Iter: World's Largest Nuclear Fusion Project Begins Assembly (bbc.com) 65
Thelasko writes: The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase. After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" required for fusion power. The $23.5 billion facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France. Advocates say fusion could be a source of clean, unlimited power that would help tackle the climate crisis. Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction. Current nuclear energy relies on fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one. This releases vast amounts of energy with very little radioactivity. Iter will confine hot plasma within a structure called a tokamak in order to control fusion reactions. The project will aim to help demonstrate whether fusion can be commercially viable. France's President Emmanuel Macron said the effort would unite countries around a common good.
One of the BIG problems: Iter is very large. (Score:3)
Quote from the Slashdot summary:
"After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot 'plasma' required for fusion power."
My understanding is that it is completely unknown if Iter will operate usefully.
Re: One of the BIG problems: Iter is very large. (Score:1)
Re: One of the BIG problems: Iter is very large. (Score:2)
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Not according to some US Navy researcher patents.
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Fusion that generates more power than it consumes is hard.
If it were easy, any ol' planet could be a sun
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Almost anyone with a bit of money can build a fusor, with parts and instructions available on the internet. So yes, it is easy. It becomes much more difficult when you're trying to build a powerplant rather than a classroom demonstration.
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Re: One of the BIG problems: Iter is very large. (Score:4, Interesting)
Break even has already been achieved so we know it i possible. From what I remember, ITER is a scaled up "safe" design (tokamak) where the physics is pretty well understood. It is mostly about figuring out all the engineering issues that will pop up since nothing like it has ever been built before. A semi-commercial prototype reactor could then be designed based on what we learn from ITER, if the economics make sense.
The biggest threat against fusion power is not physics, but economics. The final price tag for both reactor and infrastructure must be comparable to solar power or any new tech like thorium reactors that may appear over the next 50 years.
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Break even has already been achieved so we know it i possible.
Not yet. JET achieved a Q value of 0.67, pretty close but no cigar. ITER is expected to reach Q > 10, and order 0f magnitude improvement, and more.
There really is no doubt that it will be successful in operating the Q ~10 region. Tokamaks are very well understood technology now, so this is a large scale engineering project to prepare for the construction of an actual demonstration power reactor.
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yes but that Q was just plasma heating energy only. The device took 20 times that for other things like confinement and cooling. So 24MW heating of plasma made 16MW energy, but another 650MW needed by system. Nothing remotely approaching anything useful for a power plant. ITER in the same boat, a working plant would be decades from that, so I say ITER is a distraction. We should be spending the money on perfecting working existing tech. The sun puts out more energy than a thousand earths could use, i
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Break even has already been achieved so we know it i possible.
Not yet. JET achieved a Q value of 0.67, pretty close but no cigar. ITER is expected to reach Q > 10, and order 0f magnitude improvement, and more.
Huh, I was so sure I had heard of break even many many years ago. Thanks for correcting me!
I guess I might have confused it with "extrapolated breakeven" or something. There's a lot of break evens...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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No, nothing approaching break even ever done. JET produced 16MW of energy for 24MW of plasma heating, but the device as a whole took a lot more power for things such as containment and cooling, to the tune of about 650MW (fact often left out of articles for the masses)
We are nowhere in the quest for working fusion reactor power plant, ITER is a waste of money.
very little radioactivity (Score:1)
with very little radioactivity
The article said it would produce, "very little." The devil is often in the details. I wonder what they mean by very little, and how long a half life that little bit will have, and what are the plans for its containment for those years.
Re: very little radioactivity (Score:3)
Fusion produces massive amounts of radiation, in the common case of D-T fuel, largely in the form of a high-energy neutron. At reaction rates needed for commercial production, the neutron flux would melt you.
The good news is these neutrons are captured in a layer known as the âoeblanketâ which produces T to feed into the reactor. Only a percentage will not undergo this process, and instead either escape the reactor or hit the reactor itself. In these cases they tend to smash the atoms in those bit
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I don't see fusion becoming financially competitive with other forms of power any time soon (next 50 years) for the simple reason that it is hugely complicated. Complexity, large scale and the inability to use large scale automation to reduce costs will likely prevent fusion from moving beyond being a novelty with the current big designs.
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I use a much larger fusion plant, so size is not a problem at all.
It shines a lot light to my roof every day, reliably, cheaply, and without supervision.
Some people never go outside during the day. (Score:2)
(It's called the "Sun".)
I think you could have your own Sun, but you would have to know how to travel to it.
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you don't need to own it. There's enough sun for everybody. :)
Unless you live in UK
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you don't need to own it. There's enough sun for everybody.
LOL.
The latter has never impacted the former, my friend.
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you don't need to own it. There's enough sun for everybody.
LOL.
The latter has never impacted the former, my friend.
(I know you jest but there is some truth reflected in it)
And that my friends is why capitalism will eventually fail. Beyond a certain level greedy shitbaggery will cause society to collapse.
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What do you mean "usefully?"
Iter is a research project. It will operate usefully because it's purpose is to provide a realistic-scale facility to test all the techniques fusion researchers have been developing on their small-scale systems.
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"Iter is very large. If it works, that may become acceptable. However, the size presents many problems. "
They have only 1 IKEA key to assemble it?
Re:One of the BIG problems: Iter is very large. (Score:5, Informative)
Iter is very large. If it works, that may become acceptable. However, the size presents many problems.
ITER is built on early 90-s technology. It uses low-temperature superconductors and has a large central pillar to accommodate all the cooling needed for it. And it won't be able to operate continuously because it uses inductive plasma heating by slowly changing the field of a huge poloidal magnet.
But it's all safe technology, tried and tested in other tokamaks. It will allow scientists to study actual burning plasma in conditions that are expected in industrial power plants. There's simply no other way to do it, no current simulation is capable of properly predicting plasma behavior. And simply scaling up reactors actually provided both bad (lots of hydrodynamic instabilities) and good surprises in the past. Out of the good surprises, the first large US tokamak discovered so called "H mode" of plasma that significantly improves its confinement properties, and its properties are still not explained theoretically.
If everything works out OK, the next DEMO plant will be much much simpler. It'll likely use high-temperature superconductors (they have just now became feasible for large magnets), thin central pillar design, RF-based plasma heating augmented with neutral beam injectors and so on.
BEST explanation. (Score:2)
Iter managers have not been good at explaining the progress, in my experience.
Iter insufficient reporting last year (Score:2)
Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Every 13-14 billion years we build a hadron collider. Or a nuclear fusion plant...
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Mods are on crack today. That's some funny shit.
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I have a few stalkers, who mod me down (as Troll), whenever they get mod-points. Which is way too often, obviously. Some times they'll even post in the same thread then — but only as AC, obviously.
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It cannot be either. We've been running colliders for a while and we're still here. And fusion, well there is the Sun and it didn't create a Biug Bang, and we did build the fusion bomb and tested it, too. That, too, didn't cause it.
My bet is on Dark Energy. If we can figure out how to draw power from Dark Energy then we could be plugging straight into God's butthole. I'm sure he'll have another Big Bang waiting in there for us.
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Quantum particle energy. Infinitely small and infinitely fast relatively speaking. They only express mass when it a sufficiently large and dense structure, like a photon of light or the quantum singularities of which we are constructed a lot more enduringly and they give off a lot of energy when they break down. The key to manipulating quantum particles effectively is not the strength and size of the energy fields used to manipulate them, but how compact and dense you can make those fields to impact the flo
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You jest, but we all know the last time this happened, you said the exact same thing.
The Fusion Constant (Score:2)
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That's the nice thing about this project... (Score:1)
To me this project is about preventing the start of the next 20 year promise, to where if it's not going to work out this can let us know, or move us forward enough to actually make it happen. The results if it works are so promising and significant that it's worth the effort to explore viability.
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Hmm, wrong.
Fusion power is here to stay, and it's nearly too cheap to meter. At big scale.
https://energyindustryreview.c... [energyindustryreview.com]
Duke Nukem Forever (Score:2)
Duke Nukem Forever saw the light of day. But let's not hope it will be as big a disappointment
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You guys keep quoting that stupidly. Sometimes one of you says 50 years, and sometimes it's 25 years, other times it's 10 or 5. Not to mention you just subtly moved the goal post to "commercial power generation" from "controlled fusion energy gain". The truth is that it has always been a matter of enough investment. You easy-to-give up people managed to influence enough people to make your prophecy true. It's like hiding all the flour and then saying cake baking isn't possible technologically. Fusion was n
Re:The Fusion Constant (Score:5, Informative)
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Idiots regurgitate snappy soundbites and think they're contributing some remarkable insight all the time. Fusion is X number of years away and always will be. Correlation does not imply causation (it does). Never march on Moscow (okay, that one is true).
I think these are a relative of rules of thumb. Rules of thumb are an over simplification that someone who understands a topic tells you to get you to go away and stop bothering them. For these arguments by sound bite we need another term, one for an over si
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> You guys keep quoting that stupidly
Because pro-fusion woos keep stating it.
> subtly moved the goal post to "commercial power generation" from "controlled fusion energy gain".
No, the claims are always about commercial power generation.
Let me introduce you to Daniel Jassby, formerly a principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, one of the largest fusion labs in the world (and one of the first as well). Jassby periodically updates a list of people claiming that fusion will be in c
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TAE Technologies: in 2011 predicted "a working commercial reactor between 2015 and 2020"
TAE is actually leading the bunch. They are working with incrementally larger machines and so far have confirmed that the scaling law holds. The next one should have performance characteristics good enough to burn D-T plasma with positive energy balance.
The holy grail for them is p-B11 fusion, of course.
Re:The Fusion Constant (Score:5, Informative)
Ah the same Lame Joke.
ITER is the first major step towards commercial grade Fusion power generation. It represents the single biggest investment in fusion in history (at $18+ billion it was almost impossible to accomplish without investment from every nation). ITER also represents and the biggest international science project ever attempted. ITER's goal is to evaluate all the commercial fusion technology developed to date in a working fusion power generation plant and will hopefully provide the blueprint towards real Fusion power generation.
Will ITER be a success? We can only hope, as every previous attempt has been stymied by technical problems. It will be the largest tokamak reactor every constructed and includes scientists and investments from every major world power including Europe, Japan, Russian, China and the USA.
If Fusion power generation based on tokamak technology can be accomplished, ITER will the first step towards that goal and will provide the blueprint for future plants.
Cannot MOD this post .. BUG! (Score:1)
Disruption can't be solved (Score:1)
Disruption can't be solved. Bigger the project, bigger the disruption. It will work 5 minutes then it will stop. Nice for science, but can't work as is.
Gotta start somewhere. (Score:2)
Safety (Score:2)
Re:Unlimited? I don't think so ... (Score:5, Insightful)
So you favor fusion, with the gravity confinement reactor in the sky. It too has finite fuel supply. 8D
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No, I favour renewable energy.
No power source we know of is unlimited. Calling fusion unlimited is a deception. Calling anything unlimited inspires greed.
I prefer energy sources that are not being sold to us as being unlimited, but that require people to think, for example what it means for energy to be renewable. It inspires energy awareness and moderation of consumption.
Or say, do you believe fusion energy will solve all our problems? You probably do ...
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While lithium and deuterium are not technically unlimited, they might as well be. Both are common enough in seawater. As someone has already pointed out, the Sun only has a finite fuel supply
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So why call it unlimited when you know it isn't?
We don't call renewable energy unlimited. We call it renewable, because it renews itself.
Sticking with solar and wind power.. (Score:2)
It is claimed that solar and wind can, on average and in the absence of grid-scale storage, supply up to 30% of the power on the grid until you run into stability problems. What about pumped storage? That is limited by the sites where it can be implemented. What about battery storage? That smooths out daily variation but seasonal variation remains a problem.
Let's stipulate solar and wind can supply fully 50% of the power on the grid.
So a person boasting of selecting solar and wind power is saying,
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> Let's stipulate solar and wind can supply fully 50% of the power on the grid.
No, let's stipulate it can supply 100%.
Why not? You didn't present a single credible study to back up your claim, so I'll do the same.
No one really knows (Score:2)
In the absence of grid-scale energy storage, no one really knows what percentage of wind and solar can be safely placed on the grid. I have attended more than one job interview talk for a Power Networks candidate in an ECE department, and there is much speculation on what can be achieved.
30% is a kind of spit-balled number, until recently, a goal for "renewable penetration" as evidenced by my local power company having a "30 by 2030" slogan. Not the credible study you are demanding, but the actual resp
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Stability issues seem to have been more of an engineering issue hyped by trolls.
Solar and wind do have availability limitations. A person who scheduled their electrical use around those availabilities and invested in a battery to charge during high availability and provide what they needed during low could make that claim.
A store claiming 100% renewable power is usually because they've elected to pay extra for their electricity. It's kind of a holdover from when renewables were considerably more expensive b
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A store claiming 100% renewable power is usually because they've elected to pay extra for their electricity.
I pay my own electricity and my provider is one of the cheapest in the UK, getting it only from renewable sources.
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As I said, this is probably a holdover from when renewables were more expensive. I lived near a wind farm around twenty years ago and you could pay ~20% more to "get your electricity from wind."
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Why do people keeping bragging about the getting 100% of their grid power from wind and solar (I am looking at you, greedy capitalist local food store making that claim)?
I don't brag about it, I support it.
Renewable energy scales better than the so called unlimited energy. Nuclear energy requires fuel, which needs extraction, refinement and transportation, which requires infrastructure. The fuel for renewable energy is readily available, and in case of solar power can it scale down to individual devices without rely on any grid at all.
One cannot put a fusion reactor on top of a house or onto a small devices, but you will always end up needing fuel for it or depend on a prov
Blurred satellite images ... (Score:1)
I wanted to see what it looks like from the air. Seems like they blurred satellites images on purpose ...
https://goo.gl/maps/ZtqW4egTdn... [goo.gl]
Primitive old Tokamak. Can't out more out than is (Score:1)
The whole project is silly at this point. We know it will never be a viable way.
Now stellarators, like Wendelstein 7-X, on the other hand .... those are an entirely different story
World's Largest Fusion Project (Score:1)