Korean Nuclear Fusion Reactor Achieves 100 Million Degrees Celsius For 30 Seconds (newscientist.com) 126
An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: A nuclear fusion reaction has lasted for 30 seconds at temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees celsius. While the duration and temperature alone aren't records, the simultaneous achievement of heat and stability brings us a step closer to a viable fusion reactor -- as long as the technique used can be scaled up. [...] Now Yong-Su Na at Seoul National University in South Korea and his colleagues have succeeded in running a reaction at the extremely high temperatures that will be required for a viable reactor, and keeping the hot, ionized state of matter that is created within the device stable for 30 seconds.
Controlling this so-called plasma is vital. If it touches the walls of the reactor, it rapidly cools, stifling the reaction and causing significant damage to the chamber that holds it. Researchers normally use various shapes of magnetic fields to contain the plasma -- some use an edge transport barrier (ETB), which sculpts plasma with a sharp cut-off in pressure near to the reactor wall, a state that stops heat and plasma escaping. Others use an internal transport barrier (ITB) that creates higher pressure nearer the center of the plasma. But both can create instability. Na's team used a modified ITB technique at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, achieving a much lower plasma density. Their approach seems to boost temperatures at the core of the plasma and lower them at the edge, which will probably extend the lifespan of reactor components.
Dominic Power at Imperial College London says that to increase the energy produced by a reactor, you can make plasma really hot, make it really dense or increase confinement time. "This team is finding that the density confinement is actually a bit lower than traditional operating modes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it's compensated for by higher temperatures in the core," he says. "It's definitely exciting, but there's a big uncertainty about how well our understanding of the physics scales to larger devices. So something like ITER is going to be much bigger than KSTAR". Na says that low density was key, and that "fast" or more energetic ions at the core of the plasma -- so-called fast-ion-regulated enhancement (FIRE) -- are integral to stability. But the team doesn't yet fully understand the mechanisms involved. The reaction was stopped after 30 seconds only because of limitations with hardware, and longer periods should be possible in future. KSTAR has now shut down for upgrades, with carbon components on the wall of the reactor being replaced with tungsten, which Na says will improve the reproducibility of experiments. The research has been published in the journal Nature.
Controlling this so-called plasma is vital. If it touches the walls of the reactor, it rapidly cools, stifling the reaction and causing significant damage to the chamber that holds it. Researchers normally use various shapes of magnetic fields to contain the plasma -- some use an edge transport barrier (ETB), which sculpts plasma with a sharp cut-off in pressure near to the reactor wall, a state that stops heat and plasma escaping. Others use an internal transport barrier (ITB) that creates higher pressure nearer the center of the plasma. But both can create instability. Na's team used a modified ITB technique at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, achieving a much lower plasma density. Their approach seems to boost temperatures at the core of the plasma and lower them at the edge, which will probably extend the lifespan of reactor components.
Dominic Power at Imperial College London says that to increase the energy produced by a reactor, you can make plasma really hot, make it really dense or increase confinement time. "This team is finding that the density confinement is actually a bit lower than traditional operating modes, which is not necessarily a bad thing, because it's compensated for by higher temperatures in the core," he says. "It's definitely exciting, but there's a big uncertainty about how well our understanding of the physics scales to larger devices. So something like ITER is going to be much bigger than KSTAR". Na says that low density was key, and that "fast" or more energetic ions at the core of the plasma -- so-called fast-ion-regulated enhancement (FIRE) -- are integral to stability. But the team doesn't yet fully understand the mechanisms involved. The reaction was stopped after 30 seconds only because of limitations with hardware, and longer periods should be possible in future. KSTAR has now shut down for upgrades, with carbon components on the wall of the reactor being replaced with tungsten, which Na says will improve the reproducibility of experiments. The research has been published in the journal Nature.
must (Score:1)
Korea, eh? (Score:3, Funny)
> Korean Nuclear Fusion Reactor
South. The answer you're looking for is South.
Re:Korea, eh? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, both north and south are Korea.
"North" Korea is officially named Democratic People's Republic of Korea (1948-Present) aka DPRK.
"South" Korea is officially named Republic of Korea (1948-Present) aka ROK.
Neither of these should be confused with the People's Republic of Korea (1945–1946) or the Korean Empire (1897–1910).
Excellent progress! (Score:2)
That would slow or end global warming.
Fusion does not have the radioactivity problems of fission. A fission accident could make an area of land uninhabitable.
All automobiles would eventually be electric. No pollution from burning fossil fuels. None of the enormous health problems from breathing pollution.
Not that much progress (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems that there is excellent progress toward eventually finding a way to develop Nuclear Fusion...That would slow or end global warming.
Or instead of waiting 50 (or 200) years you could just start building thousands of new nuclear reactors today and then if in 50 years fusion actually happens, start replacing them in a world that has already removed all carbon emitting forms of energy creation.
I do indeed look forward to a world where energy is bountiful for all, it means a lot of good things for everyone. Which is exactly why some people have been trying to stop it for decades.
Re:Not that much progress (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, why don't you ask the Ukrainians what happens when you build a whole bunch of fission reactors.
They already got a huge nature reserve from that, and it looks like they may soon gain another one.
Thanks for that excellent example! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, why don't you ask the Ukrainians what happens when you build a whole bunch of fission reactors.
Turns out you get reliable power even in the middle of a war... if you can keep transmission lines connected.
In a structure so strong only an external storage building is mildly impacted by repeated shelling of the area..
So yeah, that was a great example, thanks for bringing it up. People have no idea just how thick reactor walls are. You get a gold star for further promotion of nuclear power!
Re:Thanks for that excellent example! (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, it's working so brilliantly that the IAEA sent an emergency team there in the middle of an active warzone to make sure Europe wasn't about to be covered in radioactive fallout. It's working so brilliantly that there are almost daily headlines about the plant teetering on the verge of meltdown when it loses connectivity to the grid.
And let's not forget that there are Russian soldiers who *this year* received huge, potentially lethal doses of radiation from digging in the dirt around Chernobyl. Dirt that will be radioactive for hundreds of years.
Where is your backyard? Maybe you could volunteer it for one of those small nuclear reactors you nuclear shills are always going on about.
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Where is your backyard? Maybe you could volunteer it for one of those small nuclear reactors you nuclear shills are always going on about.
Which would be quite safe, since those small nuclear reactors don't exist. Nobody has ever built a viable one. The only successful use of SMRs has been in military vessels, where they don't have to be commercially viable. And even there we backed off from using large numbers of SMRs; we built one carrier with more than two (eight!) and then we discovered that was stupid.
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Where is your backyard? Maybe you could volunteer it for one of those small nuclear reactors you nuclear shills are always going on about.
I volunteer. I am not a shill, but if it were in my back yard, I would make sure it was running smoothly and perfectly while taking in huge flows of cash for providing power to people. My back yard (thanks Federal and State governments) is a safe place for a nuclear reactor (assuming that I am the one running the reactor).
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You need to think that through a bit more. A small, intense, radioactive source can be contained. A larger, less radioactive, source is more difficult to contain, and just as dangerous if in aggregate it emits the same amount of radiation. Hundreds of years isn't low level enough to consider it safe.
OTOH, people do tend to be unreasonably afraid of radiation.
That said, I'm not really sure I believe the propaganda about fusion not leaving radioactive waste. The reactions proposed all emit hot neutrons, a
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> That said, I'm not really sure I believe the propaganda about fusion not leaving radioactive waste
The tritium is quite hot in the radioactive sense, ridiculously hot in the temperature sense, aggressive in the chemically reactive sense, and it _will_ leak. It's a form of hydrogen, it's very difficult to contain in pure form, and it needs to be pure for the fusion mixture. No, I don't expect it to be safe _at all_.
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Tritium also has a half life of about 12 years. And it doesn't tend to hang around unless it's under control. On the minus sign, it's one of CHON, so in many forms it's very bio-active.
FWIW, tritium isn't one of my concerns. I'm more worried about things that tend to accumulate. Radioactive steel and concrete are large enough to be difficult to contain, and have varied enough half-lives to be hard to manage. (Well, that's also partially because of how large and clunky they are. It's my understanding
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Nonsense. I once had a watch with a tritium dial--it glowed in the dark. 50 years ago, and I'm still alive. (The glow is not from the tritium itself, but from phosphors that are made to glow by the tritium decay.) It is still used today to create luminescent things, like analog wristwatches, exit signs, military aircraft dials, and other things where electrical power might not be assured. There are other radioactive elements that can be used for luminescent things (like radium), but "Tritium is the onl
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OTOH, people do tend to be unreasonably afraid of radiation.
If you are not afraid of radiation, you are an idiot.
What actually has "afraid" to do with "(un)reason" is beyond me anyway.
Either you have reason, or you are afraid. Or you are both, or you are neither. They are on orthogonal axises.
Re:Thanks for that excellent example! (Score:5, Informative)
The reactors in Ukraine are Soviet era. They didn't have containment buildings due to cost and the belief that the reactors could not explode or melt down.
They have been improved since the fall of the Berlin Wall, but they aren't exactly a model of safety. The international inspectors are there right now, raising the alarm about on-going Russian shelling.
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> raising the alarm about on-going Russian shelling
I'd appreciate a link to that.
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Can't find anything here: https://www.iaea.org/nuclear-s... [iaea.org]
> The international inspectors are there right now, raising the alarm about on-going Russian shelling.
It might help if Turkey can help reduce the severity of the problem like they did with grain exports.
Re:Thanks for that excellent example! (Score:4, Informative)
And if you cannot get keep the transmission lines connected, you need to SCRAM your reactors and find power to cool them for a few weeks to keep them from melting. In once case they were excessively lucky that they could self-supply by keeping one reactor partially up. That is not something that can be reliably done, because you suddenly need to reduce the output from that one reactor just so much that it is enough for cooling but does not overload the local grid. Essentially, they had to run that one reactor just exactly right to prepare for this case. If you mess this up (very easy to do), your transformers go up in flames and then all your reactors melt a day or two later. Sure, you have Diesel generators for the the immediate supply, but they run out of fuel after 48h or so, because in normal times that is ample time to reconnect to the grid and the Diesel generators are_not_ enough to bring a reactor up again, for that you need a grid-connection.
Seriously, after Fuckushima, this should be common knowledge...
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Except for Chernobyl, which failed catastrophically in peacetime. It's still not considered safe to grow food or live in the 30 kilometer exclusion zone.
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In a structure so strong only an external storage building is mildly impacted by repeated shelling of the area..
The external storage buildings... where they store the spent rods.
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Well, if you use designs from the 1960s, nothing good.
If you use more advanced reactors (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]), you get safe nuclear energy. The waste issue is still there, of course, but that is probably not impossible to solve via repurposing (spent nuclear waste can still produce hot water heating for other purposes) or regeneration of new nuclear materials.
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There is a political dimension to this too: if we were to sit around and wait for fusion, the flat-earth lobby will be ready with canned arguments on how terrible an idea energy freedom would be. Build a new fission fleet first, and by the time fusion goes commercial the whole nuclear controversy will be as forgotten as Prohibition.
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Thousands of reactors, okay.
You need a lot of fuel. And a lot of waste storage. Given it's been what, over 70 years since we started with nuclear power, and most countries still haven't got a solution for long term waste storage or reprocessing, I'm not willing to simply accept that *this time* things will be different.
And what of the countries that aren't allowed to have lots of nuclear power for security reasons? And what about the ones we just don't trust to run them safely?
Most importantly, can we reall
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> One rational post on the subject, then back to spreading FUD.
Says the AC.
However, reading the post in question, there's zero FUD in it. Building a thousand reactors would indeed result in a lot of waste storage. It is true that we have been using fission for many decades and still have no widely accepted solution for that storage. It is true that a good chunk of the planet will not be allowed to use fission for security reasons. It is true that we could build enough alternatives to solve the problem b
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The same zero is attacking me, and I presume they will attack anyone else who successfully makes arguments against nuclear power. Those of us who have been making literally the same arguments against it for years are finally gaining traction as it becomes obvious to more people that nuclear is not going to solve our energy problems. We're using literally the same arguments we've been using, but now our comments are getting modded up more than down as the rest of Slashdot catches up. This is terrifying to th
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Please feel free to ignore
Ride my dick harder, troll. I haven't had a good online dick ridin' in ages. Thanks for validating me and making me feel important to Slashdot, for what little that's worth.
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All scarcity and hardship is caused by human corruption.
But corruption flourishes in a world where people are desperate for basics. The only way tossup the tide of corruption is to provide enough basics that people have more interest in pleasure than the benefits of corruption.
Abundance is evil in a capitalist economy.
If you think abundance is evil, just wait until you witness what happens as abundance suddenly ends.
Just ask Sri Lanka.
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Earthquakes, volcanoes, naughty asteroids, stars hosing us down with gamma ray jets, mosquitos, polio, Covid, ice ages, brain eating amoebas, etc.
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You really are utterly clueless.First, we _cannot_ build "thousands" of nuclear reactors "today". That number would take 50 (or 200) years. Second, we do not have the fuel for that. At current (!) usage, the current reserves run out in about 50 years.
We do not have the technology to do this "today" but we might have it "tomorrow." A small modular reactor has been approved. By design we can turn these out on a assembly line so making a thousand of them is not really out of the question. They can be deployed on the back of a truck where they are needed.
As for the fifty-year fuel supply, I doubt your numbers but let's just work with that. Evern if fuel supplies are that low, I don't see that being a problem. In fifty years if we haven't shored up
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SMRs are a lie by misdirection. There is strong indication they will be even more excessively expensive than large reactors. The other thing is that these will require something like 50 years to have an impact, and that is only if things work out. Too many innovative reactor designs have failed for that to be a given. Betting the future on SMRs is very, very foolish. Not that the human race has not been exceptionally foolish up to now or we would not be in this situation.
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There's another horrifying issue that this will stop or significantly as well that are the deaths by air pollution.
3-4 million people perish every year due the general pollution of power generation and automobiles, killing even more than global warming and many of the hot button topics such as violence.
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that's better than the tens of millions that would be dying each year by not using the benefits of fossil fuel that built our civilization. Try medieval living sometime.
No, fusion will not work in the next 50 years. ITER won't make power and may find fusion is out of reach.
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Asbestos saved a shitton of lives as well with it's fireproof proprieties.
But then we stopped to use it when we invented methods that where as fireproof but didn't carried the horrible lung diseases.
Oil is better than nothing, but we have more options than nothing such as nuclear, wind, hydro, solar...
Even gas and ethanol is a improvement over oil and coal.
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There's a LOT of effort on batteries because they're basically in everything from the cheapest to the most expensive devices.
A new, better battery technology in your phone or car or.. means more power you can put and crush the competition.
But you probably can do better and do something insane like a country entirely dedicated to battery research.
Now wind is a pretty fun ride, because every time you double the fan, you quadruple the power generation until physics get in you way and you have to somehow beat i
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I think your currently working fusion reactor is pie in the sky!
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"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong." --Arthur Clarke's First Law.
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It seems that there is excellent progress toward eventually finding a way to develop Nuclear Fusion as a way of providing power to the entire world.
It seems like that if you don't look around. It's NOT "excellent" progress if it comes too late, which is what is happening. It's already too late, and it's not even here yet.
as long as the technique used can be scaled up (Score:3)
Yeah right, ths is exactly where all the problems with nuclear power plants arise from.
A plant 10 times as big brings 20 times the amount of problems and unexpected situations.
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And pray, how did you arrive at your patently magical numbers?
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You can't even be bothered to get my name correct.
Why should I listen to you Sockpuppet?
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That's an "often true" WAG (wild ass guess). But sometimes scaling up makes many problems go away. Probably not true this time, but it should make SOME of the problems easier to handle. E.g. it might well reduce thermal losses. But turbulence would probably get worse.
Good (Score:2)
I suspect that there is going to have to be a lot of data points collected. Hotter, denser, faster, longer, etc. To plot a series of points on a graph so some smart people can figure out in which direction the optimum stability points lie. Too bad each machine seems to generate only a few of those points and each is outlandishly expensive.
We may be better off, energy-wise, if we'd just burn the money and use it for heat.
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Nope. There'll always be CO2 and particulate waste blown into the atmosphere that way.
Daft Punk (Score:3)
Hotter, denser, faster, longer
Power plant work is never over.
Is there a there there (Score:4, Informative)
For a long time I too thought Fusion sounded great....
But over several decades, you start to realize you are just hearing the same stories over and over about this or that small success in fusion reaction.
Even this story admits the duration is nothing new...
After a while, you realize it's like 10 blind men around an elephant, each feeling one part of something and trying to describe a whole....
Except that after an even longer while, you start to realize there very probably is no elephant there to start with, and all the fumbling will in the end amount to nothing - at least it terms of the goal of using fusion for energy. I'm sure they do get some useful basic scientific knowledge out of the attempts, but that seems to be as far as it will ever go.
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This is why I have a 150 year clock.
And every time we get a "new fusion breakthrough", I restart the clock.
Until they can build a demonstration reactor that can achieve carrier-grade levels of uptime, it's not a thing.
Re:Is there a there there (Score:5, Informative)
Did even you know that a design for a tokamak that most plasma physicists agree will work has never gotten the funds to be built? Reference: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
Even the current ITER project is a scaled down version of an early 1980s design.
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> Did even you know that a design for a tokamak that most plasma physicists agree will work
Agreed**D**. The chart in question is based on numbers from the early 1970s when everyone through the tokamak would work. Then we built larger tokamaks in the 1980s and they didn't work.
>Even the current ITER project is a scaled down version of an early 1980s design.
Not even in the slightest. ITER has, for instance:
1) the "advanced tokamak" layout, which uses a shaped plasma, in this case, D-shaped, to control
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"a) ...liquid metals, notable lithium, is highly suspect in the presence of such high magnetic fields": Why? It's not like lithium is magnetic.
"b) tritium breeding. In order to fuel the reactor you need D and T, and only D is available. We can make new T through "breeding", but we really have not developed this at all" Where does the tritium currently used in other applications come from? You don't need a huge mass of it for nuclear fusion.
"c) we still have no idea how you would perform maintenance on on
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And this affects the math on my equation...HOW?
But hey, let's keep playing sideshow!
Re:Is there a there there (Score:5, Interesting)
Note, we've known since the 1970s how to make fusion given a large enough tokamak. Funding for the size of tokamak that the math shows will work was never provided. So you basically don't allow the tokamak that we know will work to be built and then proclaim that fusion doesn't work. Even the current ITER project is a scaled down version of a design from 1984. You realize that 100 years ago, we didn't even know how the Sun produced energy. Heck a lot of people thought it was a lump of coal burning in the sky. Compare how far we have come since then with how long it took to go from wheel to automobile (5,000 years?) Progress is being made in spite of guys like you cutting budgets. Reference: https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]
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Too be fair, there are huge downsides to a power reactor that large and expensive. And if there were technical problems, like plasma instability eroding the walls, fixing them could be extremely expensive.
I'd really prefer a better answer, though not the "take a huge bunch of lasers and fire them all at same target at the same nanosecond" approach.
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Ah, the clairvoyance diagram - wherein 1998 someone unearthed a proposal for future fusion research activities in 1976 [pppl.gov] (this is the actual report from which the charted was lifted to be stripped of context and modified) granted oracular power decades later when we actually knew a lot more about the technology with vastly better tools which suggest the original document was very speculative. Look at page 12 of the report for the real diagram, but it is sort of a cartoon. Look at page 10 for one intended to b
Re: Is there a there there (Score:2)
In 1985 my junior high school science teacher told us that people had been working on fusion power for a long, long time, but fusion power seemed just as far away as when the research started. He said "If they had known how hard it was going to be, they would never have started [fusion power]".
Fusion power plants are not something I expect to see in my lifeyime.
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Don't look up.
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> about this or that small success in fusion reaction.
Invariably described as a "breakthrough in fusion!"
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Invariably described as a "breakthrough in fusion!"
At this rate any small sucess is a "breakthrough in fusion."
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Fusion has been just around the corner for the past 60 years. Maybe they meant coroner. Maybe it needs to be put out of its misery once and for all.
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It would be great if fusion worked, but right now we have a climate emergency. We need to act, fast. Resourced need to be directed to renewables and grid upgrades whenever possible.
Your country did exactly that, and look what happened! Lignite now and lignite forever.
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The UK certainly didn't divert all available resources to renewables. In fact the government is quite anti-renewable, having refused a record number of solar installations last year, and having had a moratorium on onshore wind for a few years now. Meanwhile tens of billions are being pissed away on new nuclear plants that won't be ready until the mid 2030s at the earliest, and which have a guaranteed strike price currently around 8x the cost of offshore wind.
We are in this mess because we failed to invest i
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> guaranteed strike price currently around 8x the cost of offshore wind.
2x. Offshore PPAs are around 6 cents USD last time I checked, and the EPR is 12.
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In the UK offshore wind auction a few weeks ago, they came in around £25/MWh. Hinckley Point C nuclear plant is on target for about £200/MWh by the time it starts generating. They had to make it insanely expensive to convince EDF to build it.
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There is no conflict. Fusion research funding is so small that it wouldn't make much difference in the rate of solar power installation.
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I have my doubts about fusion. It has always been fifty years down the road. This is great step forward the Koreans have made but there is still a long way to go.
One of the good things that is coming out is we have small modular reactor designs coming out. Soon we will be able to deploy these to places that need extra energy. These will go a long way to bring down green house gases.
Climate Change? (Score:1)
Remind me again how we are afraid of heating the air by 2 degrees over the next few years? I mean, I am no scientist, but it seems to me the law of thermodynamics requires that heat to go somewhere, and I am guessing that somewhere is our atmosphere.
But no, it is green house gasses that is the largest cause of climate change.
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Remind me again how we are afraid of heating the air by 2 degrees over the next few years? I mean, I am no scientist, but it seems to me the law of thermodynamics requires that heat to go somewhere, and I am guessing that somewhere is our atmosphere.
it is clear that you are "no scientist" because you are "guessing." The real scientists have demonstrated that while some of the heat warms the atmosphere, most of it is radiated into space. If the atmosphere contains more CO2, less of the heat can radiate to space, therefore the surface temperature and atmospheric temperature of the planet will, on average, increase. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
But no, it is green house gasses that is the largest cause of climate change.
That's right. It's not a new idea, it was proposed by mathematician James Fourier around 200 years ago, and
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But no, it is green house gasses that is the largest cause of climate change.
That's because greenhouse gasses leverage the sun, which is always blasting the earth with 10,000X the power that humans generate. The extra CO2 is a blanket trapping far more solar thermal energy than humans could ever hope to directly control.
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Indeed. The actual heat generated by humans is completely negligible for the global situation.
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Indeed. The actual heat generated by humans is completely negligible for the global situation.
Not only that, but if it were relevant, it would be because of the greenhouse effect causing the heat to be trapped instead of escaping!
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Yes. But as usual, the deniers and the fanatics have no clue how things actually work.
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Remind me again how we are afraid of heating the air by 2 degrees over the next few years? I mean, I am no scientist, but it seems to me the law of thermodynamics requires that heat to go somewhere, and I am guessing that somewhere is our atmosphere.
That isn't exactly how it works. Actually, the more heat we release into the atmosphere just means that more heat will be radiated into space by the planet.
What greenhouse gases do act as a blanket around the planet and keep the heat in. The more gases in the atmosphere the less energy gets released back into space. On that note, the amount of heat that mankind puts into the atmosphere is insignificant compared to the amount the sun puts there every day.
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Remind me again how we are afraid of heating the air by 2 degrees over the next few years? I mean, I am no scientist, but it seems to me the law of thermodynamics requires that heat to go somewhere, and I am guessing that somewhere is our atmosphere.
But no, it is green house gasses that is the largest cause of climate change.
That 2 degrees is an average for the entire planet. The problem is that localized climate changes are not just 2 degrees with all other effects constant. Some areas may experience far larger temperature increases, and more importantly, those changes often manifest as wild temperature swings that cause extreme changes in precipitation and air and water currents. If we would just have a 2 degree constant warming effect locally with no changes in precipitation and currents, that wouldn't be so noticeable.
How is 30 seconds "stable"? (Score:2)
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What the article says is that they've managed to keep the reaction running stable for a period of 30 seconds.
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That's pretty much my understanding.
But my point is that doesn't that suggest that it's not stable in the first place?
Stable, at least to me, implies that no additional work needs to be supplied to a system in order for it to maintain that state, and the state would last at least until some other factor has changed.
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I think "stable" in this context only means that it's potentially useful.
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The claim is "stable for 30 seconds"...
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Sorry if this is a dumb question.
30 seconds is long enough to take out a few players in The Squib Games Season 2.
100 million Celsius, no, stop it now (Score:3)
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That is 100 megakelvin. Stop it with the degrees Celsius already.
Why does Celsius get a capital but not Kelvin? I mean, I know he could kind of be a jerk, but it's still a proper name.
Meanwhile... (Score:1)
North Korean Nuclear Fusion Reactor Achieves 100 Billion Degrees Celsius For 30 Years.
For I am the Great Nucrear Physicist Kim Jong-un !
Same story for 50 years (Score:2)
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Nonsense. You just need to a) look at the actual results and b) realize this was _always_ long-term research and the actual experts never claimed differently. It was just the stupid press that made estimates of "at least 50 years, maybe a lot longer" into "in 30 years" because their readers cannot understand long time-frames.
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It was just the stupid press that made estimates of "at least 50 years, maybe a lot longer" into "in 30 years" because their readers cannot understand long time-frames.
I would say the opposite. They made it into "30 years" because their readers can understand that "in 50 years" means very well not within their lifetimes, and thus irrelevant to them. They changed the meaning of the story to make people care about it... by lying.
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So you think the fate of the next generations is "irrelevant"?
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So you think the fate of the next generations is "irrelevant"?
No, the readers they changed the story to appease do, or they think that the idea that the next generations are facing a worse fate than they are is overblown, mostly for reasons of cognitive dissonance. It couldn't possibly be harder to survive now than it was for them, because they want to believe they are superior, etc.
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Ok, makes sense.
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To say "Fusion reactors are nice and important for basic research" is correct, but to continue with "but completely hopeless as a source of energy." is either foolish, or reveals an extremely short time horizon. I suspect the latter, as it's technically true, i.e. it's true of all existing, and almost all proposed, fusion reactors. It's just there's no reason to believe it will continue to be true.
FWIW, there has been proposed an effective fusion reactor. It's pretty simple, and guaranteed to work. You
"so-called plasma"? (Score:2)
Maybe I'm being too harsh. It's "NEW Scientist" after all. Maybe they're so new at it that they haven't got to that chapter in their physics 101 texts.
Re:"so-called plasma"? (Score:5, Interesting)
New Scientist confuses a lot of people outside the UK. It's not a science magazine like you might imagine. It's more like a science gossip monthly. It's hard to explain unless you've experienced the UK's newspapers, they span a long spectrum from "just the facts ma'am" to "UFOs replaced the prime minister", and all of them are sort of on equal footing in terms of reporting actual news.
New Scientist is sort of on the one side of that spectrum. They report real science stories, but they are not really researched and they're happy to report any controversy no matter how balony. I recall their breathless reporting of all those people that were dying on airplanes from blood clots - remember that - and they cornered some poor MP and asked him his opinion and then giggled at his BS answer on the BS story.
It was not always this way, you can read issues from the 50's on archive.org and it's basically what someone in the US might imagine a science magazine would be like. But that doesn't pay the bills.
How is this even a story? (Score:2)
EAST did 120 million degrees for 101 seconds last summer. It was all over /.
Yet here we are with a significantly less interesting "record" and everyone's "wow, such progress!"
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Different design. As we do not know what will eventually work out, we have several different approaches going. A significant step in any of them is a significant step overall.
"so-called plasma" (Score:2)
These science "journalists" drive me crazy with their unnecessary equivocations.
It's plasma. That's it! Or are you just trying to jackup your word count?
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It's not an equivocation; they are just too ignorant to know what the term means, thinking it is the same as "known as."
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What about thermonuclear weapons? I guess you never heard of those?
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We don't want to do it the way the sun does it. That would release the power much too slowly to be useful. (Or it would take so much mass that we couldn't assemble it.)
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It would also make currently underweight people severely overweight.