If Fusion Is the Answer, We Need To Do It Quickly 305
Lasrick writes: Yale's Jason Parisi makes a compelling case for fusion power, and explains why fusion is cleaner, safer, and doesn't provide opportunities for nuclear smuggling and proliferation. The only downside will be the transition period, when there are both fission and fusion plants available and the small amount of "booster" elements (tritium and deuterium) found in fusion power could provide would-be proliferators what they need to boost the yield of fission bombs: "The period during which both fission and fusion plants coexist could be dangerous, however. Just a few grams of deuterium and tritium are needed to increase the yield of a fission bomb, in a process known as 'boosting.'" Details about current research into fusion power and an exploration of relative costs make fusion power seem like the answer to a civilization trying to get away from fossil fuels.
Fusion Confusion (Score:4, Funny)
With facial hair cruisin'.
Fission frission
Bears smooth-faced derision.
Burma Shave
Re: Fusion Confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
Confusion is correct. This guys damn confused. I'd love to have the problem hes talking about as that would mean that we actually have working fusion reactors. Wake me from my grave when we have one actual working power producing fusion reactor (I'm in my early 30s).
Fast? TRANS-FUSION! (Score:2, Funny)
Transfusion, transfusion
My red corpsuckles are in mass confusion
Never, never, never gonna speed again...
Pass the crimson to me, Jimson!
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Confusion is correct. This guys damn confused. I'd love to have the problem hes talking about as that would mean that we actually have working fusion reactors. Wake me from my grave when we have one actual working power producing fusion reactor (I'm in my early 30s).
Good Morning Sleepy head! We do have working fusion reactors, they just don't work long enough or well enough to get much energy out of them.
Re: Fusion Confusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, since the whole purpose of fusion reactors is to make commercially useful power, it is pretty clear that we do not have a working fusion reactor by any reasonable definition.
Despite having spent billions (22 Billion USD on hot fusion research by US alone) on the problem so far, with billions yet to come, we do not have working fusion reactors. Even ITER will just be a prototype with no power generation at all. Cost to develop commercially, unknown but bound to be a lot of money.
The US alone has also spent around 15 Billion developing Fast Breeder reactors, and has little to show for it. Other countries have similar experience.
Estimated cost to develop commercial LFTR reactors seems to be in the range 3 - 20 Billion USD. A commercial LFTR prototype seems to be likely 1 billion USD by most observers.
And you still have to build the reactors -- that won't be cheap either. Every known possible solution to replacing our energy infrastructure has a large economic cost, and significant to large environmental cost as well. Kind of the way large-scale engineering works.
Yet the cost of doing nothing will be larger yet, at least eventually. Peak fossil fuel is coming sooner or later, even if you master shale and methane hydrates with high recovery rates and limited environmental impact. There are a lot of third-world people in this world that would gladly join the first-world lifestyle which puts a severe constraint on expanding fossil fuels usage to match the growth in demand.
Personally, the combination of LFTR and renewable sources seems most likely to me to be commercially successful by 2050. Why, because the needed development seem to be within or nearly withing the capabilities of current engineering in both cases. Engineers are very happy to deliver good enough when the perfect seems unattainable.
Re: Fusion Confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
$22bn is only 0.03 Iraq Wars, so it's really not that much money in the grand scheme of things.
Re: Fusion Confusion (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Fusion Confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
We do have a functioning fusion reactor. It has about four and a half billion years left worth of fuel. It pours more energy into the earth alone than a hundred civilizations could use, to say nothing of the untapped energy it pours elsewhere.
Re: Fusion Confusion (Score:5, Funny)
I think if there really was something like that, we would have heard of it by now.
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Not to mention how much of its output is wastefully beamed into empty space!
Need that Dyson sphere damn it!
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Yes, we were definitely confused. Back in the 80's, we were trying to do the fusion "cold".
Instead, this guy suggests now that we do the fusion "quick" instead.
I see an Ig Nobel coming for "quick" fusion.
Re:Fusion Confusion (Score:4, Insightful)
isn't that an h-bomb?
Ready in 30 years (Score:5, Insightful)
As it always has, and likely always will be.
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:4, Insightful)
As it always has, and likely always will be.
I don't think you are correct. Fusion seems to be quite doable to me. Right now we have some issues with materials and reactor designs, but the basic physics are in place and understood. I think we are closer than 30 years myself.
Of all the things we spend money on, the national ignition facility seems to be one of the best scientific investments we can make and IMHO we should redouble our investments in similar research equipment.
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:5, Funny)
Right now we have some issues with materials and reactor designs, but the basic physics are in place and understood.
The basic physics was in place and understood in 1952. They just had some issues with materials and reactor designs.
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Nope. Plasma physics was very young, and nobody had truly studied plasma turbulence.
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:5, Funny)
The main problem they had with materials is that they couldn't source enough of these small, green, flexible rectangles that they could exchange for almost anything - building materials, labour, research effort, rent, food, etc.
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We have had a working fusion reactor for over 5 billion years, and it should keep going for a few billion more.
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I have been hearing that fusion is about 30 years away since I first heard about fusion power 32 years ago. So, it was funny to read TFA and see the date of when it might be available as 30-odd years away.
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps if Fusion is the answer, then the question is "What should we be spending money on developing?"
Which makes more sense:
1. Spend a trillion or so dollars (it's been about $400Billion so far, and rising) on the F-35, which won't be viable for a long time but has already been making a few rich people richer. Money comes from taxpayers, and it's the ultra-wealthy who directly benefit from the contracts who get richer. In reality our actual military power is unchanged.
2. Spend that money instead on R&D for fusion (spend a bit of it on battery research too for electric cars/trucks). The US saves $380Billion per year on oil imports. The economy and thus quality of life for everyone improves. The rich still get richer because manufacturing and transportation costs have been reduced. F-16's, F-18's, etc and UAV's continue to give us military superiority.
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:5, Insightful)
http://i.imgur.com/sjH5r.jpg [imgur.com]
Pretty much covers it, even with the speculative forecasting. The money put into it is equivalent to throwing the spare change you have in your car's ashtray toward a new car fund every year.
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:4, Interesting)
We all hope not. And past performance is not an indication of future results. (Which is a good thing, in this case.) But the past several decades have pretty much beaten all the enthusiasm out of many of us.
Practical fusion would be a complete game changer in many different areas. Cheap enough, it would not only pretty much kill the oil industry, but may even make the "green" energy industry redundant. (Solar, wind, tides, geothermal.) Dirt cheap electricity, commonly available, would make electric vehicles a lot more interesting. Cheap centralized power would probably reverse the current tendency to diversify power and make upgrading our aging electric power infrastructure a priority. And so forth. Fusion is a very disruptive technology.
Maybe that's the real reason we don't have it yet.
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past performance is not an indication of future results.
That is a good rule of thumb when INVESTING. When doing science or engineering, it is nonsense. Past performance (also known as experimental results) are the ONLY reliable indicator of future results. There is little reason to expect cost effective fusion power in the next several decades.
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Past performance (also known as experimental results) are the ONLY reliable indicator of future results.
So you're saying that the bulletproof way of making something complicated work is to employ people who did something simple that worked? I'm really not sure what your sentence is supposed to mean. I would have thought that future technological results depend mostly on inherent problems with the goals that we're not aware of yet.
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Not being twelve feet deep in horseshit implies that there has been a game change in energy production and transport.
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You're probably right about that.
While I don't really believe this, it wouldn't surprise me if, in the future, there was a big news story about how the cold fusion guys were right, all along. Why? Just think about how the world's power structure would change, if it was real. Demand for fossil fuels would drop to maybe 10% of what it is now, almost overnight... power companies would be out of business... and so on. Portable fusion reactors would dramatically
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Nobody needs to get murdered. You merely must create an environment where it's more profitable to research fusion energy than it is to commercialize fusion energy.
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Actually, its fairly trivial. I'm working on doing it in my back yard workshop actually. Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
Fusion is very easy to attain if you know the physics involved.
Net energy surplus is something else entirely. Its the harvesting part that is killing it right at this moment, but much like building a workshop fusor is trivial now that its well understood, in 100 years, building a fusion reactor might not be a whole lot different. Fusion has some really beautiful requiremen
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:4, Informative)
" The "real" reason we don't have fusion power yet is because it requires creating a little piece of THE SUN inside a contained vessel. That's mind bogglingly difficult."
Not really. The conditions for fusion inside the Sun are actually mind-bogglingly MILD. Overall, the Sun converts ~4 million tons of matter into energy every second, yet it only has the energy density of decomposing manure. It's just that the Sun is so freaking HUGE.
The problem with getting fusion power on Earth is that we need to SURPASS by orders of magnitude the conditions at the heart of a star.
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Shoulda said POWER density.
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:5, Informative)
What a load of bull. Only in the core of the Sun does fusion actually occur. The temperature at the core is 15 million Kelvin and the central density is 160,000 kg/m^3. That is an energy density fucking orders of magnitude about decomposing manure. The numbers you get are by averaging over the entire Sun, which is irrelevant, because only a tiny central region of the Sun is hot enough for fusion.
10+ years on Slashdot and in the past few years it has really been taken over by amateurs. Every hard physics / astronomy article is filled with nonsense patently FALSE comments modded up to +4. Our collective intelligence has been decreasing, friends.
Please know what you are doing before you mod up an incorrect article... a simple Wikipedia peek will fix it for you folks.
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OK here's a simple wikipedia peek for you my mouthy friend:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
"The power production by fusion in the core varies with distance from the solar center. At the center of the Sun, theoretical models estimate it to be approximately 276.5 watts/m3,[55] a power production density that more nearly approximates reptile metabolism than a thermonuclear bomb."
An average fission reactor gives you about 1GW of electrical power and more like 3GW thermal power. To get a 1GW of power at the den
Re:proving his point... (Score:4, Insightful)
Could you read that again, please? How is there an average in there? Also, he mixed up density, temperature and energy density without blinking.
I'm not impressed.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I work in fusion, so I assure you that I and most of those I work with actually *agree* with this article to one extent or another. Optimistically let's look at the following: ITER is built and achieves breakeven (but no power tapping), then DEMO is built and demonstrates power to grid. You're still talking 20 billion dollars for a Fusion plant that (if built using Tokamak tech) will be fragile and prone to failure (disruptions, ELMs, and other physics issures). No company in their right mind will pay this
Re:Ready in 30 years (Score:5, Interesting)
You're arguing against Tokamak fusion. But what about, say, HiPER? Looks to me to be a much more comercializeable approach, yet it's still "mainstream" fusion, just a slight variant on inertial confinement ala NIF to make it much smaller / cheaper / easier to have a high repeat rate (smaller compression pulse + heating pulse rather than a NIF-style super-massive compression pulse). The only really unstudied physics aspect is how the heating pulse will interact with the highly compressed matter; NIF and pals have pretty much worked out the details of how laser compression works out. Beyond this, pretty much everything else is just engineering challenges for commercialization, such as high repeat rate lasers, high-rate hohlraum injection and targeting, etc.
I've often thought (different topic) about how one can get half or more of fusion's advantages via fission if you change the game around a bit. Fusion is promoted on being passively safe (it's very hard to keep the reaction *going*, it really wants to stop at all times), it leads to abundant fuel supplies, and there's little radioactive waste (no long-term waste). But what about subcritical fission reactors? Aka, a natural uranium or thorium fuel target being bombarded with a spallation neutron source. Without the spallation neutrons, there's just not enough neutrons for the reaction, so the second the beam gets shut off, the reactor shuts down, regardless of what else is going on. It'd be a fast reactor, aka a breeder, aka, your available fuel supplies increase by orders of magnitude. And your long-term waste would be much, much less in a well-designed reactor. Spallation neutron sources have long been proposed as a way to eliminate long-lived nuclear waste by transmuting it into shorter-lived elements.
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> But what about, say, HiPER?
I wrote the wiki article on HiPER (check the history if you don't believe me). The lead researcher has moved to LLNL, and the fast ignition method turned out to be a dead end. HiPER still exists on paper as what would best be described as a laser development effort, but for all intents it's dead. The entire fast ignition field has moved on to another holy grail, although there's continuing effort in Japan as their experiments were furthest along.
Simply put, laser-based ICF ca
Did I miss the breakthrough? (Score:5, Interesting)
Did I miss the part where the human race had a miraculous breakthrough in fusion technology? Even setting aside the expected issues with neutron radiation (sorry, no Mr. Fusion Home Energy Kit) there isn't any fusion technology today that is even close to breakeven on an experimental basis. As for commercial operations...
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" If JET can reach break-even point, there’s a very good chance that the massive ITER reactor currently being built in France will be able to obtain the holy grail of everlasting green power generation: self-sustaining fusion.
Dozens and dozens of journal summaries with that miraculous word 'if'
sPh
Re: (Score:2)
They never ran JET above Q = 1.0 because they were doing other experiments with it (mainly relating to material research on what to make the walls out of that don't become brittle due to neutron flux over time) but the data that was collected was conclusive enough that they felt confident that they could if they wanted to.
As it stands, they reached the point where the time and energy is better spent on the ITER experiment as the next stage of the research.
Of course, the funding is still tiny trickle compare
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I know this is an unpopular viewpoint, but I'm beginning to think that Tokamak is a way to funnel tax dollars into researcher's pockets. If we ever do achieve practical commercial fusion, we may look back at the Tokamak like modern pilots look back at the manned ornithopter attempts of the 1800's.
But if the Tokamak ever is made to be commercially viable, we're probably talking about a few gigantic power generators, which would mean we probably need to do something about that decades-old power line infrastr
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we're probably talking about a few gigantic power generators, which would mean we probably need to do something about that decades-old power line infrastructure.
I suggest crossing that bridge when we come to it. If a few gigantic power generators turn out to be much cheaper than alternatives, then that can fund a renewal of the power line infrastructure to support them.
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If that is the real goal of the Tokamak then they're doing a hilariously poor job of it - the funding is minuscule.
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It's not a "physics" problem to solve, it's an engineering problem. The Physics are fairly well understood. What we need now is the equipment to be engineered which will require some new engineered materials and a few engineering breakthroughs..
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What you don't know about fusion
Could fill a shelf of books
You are the type of man who looks
For new miraculous advances
But overestimates the chances
Of breaking-even on the power flow
You only have to open up your mouth to show
What you don't know
About!
Fusion!
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Maybe not miraculous breakthroughs, but we've been getting better at directly utilising our only currently usable fusion reactor.
Then again it is ultimately responsible for nearly all our other energy sources too.
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Does it matter? Fusion is still nuclear power, so even if we had a working reactor right now we couldn't use it.
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Darn. Just this once I was hoping to be one of the Kool Kids.
sPh
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Fusion power research is being funded at least $20 billion/year worldwide, and has been for over 20 years. If you can point to some concrete areas where more cash would help?
sPh
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order of magnitude off, it's about $2 billion per year total.
Fusion is not the answer (Score:2)
The answer is magnets. Lots and lots of magnets.
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Funny because the Fusion solution requires magnets, really strong ones.
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How do they work [discovermagazine.com]?
Oh, right. [quickmeme.com].
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The power of the future... (Score:2)
Fusion power is roughly 20 years away from being viable...and has been for the last 40 years LOL.
Seriously, I'll start worrying about proliferation risks when a commercially viable fusion reactor DESIGN is created. Building one -- assuming it's ever viable to begin with -- would take years, which is plenty of time to address proliferation concerns before it came online.
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I'm starting to think it would be easier to solve the energy storage problem than get a working fusion power.
Because it looks like solar is on a similar exponential improvement cycle as Moore's law:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
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Fusion power is roughly 20 years away from being viable...and has been for the last 40 years LOL.
Longer than that. Fusion power has been hyped since the 1950s. From the article:
Nuclear fusion could come into play as soon as 2050
Heard that one before.
Fusion power has some real problems. After half a century of trying, nobody has a long-running sustained fusion reactor, even an experimental one. The whole "inertial fusion" thing turned out to be a cover for bomb research. There's a lot of skepticism about whether ITER will do anything useful. It's not clear that a fusion reactor will be cost-effective even with a near-zero fuel cost. (Fission reactors
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Of course, it's extremely hard to do it when the funding is so small.
That's why it's eternally 20 years away. It's remarkable what we've actually learned despite the issue of funding it with pocket change for 40 years.
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That's the ITER's goal. Construction has started.
Seriously, we may be 20 years out yet, but I don't think you have a full grasp on where we really are on this. We have a design and are working the details of the materials and understanding how the materials will react to the neutron flux created by the reaction. There are still valid questions about how viable this design will be, but it's fairly certain that it will work and produce more energy than it takes to get the reaction going.
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No. Fusion power is roughly $80bn of research away. The problem is the funding has been so meagre that we will never actually reach the goal at current rates of funding. If $80bn sounds a lot, it's not - it's only 0.11 Iraq Wars. We saw fit to spend around $750bn (at a highly conservative estimate - that's the US DOD's own estimate) on bombing Iraq, but we don't see fit to spend just more than 1/10th of that amount on freeing ourselves from dependence on that entire region forever.
Big fusion reactor unnecessary for boosting (Score:5, Informative)
Fusion reactors capable of producing net power are big, or seem to be being as we haven't actually built one yet.
However, if you just want to produce tritium for a boosted fission bomb, you don't need to generate net power. A farnsworth fusor [makezine.com] will do and they are small and inconspicuous.
As for deuterium: Deuterium is produced for industrial, scientific and military purposes, by starting with ordinary water—a small fraction of which is naturally-occurring heavy water—and then separating out the heavy water by the Girdler sulfide process, distillation, or other methods. [wikipedia.org]
So, no point in securing your fusion reactor because the bad guys don't have any real motivation to break in. At least, not to steal anything.
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We put all our eggs into the ITER basket. (Score:2)
Other interesting and scientifically sound approaches are limping along on pitiful drips of venture money e.g. General Fusion [wavewatching.net].
And while some public money goes into Polywell research [blogspot.ca], it's produced on a dime when compared to ITER.
Don't mean to knock the work that's done to advance the Tokamak design, but it shouldn't be the only game in town.
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With regards to the Polywell design you clearly either have not read this paper [arxiv.org], or must think they made up their results.
As to General Fusion, they are hardly the only ones looking into magnetized target fusion (just the most ambitious ones) - so I fail to see how you comment even applies there.
Fusion gnomes (Score:2)
Step 1: Collect hydrogen
Step 2: ?
Step 3: Profit!
Ionization neutralization problem (Score:2)
It's possible that it's wrong, but if true, it would mean that tokamak fusion is fundamentally impossible (which would suck for ITER). The paper is by a bunch of alternative fusion research approach guys, so it's possible they're not objective here (not cold fusion, that's bunk).
a few grams of tritium a problem? (Score:3)
If it were only just getting a few grams of tritium, it isn't that hard to do. On the scale of a few grams you can just get something like this baby [tyne-engineering.com] and hide it in a commercial seawater desalinization plant to get a few grams after a bit of time (and energy)...
Of course that isn't the most economical way to do it. I think a common military-industrial method today is to put lithium control rods into an experimental-sized fission reactor and collect the tritium gas that comes off... Still no fusion necessary...
Huh? (Score:2)
the small amount of "booster" elements (tritium and deuterium) found in fusion power could provide would-be proliferators what they need to boost the yield of fission bombs
The primary issue of proliferation is getting the bomb grade uranium in the first place. Fission power by itself doesn't lead to weapons proliferation so long as enrichment processes are restricted to producing only 'reactor grade' fuel. Given a source of weapons grade material, the availability of deuterium/tritium boosters aren't going to make a damned bit of difference to rogue states trying to build bombs. Crappy, low yield bombs will suit their purposes just fine.
So badly misguided (Score:5, Insightful)
That has to be one of the most misguided ideas I've ever seen...
Worry about using deuterium and tritium being used to boost the output of a fission weapon is like worrying about whether a heavily armed maniac's getaway car can do 120mph rather than 115mph. The basic problem isn't the speed of the get away car. If a proliferator can get their hands on sufficient U235 or Pu in the first place, they're 99.99996% of the way towards their goal - the extra .00003 provided by the availability of deuterium and tritium is all but meaningless because when it comes to proliferators it's the mere fact that they have a weapon in the first place that's the problem. That they can now build two or more, or increase the yield of a single weapon simply doesn't count for much when even a low kiloton range weapon is sufficient for their needs. (Which is deterrence generally, or failing that attacks against non military area targets. They aren't trying to crack open Cheyenne Mountain.)
One small problem. (Score:2)
Fusion isn't developed to the point where it's viable yet. It's currently short-duration and net-energy negative at the moment.
Second, trying to get to fusion with existing fossil fuel plants will just kill the planet that much faster. DUMB!
There ARE relatively clean and safe options for fission power. And in the long run, we're better off transitioning base load power to fission plants, eliminating coal, oil and NG now, then chasing fusion while not poisoning the planet.
Is there a possibility of somethi
Booster fear unfounded (Score:2)
Boosting a fission bomb entails injecting tritium-deuterium gas into the center of a plutonium core implosion design before detonation. It boost the yield 2x to 2.5x. If an entity can build a reactor to create plutonium then it can create hydrogen isotopes. It would be easier for a clandestine terrorist group to figure out how to steal enough enriched uranium and build a gun bomb then steal enough plutonium to make an implosion bomb. Enriched uranium is safe to handle and figuring out a gun design easier to
We need ...... Solar? (Score:2)
We have a unlimited supply of energy which will last millions of years. Yet, we cant be bothered to pull our fingers out of our arse and make it really happen.
Fusion is a great bit of fun years down the line if it works, but we need to think of now.
Fix now, make solar plants on our planet or in space, then let the scientists play with other methods.
Either way, energy companies really dont care about the future. All they care for is profits and now. We are going to be stuck in this era for a very long time,
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Fusion would break the stranglehold of petro-exporting countries in the Middle East as well as belligerent exporters like Russia and Iran.
Then? The Banking vampire elite will need to generate new, ethnically-rationalized hate-conflict to keep us all at each other's throats - instead of removing their boot from our collective face.
Re:Who needs oil? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why would they need to create a new hate conflict? There's plenty of that to go around as is. Arab vs. Jew, black vs. white, East vs. West...it's not like conflict wasn't around before banking cartels, you know.
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Why would they need to create a new hate conflict? There's plenty of that to go around as is. Arab vs. Jew, black vs. white, East vs. West...it's not like conflict wasn't around before banking cartels, you know.
Sure, banking cartels just turned it into business practice.
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It would also destroy the value of the dollar, which is boosted by OPEC.
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Nonsense, value of dollar can be set in a world powered by any energy source adequate to produce needed goods and services. If fusion is sufficient, dollar is fine.
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Those 'petro-exporting countries' are all protege's of the US of A. Talk about belligerent.
Maybe try to look in the mirror more, confused one?
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We'll run out of oil long before they ever get fusion working.
Re: Who needs oil? (Score:2)
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Can you imagine their reponse to the above?
So why are you putting the FUD out there? Sure people are ignorant, but It's not as if people can't know the difference between addition and division.
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The word is "neutrons." (Score:2)
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Yes. Thorium. Should have been done long ago.
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Nevertheless, fusion would make for an awesome ship engine. It's probably worth studying just for that.
Re:Fusion Has Already Failed (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at ITER: $20B and rising, it will only make 500 MW(th) -- six times less thermal energy than a 1 GW(e) fission reactor -- and it doesn't even include the advanced materials needed to withstand commercial reactor levels of integrated neutron flux.
Well, that's ITER's point now isn't it? We know what is required to make fusion work, we just don't know how long we can sustain a reaction because we do not understand how the large neutron flux will affect the materials in the container and we still have difficulties maintaining the containment. It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.
IMHO, investments in such experiments should be expanded, by both government and industry. Just like getting a man on the moon, We need a JFK'esk commitment to making this work.
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Look at ITER: $20B and rising, it will only make 500 MW(th) -- six times less thermal energy than a 1 GW(e) fission reactor -- and it doesn't even include the advanced materials needed to withstand commercial reactor levels of integrated neutron flux.
Well, that's ITER's point now isn't it? We know what is required to make fusion work, we just don't know how long we can sustain a reaction because we do not understand how the large neutron flux will affect the materials in the container and we still have difficulties maintaining the containment. It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.
IMHO, investments in such experiments should be expanded, by both government and industry. Just like getting a man on the moon, We need a JFK'esk commitment to making this work.
ITER is also heavily instrumented and represents the design prototype for power generation. It's successor - DEMO - is expected to be bigger, but cheaper, because the design will be known, the manufacturing for the parts will be understood, and it won't include the scientific instrumentation since it'll be a power generating reactor, not an experiment.
But would fusion ever be economical? (Score:2)
My big worry with fusion is that it'll be shown possible, but the cost per MW of capacity will be so high that you can't pay the interest on the cost of capital by charging competitive rates for electricity. Thus rendering fusion forever uneconomical compared to alternatives.
Nuclear fission seemingly has this problem right now, though much of the expense is due to implacable unreasonable opposition.
--PM
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It's an engineering problem now, not something that is clearly impossible.
While entirely true, I was visiting the Princeton Plasma Physics lab in 1990 and heard just that. The sad part was I'd have to wait until 2012 for the first commercial fusion reactor to be viable! It was sweet to stand in the control room while they fused a few atoms in the tokamak. And the flywheels they had were the stuff of a steampunk's wet dream!
To be fair, funding did decrease over the same time period and J.H.F.C., if the m
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Look at ITER: $20B and rising, it will only make 500 MW(th) -- six times less thermal energy than a 1 GW(e) fission reactor -- and it doesn't even include the advanced materials needed to withstand commercial reactor levels of integrated neutron flux.
International Thermonuclear *Experimental* Reactor
Re:Fusion Has Already Failed (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the kind of thinking that led navies across the world to build dreadnaughts. which could be sunk by a couple of airplanes dropping torpedoes.
Fusion in it's current configuration, and our current state of knowledge, sure it's a joke.
But, going with the airplane example; you're looking at the Wright Brother's first plane, and saying "nope, will never be useful, look at it, it can only fly 3 feet off the ground for a couple hundred yards". Solar panels 30-40 years ago were laughable as well mind you.
Knowledge has a way of building on itself in an exponential fashion. Once the first working (energy positive) reactor is built, you can bet it will be only a matter of months before that design gets improved upon by a thousand different scientists.
But yes, short-sighted people like yourself are what drive the issues in the US. If it doesn't go from drawing board to mature product instantaneously it's clearly a waste of time, effort, and money.
Re: (Score:2)
Solar panels 30-40 years ago were laughable as well mind you.
They were not laughable. There just wasn't enough of economical and environmental incentives back then to push for their mass production. Now there is.
Re: (Score:3)
> The watts per square meter are still very low, the panels very expensive, the land and installation requirements still onerous
All-in, including land, clearing it, levelling it, installing equipment, trenching lines, all CAPEX and REG, every single penny from one end to the other, costs $1.79 a Watt.
In comparison, fission plants are currently going in for at least $5 a Watt, but have overrun their budgets almost every time.
Fusion reactors would be fantastically more complex and expensive than fission. T
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I'm always excited about garage experimenters running a 500 MW neutron source away from the heavy hand of the government.
Re:Fusion Has Already Failed (Score:5, Insightful)
The government does 10's of thousands of project a year. ON time, within budget with little waste.
the ITER is using extremely cutting edge experimental reactor. Of course there are unknowns.
Re: (Score:3)
Aren't uranium (as opposed to plutonium) bombs pretty bulky?
Not really. The critical mass for U235 is 50 kg or so [wikipedia.org], while for PU240 it's about 40 kg. Moreover, a U235 bomb is way easier to make, because it doesn't have a predetonation problem like plutonium. Just take two hunks of U235 and drive one into the other with an explosive charge. Bang. City gone. This was the way Little Boy worked. It was so simple they didn't even bother to test it before dropping it on Hiroshima. You can't do that with PU240: the neutrons get so thick as it nears criticality [wikipedia.org] that it blows
Re: (Score:3)
Pu-240 isn't used for nuclear weapons, though. The isotope for bombs is Pu-239, with a critical mass of ~10 kg. The spontaneous fission rate for Pu-240 is much higher than for Pu-239 (about 30000 times as high), and it's also more highly radioactive, leading to additional problems with keeping the bomb cool before detonation.
The critical mass isn't that important in "normal" bomb designs. For example, Little Boy and Fat Man weighed about 4500 kg (the former being a couple hundred kg lighter), so a differen
Re: (Score:2)
Pu-240 isn't used for nuclear weapons, though.
Oh, shit. You're quite correct. Please consider me appropriately chastised.