignited by a standard fission bomb "next to" (technically above) a huge canister of liquid deuterium, with no tritium used at all.
"Actually, Teller thought for the longest time you could make an H-bomb this way" - and he was essentially right. The trick was in the configuration.
Now practical is another matter... but it still worked.
Only if you have no idea what the differences between the two devices are... What separates fusion from boosted fission is the role the fusion reaction has in the process.
In boosted fission, nearly all of the energy comes from the fissile material - a small quantity of fusion fuel is used only to generate extra neutrons which accelerate the fission reaction and increase yield.
In a fusion bomb, a fission bomb is used to create the large quantity of radiation needed to compress and heat the fusion material to its critical point.
Two very different processes, two very different designs. There really is no "controversy" over this.
=Smidge=
Re:Tritium same problem as Teller's Classical Supe (Score:3, Interesting)
77% of the energy released by this bomb came from fissioning the natural uranium tamper (with fast neutrons provided by the fusion reaction).
Re:Tritium same problem as Teller's Classical Supe (Score:3, Interesting)
There was still sustained, massively-energy-positive fusion without tritium, which the parent was saying was essentially impossible. That was my point.
=Smidge=