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China Power

China Could Be Turning On Its 'Artificial Sun' Fusion Reactor Soon (newsweek.com) 109

"China is about to start operation on its 'artificial sun' -- a nuclear fusion device that produces energy by replicating the reactions that take place at the center of the sun," writes Newsweek.

schwit1 shared their report: If successful, the device could edge scientists closer to achieving the ultimate goal of nuclear fusion: near limitless, cheap clean energy.

The device, called HL-2M Tokamak, is part of the nation's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak project, which has been running since 2006. In March, an official from the China National Nuclear Corporation announced it would complete building HL-2M by the end of the year. The coil system was installed in June and since then, work on HL-2M has gone "smoothly," the Xinhua News Agency reported in November. Duan Xuru, head of the Southwestern Institute of Physics, which is part of the corporation, announced the device will become operational in 2020 at the 2019 China Fusion Energy Conference, the state news agency said.

He told attendees how the new device will achieve temperatures of over 200 million degrees Celsius. That's about 13 times hotter than the center of the sun. Previous devices developed for the artificial sun experiment reached 100 million degrees Celsius, a breakthrough that was announced in November last year.

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China Could Be Turning On Its 'Artificial Sun' Fusion Reactor Soon

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  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Sunday December 22, 2019 @12:34PM (#59547648)

    BTW, why doesn't the sun go to college?
    It already has a million degrees.

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:06PM (#59547764)

      TFA's claim that this replicates the sun is inaccurate.

      This reactor uses normal DT fusion, just like ITER and NIF.

      Fusion in the sun is proton-proton fusion [wikipedia.org].

    • Because 7, 8,9
  • by Applehu Akbar ( 2968043 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @12:37PM (#59547658)

    Someone posts them them whenever the subject of fusion tech comes up.

    1. "Fusion over unity is ten years away. It always has been."

    2. "We already have a perfectly good fusion reactor, located in a safe place. We don't need concentrated energy sources of our own."

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:20PM (#59547806)

      You can tell fusion is getting closer because the pundits have whittled it down from "thirty years away, always has been" to ten.

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:22PM (#59547814)

      These points always come up because they are true. China is making progress, but we still a long way from energy-breakeven and much much further away from money-breakeven.

      Grid-scale solar PV is at 3 cents per kwh and falling. It is implausible that fusion will get anywhere near that for decades, if ever.

      • Yeah, it's a totally misleading news story. It's just another tokamak, a half-century-old technology that physicists have been tweaking and tuning for fifty years without getting anywhere close to "limitless clean energy". Good to see another country getting in on it, and China's rather totalitarian but also technocratic government can just decree that X be done rather than spend 20 years arguing over funding, but after all that it's just another tokamak.
        • >technocratic government

          How is China a technocracy when they are a one party system ripe with corruption, censorship, and Xi as leader for life who reshaped the politburo to fit his needs?

          Seriously, I do not understand. Who in the Politburo are the scientists and technologists? Or are they in the politburo because of their party affiliations and acceptance of Xi? Once upon a time you could argue the percent of engineers was enough but not anymore.

          The only thing technocratic of their government is that it

    • 2. "We already have a perfectly good fusion reactor, located in a safe place. We don't need concentrated energy sources of our own."

      Ah, but remember the old proverb:

      "A sun in the hand . . . is worth two ~150 miles away in the bush."

    • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )

      1. "Fusion over unity is ten years away. It always has been."

      Sooner than humans on Mars 20 years from now (for the past 50 years).

      • We could have humans on Mars in 10 years if: we had the right people, the money, and the political acceptance of the risk involved.
      • 1. "Fusion over unity is ten years away. It always has been."

        Sooner than humans on Mars 20 years from now (for the past 50 years).

        In both cases the statements are true and have been true all along, as long as you add the qualifier with which they were originally made "...if you agree to fund this project". Given that the politicians keep not agreeing to fund the project the date keeps getting pushed back.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      In particular (1.) is staggeringly stupid. No involved scientist ever claimed that. I recently listened to a podcast with the two lead scientists on the Wendelstein X-7, and while they were pretty sure this will eventually work and were proud of the advances made, they said that significant engineering and plasma Physics advances are still needed and that these would at least take several decades and that building a working prototype may take as long after that. So, significant progress is made, things are

  • This think inevitably goes south. Do we end up becoming the sun ? Or does it just melt into the center of the planet? Fall into the ocean and cause massive ocean warming?

    Glad it's happening in China though, I mean it's not like the lie cheat and steal. They can be really honest about when stuff breaks as well right... RIGHT....

    I welcome our sun controlling, magma based, overlords. And might I say, not a one of us on this planet can take the heat, so yeah...

    • by nadass ( 3963991 )
      The environment would not provide sufficiently stable and continuous conditions to result in melting of the planet. Unlike the actual Sun, whose own core is cooler than its hot surface.
    • by Cochonou ( 576531 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:12PM (#59547778) Homepage
      Tokamaks (and more generally fusion generators) cannot go south. The fusion reaction can only be sustained if the hydrogen atoms are confined in a relatively small volume. If containment is breached, the reaction will stop. This is one of the big advantages of the fusion design over "conventional" nuclear fission.
      However, the fusion reaction also creates a lot of fast neutrons, which will turn the reactor structural materials into radioactive materials. Those materials tend to be shorter-lived than fission waste, but the extent to which this energy can be really called "clean" is disputable.
      • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @02:25PM (#59547996)

        However, the fusion reaction also creates a lot of fast neutrons, which will turn the reactor structural materials into radioactive materials.

        True, but this problem can be minimized. Lithium can be used to absorb nearly all the neutrons, and lithium does not produce radioactive products other than tritium which is fed back into the reactor.

        The lithium can be contained in zirconium pipes, and those pipes can be relatively thin since neither the reactor nor the molten lithium needs to be pressurized. Zirconium has a very small neutron cross-section, so nearly all neutrons emitted by the reactor would pass through the pipes and into the lithium.

        There would be some long-lived nuclear waste, but way less than what a fission reactor produces.

    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:13PM (#59547780)

      This think inevitably goes south.

      Keeping a fusion reactor running is like keeping a candle lit in a category 5 hurricane.

      Believing there is a plausible risk of it getting out of control requires an astounding degree of willful ignorance.

      • Humans are still cavemen and subject to irrational, superstitious reactions to some things, like ZOOMIES BAD! (warding sign against Evil). All you have to do is say the word 'nuclear' and most people go into that hardwired instinctual knee-jerk reaction mode where higher brain functions simply turn off.
      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        To be nitpicky, I believe that there is a plausible risk of it getting out of control. It's just that the result would be less of a problem than a mine collapse. It would still be likely to cause millions of dollars worth of damage.

        • This whole thread is getting stupid. But

          It's just that the result would be less of a problem than a mine collapse. It would still be likely to cause millions of dollars worth of damage.

          What do you think the typical cost of a mine collapse is? On an open cast mine (where you're either digging stuff out, or moving stuff aside before you dig out the stuff below it), the mining process is controlled manage collapse of the walls. A collapse would be an inconvenience to be moved aside in the normal course of work

      • Believing there is a plausible risk of it getting out of control requires an astounding degree of willful ignorance.

        Before you read my reply, I want you to know that I am in complete agreement with you. With that said...

        Then we both agree that the general population hold the position that this will inevitably go south. :)

    • by synaptik ( 125 ) * on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:20PM (#59547808) Homepage

      Fusion "going south" just means that it snuffs out like a candle. It is not a runaway reaction like fission is. 100 million degrees sounds scary. But the moment you lose containment of the plasma, the fusion reaction dies.

      • Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)

        Fusion "going south" just means that it snuffs out like a candle. It is not a runaway reaction like fission is. 100 million degrees sounds scary. But the moment you lose containment of the plasma, the fusion reaction dies.

        Interestingly, the moment you remove the water from a fission reactor, the fission reaction stops....

        Which is not the same as saying the heat goes away. Just the fission....

        • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @02:37PM (#59548012)

          Interestingly, the moment you remove the water from a fission reactor, the fission reaction stops....

          No. This is wrong. First, many fission reactors are not water-moderated. For those that are, removing the water slows the reaction, but does not stop it. There is also plenty of heat generated by continued decay of fission daughter products, which can continue for decades, and this heat alone is enough to cause a meltdown.

          Fission reactors can't simply be turned off.

          Fusion reactors can.

          • by HiThere ( 15173 )

            They can't be turned off, but well designed ones should be able to be turned so far down that they stop being a problem.

            Unfortunately, most of the reactors in operation could not reasonably be called "well designed" by modern standards. And the new designs haven't really been tested. Most of them haven't even had pilot plants built.

            Then there's the problem of "spent fuel". This needs to be addressed. Possibly the promise that the molten salt Thorium reactor can consume that as part of it's own fuel is c

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      With the first Hydrogen Bomb test, they did _not_ know whether they would ignite the atmosphere. The pushed the button anyways (the nuclear fanatics are utterly crazy). Later, they found out that there was no risk of that happening.

      • Had the "igniting the atmosphere" thing ever been anything but a fringe idea before they detonated it?
        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          It was the eggheads themselves that were not sure. The Physics needed to be sure was not available They did consider it unlikely.

          • Well, that's probably because it *was* unlikely. Just like when people were worried about LHC creating a miniature black hole, it had already been common knowledge by that time that significantly more energetic reactions occasionally happen in the upper atmosphere because the universe serves us significantly more energetic particles than we ourselves can make (except that they don't happen to conveniently collide in front of any of our detectors, so we had to build the huge accelerator around the detector a
  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Sunday December 22, 2019 @01:45PM (#59547892) Homepage Journal

    Here's the basic problem with fusion power: humans can't produce the densities of regular hydrogen found in the Sun, so projects like this Chinese one attempt to make up for that by using a reaction of deuterium and tritium which occurs at much lower energies. So it's not an "artificial sun" at all; it runs on an entirely different reaction -- one that no doubt happens in the Sun, but is not where the bulk of the Sun's energy comes from.

    And there's problems with that D-T reaction. When people talk about reactors producing a net gain of power, they're counting the 80% of the reaction output that is produced as useless neutrons . We might well be able to generate net power in a fusion reactor some time in the next decade, but nobody has any idea how to get from there to producing net electricity. And those neutrons are worse than useless; they'd quickly turn a D-T fusion power reactor operating at production capacities into a pile of radioactive scrap. For a given power output, a D-T reactor would produce over 25x the neutrons that a fission reactor does.

    Choosing D-T as a fuel contributes to that illusion of a panacea almost within our grasp. it lowers the bar to achieving net positive power at the cost of most of that power being unusable waste. It's doubtful that D-T fusion will ever produce a working power plant, and if it does, it probably won't be a *clean* power plant. However, research like this could be a stepping stone to anuetronic fusion, which could be clean but requires much higher power inputs.

    In any case we are not going to see a working fusion plant in the time we have to affect the course of climate change. Fusion is fine as basic science, but we'd be much better off working on advanced fission reactors if we're hoping for practical results.

  • ...millions of people have bought into the the curly-cue CFL light bulb equivalent of energy production, namely wind and solar.

  • What goes on in the minds of such people? Anything? How do they even manage, day in, day out, to so completely ignore the single most massive figurative elephant in the room there *literally* ever was:
    The giant, MASSIVE, five BILLION year fusion reactor in the sky!!

    You know how much it would take, to power the entire world with that?
    A 400x400 km patch of solar power plants in the desert.
    And even if we didn't use it it would be produced. And even if the entire planet woud be covered in solar cells, we'd onl

  • We've heard all of these nuclear-fables before. Go solar, wind, tidal. Above all else: conserve.
  • I'm expecting an earth-shattering kaboom.

  • China seems to be the only country that takes sustainability seriously. They are beginning to get a handle on CO2 emissions [eia.gov], despite increasing output. They are also the only country to take the elephant in the room seriously and control population. Success in fusion would allow them to accelerate the move from fossil fuels.
  • Well.. if the world comes to abrupt end.. this would probably be why.
  • It would be great if the live organ harvesters and surveillance state we call China developed cheap, efficient fusion energy.

    Then we could steal it, implement it ourselves, and use some of the profits to make some restitution to all the firms and individuals that China has stolen ideas, technology, and information from.

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