'Tungsten Wall' Leads To Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough (qz.com) 47
A tokamak in France achieved a new record in fusion plasma by using tungsten to encase its reaction, which enabled the sustainment of hotter and denser plasma for longer periods than previous carbon-based designs. Quartz reports: A tokamak is a torus- (doughnut-) shaped fusion device that confines plasma using magnetic fields, allowing scientists to fiddle with the superheated material and induce fusion reactions. The recent achievement was made in WEST (tungsten (W) Environment in Steady-state Tokamak), a tokamak operated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). WEST was injected with 1.15 gigajoules of power and sustained a plasma of about 50 million degrees Celsius for six minutes. It achieved this record after scientists encased the tokamak's interior in tungsten, a metal with an extraordinarily high melting point. Researchers from Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory used an X-ray detector inside the tokamak to measure aspects of the plasma and the conditions that made it possible.
"These are beautiful results," said Xavier Litaudon, a scientist with CEA and chair of the Coordination on International Challenges on Long duration OPeration (CICLOP), in a PPPL release. "We have reached a stationary regime despite being in a challenging environment due to this tungsten wall."
"These are beautiful results," said Xavier Litaudon, a scientist with CEA and chair of the Coordination on International Challenges on Long duration OPeration (CICLOP), in a PPPL release. "We have reached a stationary regime despite being in a challenging environment due to this tungsten wall."
Understanding? (Score:5, Insightful)
If all they have done is put in some heat shielding so they can run the reactor hotter then how is this a "breakthrough"? the article seems very lacking in details to actually explain why this is an important breakthrough given that we already knew tungsten could handle heat well.
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> the article seems very lacking in details to actually explain why this is an important breakthrough given that we already knew tungsten could handle heat well.
You're on slashdot. Expectations met.
I came to this article to say something along the same lines but you said it better.
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> the article seems very lacking in details to actually explain why this is an important breakthrough given that we already knew tungsten could handle heat well.
You're on slashdot. Expectations met.
I came to this article to say something along the same lines but you said it better.
Pretty standard for Fusion Power articles though.
Fusion power - so full of breakthroughs, so lacking in actual fusion power.
Re:Understanding? (Score:5, Informative)
The WEST tokamak is an upgrade of Tore Supra intended as a test for the design of ITER. The fact that it works as expected for as long s 6 minutes (the "breakthorugh") is the good news. Here their previous scientific papers with the technical details:
* (2022) Operating a full tungsten actively cooled tokamak: overview of WEST first phase of operation https://iopscience.iop.org/art... [iop.org] (open access)
* (2023) Manufacturing, testing and installation of the full tungsten actively cooled ITER-like divertor in the WEST tokamak https://www.sciencedirect.com/... [sciencedirect.com] (paywalled)
Re: Understanding? (Score:3)
Hardly a new idea
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So do they understand why this works? I had always understood the challenge with Tokamaks was keeping the plasma away from the walls because otherwise it picks up heavy ions from the wall that radiate the heat away rapidly cooling it and stopping it fusing. How does putting a wall of tungsten help that? If the only problem is that the plasma gets hot enough to melt the walls then put in some cooling - afterall that is going to be needed to extract the heat to generate power in a real reactor.
Yeah, it would seem like the balancing act of generating the fusion and the heat involved, extracting the heat without stopping the fusion would solve two problems at once. Right away, it would go a long way towards solving the seemingly intractable Qtot problem.
If all they have done is put in some heat shielding so they can run the reactor hotter then how is this a "breakthrough"? the article seems very lacking in details to actually explain why this is an important breakthrough given that we already knew tungsten could handle heat well.
I'm pretty certain that it isn't any real breakthrough. Tungsten's properties have been known since the late 1700's, so why wouldn't it be used earlier? Reeks of desperation to get something out into the news.
I am quite certain that after all th
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You forgot to take your brain out of the fridge in the morning?
Or did you forget to read the summary?
6 minutes sustained plasma ... ... the first minute ...
What of those 6 minutes is not a break through?
Exactly
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You forgot to take your brain out of the fridge in the morning? Or did you forget to read the summary?
6 minutes sustained plasma ...
What of those 6 minutes is not a break through?
Exactly ... the first minute ...
Yes, I read the story. Perhaps I was underwhelmed, why you decided to get insulting about it is another thing. Here we go
Wow! 6 minutes! Looks like we'll be having that safe unlimited and no radioactive waste fusion power next week - the last of the hurdles has been cleared. Only 240 tungsten chamber changes each day. The prophecy of electricity too cheap to measure has been acheived. Take that non believers! /s
Do you understand that 6 minutes after many decades of work isn't much of a breakthrough? I
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6 minutes sustained plasma is a new record.
If you do not know/grasp that. Up to you.
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The news is not about Tungsten, it is about a new device measuring the properties of the plasma.
For someone who claims he is teaching physics, you seem pretty bad at reading ...
https://www.pppl.gov/news/2024... [pppl.gov]
Oh, that link was already linked on the summary.
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The news is not about Tungsten, it is about a new device measuring the properties of the plasma.
Really so what part of "Researchers ....measured a new record for a fusion device internally clad in tungsten" -literally the first sentence of the article that you claimed to have read suggests that the record breakthrough being claimed has anything to do with a measuring device? The only way I can read that is that the record is about holding plasma for a long time in a tungsten vessel and I do not understand why this is such a major breakthrough.
You might want to try reading the article yourself - at
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Are you mixing up the article with the summary?
The novelty is:
a) time of sustained plasma
b) the ways how they measure temperatures and plasma quality
That this reactor uses Tungsten plating, and the device above can - as a side kick - measure plasma pollution by Tungsten atoms, is not the point of this experiment.
It is a bit confusing that a Physicist asks /. about something instead of just reading an article about the actual Physics first.
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It is a bit confusing that a Physicist asks /. about something instead of just reading an article about the actual Physics first.
I
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I had the same question (specifically, why tungsten?). With a google search, I found this article, titled "Operating a full tungsten actively cooled tokamak: overview of WEST first phase of operation"
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1741-4326/ac2525
Am reading it now. Hopefully, by the end of the day I'll have an answer.
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Because it can handle a higher heat load than other easily manufactured materials, thus allowing high power and longer duration operation. There are exotic carbides that can take even higher heat loads, but they are far more expensive and difficult to work with.
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You are going to making this complaint regularly for the next decade or so because what they are doing now with Tokamak technology is engineering, not research as it is normally understood. They are proving the materials and techniques for the full scale operation of ITER which should start burning tritium on an industrial scale in ten years time. It is inevitable, PR departments and click-driven media being what they are, that each incremental engineering step will be promoted as a "breakthrough".
Great! I've been looking forward to fusion (Score:4, Funny)
Does this mean that we are finally on the cusp of having practical fusion for large-scale power generation? Admittedly, there are some technical details to work through before it can really be out into practice, but I would guess this means that having fusion power plants on Earth is now only 20 to 30 years away. Very exciting times!
(/s [discovermagazine.com])
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Does this mean that we are finally on the cusp of having practical fusion for large-scale power generation?
No. We are getting close to sustained energy breakeven.
But economic breakeven is what matters, and we are nowhere near that.
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Does this mean that we are finally on the cusp of having practical fusion for large-scale power generation?
No. We are getting close to sustained energy breakeven.
But economic breakeven is what matters, and we are nowhere near that.
Close? Actual breakeven means that the power out of the fusion capsule equals the power put into the fusion capsule and covers all of the parasitic power requirements. So far, that isn't even close. Parasitic power consumption makes that Qtot number pretty bad, and I've always thought that their Qin - Qout metric was dishonest.
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This is a Tokamak design, thus no fusion capsule. The inertial confinement fusion uses fusion capsules, but this is a magnet trap design.
Thanks for the correction. Regardless, 6 minutes isn't much to get excited about.
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Carbon tax ! (Score:2)
Does this mean that we are finally on the cusp of having practical fusion for large-scale power generation?
No. We are getting close to sustained energy breakeven.
But economic breakeven is what matters, and we are nowhere near that.
But if we just tax everything else enough... /s
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We're in the engineering phase, not the theory phase.
That's really significant but few non-engineers can understand it.
Some dipshit non-engineer will say, "so 30 years away?" before this thread is over.
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We've had the theory of fusion power, including tokamak designs, for almost 70 years now. For all that time we have supposedly needed 20 to 30 years of working out technical details (engineering) before we can really put it into practice. This doesn't move the needle significantly.
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We're in the engineering phase, not the theory phase.
That's really significant but few non-engineers can understand it.
Some dipshit non-engineer will say, "so 30 years away?" before this thread is over.
I might be parsing your post incorrectly, but it appears that you are saying that there is no impediment to practical Fusion power generation that cannot be solved by applied engineering.
Be nice to the dipshits, they are making a joke based on the Fusion power's previous timeline claims that kept getting missed, This time, it's for real!
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It's nasty work that's doesn't pay well, but somebody has to do it.
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Hearing the same shit for decades tends to do that. The timelines here suck, mainly because it's not considered important. If it were important, there wouldn't be a single site worldwide in France chosen to work on a test reactor.
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We get a massively hyped report of a tiny step forward every few years, and the amount of fusion seems to be proportional to the amount of money poured into it. (And here I thought we were trying to fuse hydrogen atoms, not euro notes/dollar bills/whatever.) What makes this time different than the last ten breathlessly reported breakthroughs?
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I would guess this means that having fusion power plants on Earth is now only 20 to 30 years away
About the same time we all move to IPv6
At last! (Score:4, Funny)
A thoughful comment (Score:5, Insightful)
Nowadays we spend a lot of time criticizing the pseudo-journalism that has arisen in the internet age, especially with science reporting. So, it was refreshing to see the last paragraph of the article cited, from Quartz. It might be the most valid thing I have read about fusion :
" We must stress—as we do any time we’re discussing the possibilities of fusion technology—that the road of progress will be meandering, and slow, and in some cases a boondoggle. Every mountain has its molehills; you won’t be able to know their significance in the context of progress unless you keep climbing. "
Next step (Score:2)
Now try it with Hafnium carbonitride (HfCN).
any year now (Score:2)
Fusion power is just around the corner.
I feel like i now know less about fusion (Score:2)
After reading the article and the comments here, I feel more stupid.
Re: I feel like i now know less about fusion (Score:2)