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."
Oh well... (Score:3, Funny)
Guess we can't go fusion now either, since that would entail imitating the cheese-eating surrender monkeys. :P)
(That was sarcasm...I hope.
Re:Oh well... (Score:5, Funny)
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I would have thought "Mr. Fusion".
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I would have thought "Mr. Fusion".
That's Monsieur Fusion to you ...
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I LOVE IT!! I can't wait until I can power my AC with it and say it's Freesion in here.
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.
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Re:Oh well... (Score:5, Informative)
Which is still a tiny bit short of the 100,000,000K that they're looking at. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Reactor_overview [wikipedia.org].
Re:Oh well... (Score:4, Informative)
Fortunatly the magnetic confinement techniques they'll be using doesn't fail at any particular temperature. RTFM!
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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!
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Yeah, we're lucky we had a Luddite peanut farmer for President to save us from energy independence by banning nuclear waste reprocessing.
God bless the retards in Congress in bed with the oil industry (literally). Without them, we wouldn't have the joy of $200 billion drained from the U.S. economy every year to pay for petroleum.
And hugs to the corpse of President Nixon without whom we wouldn't have the cozy relationship with China that allows us to say goodbye to over $200 billion per year only to borrow it
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That Luddite wanted America to pursue renewable strategies as well as the other nastier alternatives - remember the solar panel on the White House roof? Also, nuclear waste reprocessing sounds wonderful in theory but is not a slamdunk in practice. France still needs to finds a place to bury the stuff that's not worth reprocessing and the greater needs and sprawl of the US would have made for hell of a lot more waste to be dumped in someone else's back yard.
The thorium reactor might have resolved all these p
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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
French? (Score:2, Funny)
Freedom Fusion.
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Freedom Fusion.
Here's a fun fact: The phrase 'Freedom Fries' dates back to 2003.
Le Daily News - 9/15/2060 (Score:5, Funny)
LE DAILY NEWS
Wednesday, September 15, 2060
The country formerly known as France has successfully performed its first and last Fusion reaction.
Re:Le Daily News - 9/15/2060 (Score:4, Informative)
The burning crater formerly known was France has successfully performed its first and last Fusion reaction.
~FIXED
Good joke, but I'm sorry to spoil it with a few facts. It's very difficult to make fusion happen in a reactor. The best you can do is get a small fraction of the deuterium and tritium present in the reactor to fuse at any moment. Even if you could get all of the fuel present in the reactor to undergo fusion all at once (a physical impossibility) the total amount of energy released would do no worse than demolish the reactor building. So no crater, not even a small one.
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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.
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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.
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One can only hope!
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Well, I hope you've learned something.
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Exactly. France is probably the third closest country to the US, after Canada and Mexico. Wait... Alaska and Russia are close. Okay, fourth. Hmm... No, nothing in the Pacific... Oh, snap! There's lots of Caribbean countries that are close too.
Okay, France is closer to Maine than New York City is to Chicago.
probably not first post anymore (Score:2, Informative)
Haven't fusion reactors been built already but have simply used more energy than they produced?
No time to google when shooting for FP.
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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).
Re:probably not first post anymore (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, ITER is intended to demonstrate a useful amount of energy production from fusion. It's baseline design is for Q=10, i.e. 10 times more power out from fusion than put in. This is essentially a feasibility demonstration, and experimental test bed for things like wall modules and blankets. The follow-on (DEMO) will then be a prototype power plant, and actually be connected up to generators etc.
ps. though AC, also a plasma physicist working on tokamaks
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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 co
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Duh, the next iteration is BETA (Bigger Experimental Tokamak Application). Obviously DEMO is expected to produce some sort of inverse time-shifting effect, as you wouldn't ordinarily expect DEMO to arrive before BETA.
Apparently at some point between DEMO and BETA the French expect to give up on their silly language.
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The French giving up on their stupid language ? We'll have to conquer them first.
I wonder if Chuck Norris is free on friday.
Or, in this case, Stevie Wonder will do fine.
ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. (Score:2, Informative)
That's correct. Hobbyists have built fusion reactors in their garages, and successfully achieved fusion.
There are about 30 Tokamak fusion reactors in the world today. All of them produce fusion. None of them produce more power than they require to run. Why do the ITER managers believe theirs will be different? That I don't know.
Also, there is evidence that the ITER project is badly managed, in my opinio
Re:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. (Score:5, Informative)
There are two main reasons why it is thought that ITER can achieve more power out than in (10 times more in fact)
1. It is about 8 times the plasma volume of JET (about 2x in each direction). The temperature gradients in tokamaks have limits (things like Ion Temperature Gradient mode-driven turbulence) so the bigger you make the machine the hotter you can make the middle of the plasma and the better your performance. The problem with this is that the power output goes like the volume, but the area this power is deposited on goes like the area. Hence why small fusion plants would be nice, and materials are the biggest issue for ITER and DEMO
2. They will be using Tritium in ITER. Tokamaks today have only very rarely used tritium (e.g. JET, JT60-U) to produce more power out than in (very briefly 1s). This is because the plasma physics doesn't really change when you add Tritium, so experiments use Deuterium which is much cheaper and less dangerous (e.g. radioactive). At 100 million degrees, the D-D fusion rate is still pretty small and so the amount of fusion energy produced is tiny. The D-T rate is orders of magnitude higher and so significant power can be produced
p.s. Yes, AC plasma physicist
Re:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. (Score:5, Funny)
The above AC is clearly lying about being a plasma physicist - he probably just read this book [slashdot.org] over the weekend and now understands everything. Literally.
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.
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"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 essen
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77% of the energy released by this bomb came from fissioning the natural uranium tamper (with fast neutrons provided by the fusion reaction).
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There was still sustained, massively-energy-positive fusion without tritium, which the parent was saying was essentially impossible. That was my point.
=Smidge=
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: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: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:ITER will be one of the many Tokamaks. (Score:4, Informative)
French? Well, kind of. (Score:5, Informative)
It may well be physically in France, I wouldn't call it French per se. The I in the name most assuredly stands for International, with technical and financial input from around the world (China, the EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the USA, in alphabetical order).
It's a project we all may ultimately depend on as a civilisation, so the International part is important.
Re:French? Well, kind of. (Score:5, Funny)
I can imagine the scientists and technocrats from: China, the EU, India, Japan, Korea, Russia, and the USA, sitting in a room pondering the question of where to put this new fusion reactor--the biggest and baddest one ever built.
China: "India is the best place..."
India: "Heck no, we reckon Russia is better..."
Russia: "Nyet... How about Texas..."
(room grows silent)
In unison: Lets put it in "France"
France (EU): "Thank you, this quite the compliment..."
Professor Farnsworth begs to differ . . . (Score:5, Informative)
the world's first Fusion Reactor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth-Hirsch_Fusor
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Professor Farnsworth... hrm...
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Re:Professor Farnsworth begs to differ . . . (Score:4, Informative)
Of course this design has no chance of achieving net power output. It's useful as a source of low-energy neutrons. I've always wondered what kinds of isotopes you could make with one. The next "radioactive boyscout" might use them. If you aren't familiar with that story, google it.
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Of course this design has no chance of achieving net power output. It's useful as a source of low-energy neutrons. I've always wondered what kinds of isotopes you could make with one. The next "radioactive boyscout" might use them. If you aren't familiar with that story, google it.
For all "intents and purposes", "whom" remains part of the language. I care about spelling and grammar, particularly when i see either misused.
The sad thing is that (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The sad thing is that (Score:5, Funny)
If the the repulsive force of squabbling bureaucrats could be overcome using conference-room confinement, the resulting release of energy would power the world forever.
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The problem is, as governments the world over have shown, the repulsive force of bureaucrats can be transmitted through power lines, so if your containment isn't tight enough, the whole world goes to hell.
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That eternal "Fusion is 50 years away" saying stopped being due to physics and started being due to squabbling countries and their bureaucracies many years ago. ITER could have been started over a decade ago.
But they have to finish it before 21 December 2012.
--
He can't be dead, not with this lifeline Jim.
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.
Re:As an American.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Gypsy" has double meaning: it's an ethnicity, and it's also a culture. As cultures goes, this particular one is deeply rooted in crime, it's practically what it breathes.
And that crime is, effectively, what is persecuted in Europe. It gives the perception of racism, because it's one of those cases where straightforward application of laws results in a disproportionally large number of representatives of a particular culture (who also happen to be representatives of a particular ethnicity) being targeted. T
Re:As an American.... (Score:4, Informative)
Shame about the whole 3 strikes business and kicking the Roma's out of the country...
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Yup, because between being a corporate whore on the one side and a complete communist on the other there's definitely not an entire spectrum of political views...
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The issue is about romanticizing about certain people or groups.
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They just outlawed burqas in public. They are far more socialist than we ever were (A good thing, IMHO, but still, bad example.) Their military is, ah, not very large by any standard, for instance, they have a grand total of one carrier of some 37 kilotons. We have eleven carriers over twice that size. They may have broken ground on an international effort to build a fusion reactor, but until it produces more energy than it consumes, I would hardly call them world leaders in important technology. Sarkozy ha
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About those carriers, what are their value these days?
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Same as it ever was.
Name a better way to project air power to the other side of the world?
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And what would the need to do that be again?
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They are very valuable for bringing aid to disaster struck places and for bring bombs and missile to places that are about to be struck by disaster.
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I wonder, if we USians had nearly limitless energy sources without the use of petrochemicals, would we need 11 humongous aircraft carriers?
Just a passing thought...
(And yes, I know that the new reactor is not a nearly limitless energy source, it's a research device. Maybe in 50 years...)
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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.
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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 co
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T-O-K-A-M-A-K (Score:5, Informative)
Re:T-O-K-A-M-A-K (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, it's not hyphenated.
Not French (Score:3, Informative)
It's an international reactor, hence the "I" in ITER.
Duh.
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It's in France. However, the project is international. To be honest, mostly US and Japan.
No, it's not. It's mostly european: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iter#Funding [wikipedia.org]
French? I think not. (Score:2)
According to sources inside the ITER meeting at Jeju, Korea, the six non-host partners will now contribute 6/11th of the total cost - a little over half - while E.U. will put in the rest.
Sounds like it's mostly not Frances'.
They cost $50,000 and come out in the year 2050! (Score:2)
They cost $50,000 and come out in the year 2050!
yes that from simcity 2000
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F-U-N-D
F-U-N-D
F-U-N-D
F-U-N-D
F-U-N-D
...
Earthquake!!!!!!
Stupid Slashdot telling me not to use caps. Doesn't it understand that my humor would make even less sense if it was lower case?
Polywell (Score:3, Interesting)
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I would hope LANL believes in the project. They're partners in it.
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Seems unlikely. There's no indication that their machine will ever reach break-even, and the idea of a piston-powered fusion reactor makes me laugh. As for Los-Alamos, their magnetized-target fusion research seems to have stalled - no updates since 2003. Don't hold your breath on this one.
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Both Polywell and MTF are just vaporware (Score:3, Insightful)
When some of the early fusion reactor designs were tried they worked great.... until they started trying to increase the temperature and confinement. Tokamaks have been chosen for ITER because they are the most promising and well tested design. When polywells can demonstrate temperatures in excess of 2 keV (many large tokamaks e.g. JET, DIII-D, JT60-U), long operation (e.g. Tore Supra, over an hour), more energy out than in even briefly (JET, JT60-U), then people might become interested.
I wish the polywell
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In related news ... (Score:2)
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... Gypsy scientists make significant breakthrough in fusion energy. Expect to have commercial reactors ready within 3 years.
I don't think fusing your hand to the stove is what we're talking about here ....
Design parameters for a fusion reactor (Score:5, Funny)
Design parameters for a fusion reactor:
1. Shielding: 10m of water or similar as well as magnetic shielding
2. Energy density 10kW/m2
3. Politics: Not in my backyard
Conclusion:
Sun
1. Atmosphere and earth magnetic field: perfect
2. perfect almost anywhere
3. 150 million km away: perfect
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3. 150 million km away: perfect
Meh. For you maybe. But what if it explodes? Probably destroy the whole planet from that close. No way I'm going to support this environmental disaster waiting to happen. I'm lobbying to have it shut down or at least moved so that it orbits the earth from further out. ;)
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There's no purpose served in using photoelectric panels for industrial-scale power generation. We don't need better photoelectric cells to make better use of solar power. A black pipe, a reflective parabolic trench, and a turbine generator are all you need - there were a couple of plants like this in California, low tech and functional. Of course, it will never catch on, since it actually works.
50 Years Away? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure Fusion was only 20 years away when I was a kid 30 years ago.
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I'm sure Fusion was only 20 years away when I was a kid 30 years ago.
There was a curse on the reactor.
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See, once you achieve fusion, it messes with the Tachyon fields and sends you back in time. The trick is to reverse the polarity of your own Tachyon fields, so they cancel out with the Tachyon fields of the fusion reactor. You'll probably be killed in the process, but the rest of humanity will get to enjoy fusion power for the rest of eternity.
France has plenty of fusion reactors already. (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tore_Supra [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak_de_Fontenay_aux_Roses [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LULI2000 [wikipedia.org]
Not French !! (Score:4, Informative)
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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 demonstr
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the tokamak design is never going to run in continuous mode. To maintain the field strength of one of the magnetic gradients, an ever increasing current in the superconducting magnets is supplied. This has to be (cautiously) removed every n minutes. This is not a problem with the stellarator design, but that is much more complex to build. The idea is to have three tokamaks on one energy producing site, rotating in operation to keep a constant power output.
Re:Better to just adopt 4th Gen Nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed the world cannot sit on it's hands waiting fusion. Fission is a highly practical, safe and clean form of electricity generation. And Generation IV reactors make it sustainable and hugely reduce the waste issue. If you haven't seen it, there is a host of informative material and discussion on Barry Brook's blog. Brooke is Director of Climate Science at the University of Adelaide and one of the group including Hansen pushing for development and deployment of Gen III and Gen IV nuclear.
Brave New Climate [bravenewclimate.com]