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Power China

China Turns On Nuclear-Powered 'Artificial Sun' (phys.org) 108

Posted by BeauHD from the testing-testing-1-2-3 dept.
China successfully powered up its "artificial sun" nuclear fusion reactor for the first time, state media reported Friday, marking a great advance in the country's nuclear power research capabilities. Phys.Org reports: The HL-2M Tokamak reactor is China's largest and most advanced nuclear fusion experimental research device, and scientists hope that the device can potentially unlock a powerful clean energy source. It uses a powerful magnetic field to fuse hot plasma and can reach temperatures of over 150 million degrees Celsius, according to the People's Daily -- approximately ten times hotter than the core of the sun. Located in southwestern Sichuan province and completed late last year, the reactor is often called an "artificial sun" on account of the enormous heat and power it produces. They plan to use the device in collaboration with scientists working on the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor -- the world's largest nuclear fusion research project based in France, which is expected to be completed in 2025.
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China Turns On Nuclear-Powered 'Artificial Sun' More

China Turns On Nuclear-Powered 'Artificial Sun'

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  • Wuhan, or at least Hubei province.

  • 150 million degrees? (Score:5, Funny)

    by niftydude ( 1745144 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @09:02PM (#60796012)
    I guess they're in the right place. Sichuan food is also that hot.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:150 million degrees? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @10:16PM (#60796150)

        Simply put, no. It's a deuterium/tritium reactor. Tritium has a very short half-life, and is primarily available from the breakdown of uranium. Running enough nuclear reactors or breeder reactors to produce the tritium for the necessarily inefficient fusion plants would provide many times the power of the fusion plants themselves.

        There is some interesting work involving _thorium_ fuels, but tritium is not an effective fuel source. It's far too rare and expensive to generate. Its use as fuel is the fiscal equivalent of burning diamonds to heat your home, especially since tritium currently costs $30,000/gram, and abrasive grade diamonds only cost $1,000/gram.

        • Comment removed based on user account deletion

        • Re:150 million degrees? (Score:5, Informative)

          by joe_frisch ( 1366229 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @10:47PM (#60796200)

          If you are able to make a working D-T reactor you get enough neutrons out that you can use them to generate Tritium from Lithium (which is pretty common)

          Today tritium is made using fission reactors because we don't have any working fusion reactors.

          There are still issues with handling the tritium but there isn't a supply problem.
          https://www.iter.org/mach/Trit... [iter.org]

          • Today tritium is made using fission reactors because we don't have any working fusion reactors.

            There's plenty of working fusion reactors. Just none of them are any good at producing a net gain power output, at least none that any are talking about publicly. What they are quite good at doing though is producing neutrons.
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

            If you are able to make a working D-T reactor you get enough neutrons out that you can use them to generate Tritium from Lithium (which is pretty common)

            That's precisely how fusors are used to produce more tritium today. A working D-T or D-D fusor is simple enough that high school students build them as science projects.

            We collect tritium from fission reactors because it is a neutron poison, it can

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          It's an experimental research reactor, they're not expecting to make money selling electricity. In order to learn how to do really cool stuff you sometimes need to spend a big chunk of money, which is why the US doesn't spend much on basic research any more.

        • The half live of Tritium is 12 years.
          And you usually collect it from sea water ... your post makes no sense.

          • Your posted half-life for tritium is correct. But _deuterium_ is harvested from sea water, typically from fresh water. Sea water is salty, corrosive, and awkward to refine in the necessary bulk to produce significant amounts of deuterium. _Tritium_ is harvested from fission reactors, typically from the lithium shielding bombarded by neutrons from the uranium. And if you have that much high energy neutrons from a uranium fission reactor, you don't need a deuterium/tritium source to trigger reactions in your

            • Fission reactors have no lithium shielding. Unless it is purposely build for tritium harvesting.
              That is an idea for fusion reactors.

              The idea that you can harvest sea water for fusion fuel makes neither economic nor thermodynamic sense.
              Thermodynamics has obviously nothing to do with it ... or are we suddenly talking about steam engines, compressed gases etc.?

              • Lithium, in the form of lithium hydride is one of the _primary_ shielding materials for fission reactors. Which isotope is used affects strongly the availability of tritium generated by neutrons from the uranium striking the lithium shielding.

                The energy involved to harvest water for tritium far exceeds the energy available from the tritium. Even if the energy spent for electrolysis to split oxygen from hydrogen is _mostly_ recoverable, the amount of tritium in fresh or sea water is so small that any losses

                • The energy involved to harvest water for tritium far exceeds the energy available from the tritium. Even if the energy spent for electrolysis to split oxygen from hydrogen is _mostly_ recoverable, the amount of tritium in fresh or sea water is so small that any losses whatsoever far outweigh the available fusion energy. Ergo, "it does not make thermodynamic sense".
                  even if it was true - which it obviously is not - it has nothing to do with "Thermodynamics", as it is not a steam engine/heat engine/pressure e

                  • Oh, my. The definition of "thermodynamics" generally includes the exchange of all forms of energy, not merely steam engines. Those of us old enough to have worked with assembling and wiring physical components can attest that thermodynamics affects hardware, batteries, and fuel supplies. Perhaps you'd benefit from a basic physics course? Or chemistry, where tracking energy with the laws of thermodynamics in mind is vital to understanding reactions. Even biology can provide fascinating understandings, learni

                    • Oh, my. The definition of "thermodynamics" generally includes the exchange of all forms of energy, not merely steam engines.
                      No, it does not.

                      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

                      Thermodynamics is strictly about heat and gases.

                      For example a PV cell has nothing to do with thermodynamics, nor an orbit of a satellite around the earth, nor your CPU in your computer ... (stupid americans).

                      Can you name even _one_ design that plans to harvest tritium from water shilding? There are a number of so-called "hybrid" designs

                    • From the Wikipedia article you cite:

                      Thermodynamics applies to a wide variety of topics in science and engineering, especially physical chemistry, chemical engineering and mechanical engineering, but also in other complex fields such as meteorology.

                      Nuclear physics and power supplies would seem to be candidates for such complex fields, especially pointing out that the fusion supply takes more power to refine the tritium fuel for than it has ever shown any signs of generating. Ergo

                    • Nuclear physics and power supplies would seem to be candidates for such complex fields,
                      Then learn to read. (The wiki article)
                      They are not.

                      Can you point to _any_ design, existing or future, fusion or fission, for any reactor that harvests tritium from water
                      I never said that a fusion reactor harvests tritium from water.

                      You claimed that a fission reactor makes tritium from lithium, which is wrong. Simply learn to read, and re read my previous posts.

                      Angel OUT

                    • Look again at the ral articles.

                      https://inis.iaea.org/collecti... [iaea.org]

                      The tritium in a light water reactor is primarily produced from lithium used for moderation of the reactor. Not the water.

                      There are other designs discussed in that article, such as using helium exposed to neutron radiation to generate and recover tritium. But no one does this: it _leaks_. I can't find any actively used samples. Can you? And oh, neither is that based on water. It relies extensively on helium.

                    • This is about "tritium production", we covered that 5 post back already.
                      Most Fission reactors are for production of electricity, not tritium.

                      It relies extensively on helium.
                      No, it does not. You can not make tritium from helium.

                    • Yes, tritium is a byproduct of many fission reactors. It's one of the potential larger scale sources of tritium for fusion, and is part of many fusion power plans. But that brings it right back to thermodynamics: is it worth the extra energy consumed to refine and handle the tritium, and run the fusion reactor, to recover the currently never-provided power that such a reactor might yield? It's currently a huge net loss of power, with no sign that the efficiency of D/T fusion plants will ever justify the ene

        • If you have a working fusion reactor you can use the neutrons to breed more tritium from lithum.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by Chas ( 5144 )

            The problem is, is the reaction energy positive or energy negative.

            If you're burning 1000 grams of tritium to produce 500 grams of tritium, you have a problem.

            • In principal it is a net win - if you can build a working reactor. You get enough neutrons to breed enough new tritium from the lithium.

              • Re: (Score:1)

                by Chas ( 5144 )

                I'm not talking "in principle". Because that's just pie-in-the-sky BS.

                I'm saying flat out. If you're putting more energy and more fuel in than you are getting out, it isn't viable.
                And last I checked, we were still there with fusion.

                So while the reactor "works", the economics don't.

                It's like burning diamonds to run a steam engine.

        • As far as I know, tritium for nuclear fusion is generally produced from lithium. A neutron hits the lithium nucleus, resulting in an alpha particle (helium nucleus) and a tritium nucleus. The tritium fuses with deuterium, to produce an alpha particle and a neutron. This neutron then goes in to feed more reactions. A favourite fuel for nuclear fusion is lithium deuteride, which contains both nuclei required. The lithium has to be the 6Li isotope, with 3 protons and 3 neutrons. The more common 7Li isotope doe

          • Li7 does produce the desired result it just takes higher energies to do so, as they discovered accidentally during the castle bravo test, which in turn led to a complete ban of aboveground testing

          • You ar4e correct. Molten lithium is typically used for shielding at fission reactors. The amount of the triium in the world has been dropping for decades as fission reactors have been falling out of favor. handling and refining the tritium embedded fuel is its own nuclear waste adventure in safety.

            • As far as I know, tritium derived from fission reactors should only be needed to initiate fusion. If we actually achieve ignition and sustained fusion, then the neutrons produced by the fusion of tritium and deuterium should sustain tritium production. However, the equation I have seen indicates that you only get one neutron out for one neutron in, so the usage of neutrons to produce tritium would have to be 100% efficient, which I doubt will happen in practice.

              The nuclear safety aspects of tritium extracti

              • Tritium as a mere trigger? The primary fusion reaction in almost all theories for fusion reactors is one deuterium and one tritium atom. Tritium is roughly 3/5 of the fuel, by mass: the extra neutron from the tritium is radiated, and is the main source of energy from the reaction.

                • I certainly did not mean that tritium is a mere trigger. I think the intention is that a significant proportion of the tritium required for fusion is generated using neutrons emitted by the tritium-deuterium fusion itself. If you can use lithium as a neutron absorber in a fission reactor, then you can do the same in a fusion reactor. I presume that the lithium shielding absorbs the energy of the neutrons, and heats up, so there is no loss of power if neutrons are absorbed.

                  • Using lithium shielding to generate some tritium has been suggested, but it would inevitably be inefficient. One neutron from a D-T fusion could only produce one Lithium from Lithium-7, and there are some inevitable losses. Given the cost and short half-life of tritium, I don't think it can be economically sustained.

                    The project always seems to require fission based breeder farms, using uranium for fission and possibly lithium as the tritium source, to provide fusion fuel. And with that many fission reactors

                    • I take your point about needing fission reactors to produce tritium, as the fusion only process is only partially self-sustaining.

                      At $30,000/gram for tritium, synthetic industrial grade diamonds are considerably cheaper as fuel.

                      The question of whether fusion is ever going to be economically worthwhile hinges on the additional energy yield of fusion, on top of the energy yield of the fission reactors that produce the tritium needed for fusion. Even if tritium costs so much to make, it is worthwhile producing it if only tiny amounts are required to produce useful energy. Comparing the price of tritium wit

        • There was some talk about revolutionary breakthroughs in boron fusion [wikipedia.org] a year or 2 ago (was that Polywell ?), but I haven't heard much since them...

  • Can anyone at all reply to this please?

    Iâ(TM)m an old SlashFag.

    Something is going on; Iâ(TM)m no longer replied to, and havenâ(TM)t received mod points in years.

    Thanks.

  • Does anyone know what the research goals are? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @09:51PM (#60796100) Homepage Journal

    All I can find is that they plan to work with ITER somehow, but with a smaller tokamak. This seems to be similar to what the Plasma Fusion Center at MIT is working on -- using it's expertise in magnet technology to build a physically smaller tokamak.

    The big problem in all these experiments is that the deuterium/tritium reaction they use releases the lion's share of its energy as (for now) useless neutrons. ITER is working on that, I know, but for now we seem pretty far from hooking fusion power reactors up to the electric grid.

  • We promise this time.

  • What has actually been achieved? (Score:3)

    by John Cavendish ( 6659408 ) on Friday December 04, 2020 @10:15PM (#60796144)

    Does anybody know what has actually been achieved?
    Have they turned it on?
    Have they run first plasma?
    Have they achieved first fusion in this tokamak?

    All the articles I found suggest like they started to fuse, but it seems unlikely and there is actually no information what has been done and what this "big news" is about, as testing reactors has been operated throughout the world for some time (including in China), and as far as I know (despite big progress in efficiency and plasma control) no major breakthrough (more energy out than in) yet.

    • Not a tokamak. A stellarator.

    • This tokamak is an example of new line of development that will dominate fusion projects from now on. It was not built to test the ability to hit new confinement or fusion parameters, although it is one of the largest and highest current tokamaks in the world. It was built as an engineering demonstration and development platform. It is designed to be a more practical tokamak, robust, easier to build and services, and to permit the testing of components for ITER.

      Just as ITER is a stepping stone to a demonstr

      • Thank you.
        So at what stage is this tokamak, is it built and ready to run plasma, has it already run plasma or has it burned plasma?
        Also what are it's advantages comparing to other major tokamak projects in the world (the British and US one)?

        I am asking all this because the articles about it are very vague, they say "turned on an artificial sun", which would suggest they burned (fused) plasma, but I have not found any confirmation of this anywhere, to the contrary, seems like all the hipe is about it being b

        • OK, I found some info. The tokamak has been build and the news are about first plasma run (not fusion), but heating up medium to reach plasma state, which is a standard procedure before trying first fusion.

  • One of the major complaints about solar power is that it doesn't work when it's dark or cloudy. Build an indoor artificial sun, and problem solved!

    If the solar panels are arranged in a ring, does that count as a Dyson ring?

    • Solar sails, used as solar mirrors, could beam Terawatts of solar power to microwave arrays on Earth, including solar sails in slightly skewed orbits to provide night-time power collected and beamed to those ground stations.

      Putting them in a ring would be closer to "Ringworld", but isn't necessary. The solar sails can get a bit of orbital guidance from tilting the sails as needed to manipulate their orbits. Part of the danger would be using them against ground targets, which could be very difficult to preve

      • Just what the earth needs - more energy being inserted into the atmosphere only having to escape eventually as heat. I suppose it might be better then the alternative so long as the energy is being effectively used. But to actually balance things out, those solar sails should be designed to block just as much solar energy from reaching earth as they redirect to earth. This way they have a net zero impact on global warming.

        • It's an interesting question if the energy is in _addition_ to Earth's current chemical and solar energy production. I'd anticipate it replacing major non-renewable sources and reducing the _greenhouse_ gases associated with them. Reducing the greenhouse gases effectively should allow more efficient cooling frm solar radiation, which is much more plentiful energy than the solar sails might produce for the immediately foreseeable future.

  • I think that would be the ideal next location. They need more electricity, and nobody would notice the additional heat down there.
  • And swallow the Chinese government LOL.
  • You mean the industrial catastrophe that is ITER at Flamanville ["Le Monde", in French] [lemonde.fr] ?

    Started in 2007, a lot of delays, a lot of technical failure. Yes, may be in 2024 or 2025.
    We may be living in the hope it bring "clean" energy (whatever that could be). But we're not living in the hope of its start, we're living in the fear that it became the most powerful bomb ever detonated.
    • As far as I can tell, ITER is totally unrelated to EPR in Flamanville. You're mixing things up.

    • No, Iter is a Tokamak. This is a stellarator.
      Tokamak will fundamentally never work.

    • First, ITER is just north of Marseille in southern France, not on the coast of the English Channel in Normandy: it almost could not be further from Falamanville and still be in France!

      Second, it is physically impossible for a fusion, or fission, reactor to explode with the force of a nuclear bomb which it would have to be "the most powerful bomb ever detonated". The explosions which can occur at fission reactors are chemical or pressure-related in nature but are nevertheless extremely dangerous because t
  • and now they are stealing our sun energy!

  • It's the net step beyond Tokamak-type reactors. We've got one. In Germany, ours is called Wendelstein 7-X and it's awesome (original gravity of the word).

    • Oh and stop saying "atificial.sin" for a Tokamak piece of shit. I is a failed technology. "Stellarator" literally means "that which generates a sun", and is the only type deserving of the name "artificial sun".

  • Every sufficiently technologically advanced country gets to blow money on fusion energy research devices once they have enough money laying around. Welcome to the club!

  • Surprising that a site called "phys.org" would fail mention the technical relevance of the device. This tokamak is not a record breaker in any particular way, though it is one of the largest and highest current machines in the world, but it is an advanced engineering design -- a demonstration of a more practical tokamak, closer to what would be needed in a commercial plant. It is a stepping stone to ITER, which is in turn a stepping stone to a demonstration power plant.

  • How long? (Score:3)

    by SimonInOz ( 579741 ) on Saturday December 05, 2020 @08:34PM (#60798862)

    So, let me guess, they are hoping to have a working fusion reactor in twenty years?

    You know, people have been saying that for my entire life. And I was born in 1955.

  • I often wonder how much of earth's oxygen do these hotter than sun plasma experiments use up, and what if we start having them full time in every country as a nuclear alternate?

  • The article states "the reactor is often called an "artificial sun" on account of the enormous heat and power it produces".

    No. It's called an "artificial sun" because it's an attempt at replicating the nuclear fusion process that powers the sun and other stars.

    -1 for misleading physics vulgarisation.

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