Fusion (not cold)

enda1

Talking about nuclear....

www.iter.org

This looks like it could be the real future for nuclear power. FUSION. Now this is not cold fusion but happens at millions of degrees celcious. Quite interesting if they get it up and running and self sustaining.

Any thoughts?

Pocari Sweat

By eck, it looks like a massive fecker, and the pics look like they have nearly made the thing already.

They could do with puttin a flash animation of it working though and some running commentary of what it is meant to be doing.

democrates

Pocari Sweat wrote:

By eck, it looks like a massive fecker, and the pics look like they have nearly made the thing already.

They could do with puttin a flash animation of it working though and some running commentary of what it is meant to be doing.

I think that design uses a mag field to hold a fusing plasma in the core space which is trying to expand, ultra high tech required.

Solid state fusion is another hopeful, from what I can gather a laser fires into a tightly packed molecular lattice and fusion results. Not sure how scaleable it would be though.

enda1

Solid state fusion is currently used. It acts like a mini nuclear bomb. It is used to test materials to see how they stand up to nuclear blasts without having to undergo a full weapons test.

Not sure if there is much research into scaling to large scale or exploting for generation uses.

yeah this is seriously high tech. All the parts individually have been proven and a proof of concept is there. Fusion works and fusion generators exist. What this project is for is to test the comercial viability of it as a fuel source. It needs top be this big as there is a critical size below whioch it costs more energy to run than it yields whereas this should be completely self sustaining, and provide an excess of 500MW!!!!

Pocari Sweat

They have been talking about fusion for decades now, and I wonder is it just recently they have built up the funds or technology to take up the challenge.

During the time the fusion idea was conceived, we have had the nuclear age and space age. Will a successful launch of fusion bring us into a new era, the fusion age, will it be a major technological jump for mankind?

OSiriS

ITER is the next step in fusion research, and is expected to be online in 2016. I believe they hope to have the first fusion reactors generating power for widespread electricity production 20-30 years after that.

monkeyfudge

It's a big international undertaking which is interesting... although it was held for some time as the Japanese wanted it built over there but Europe won out in the end which is probably a good thing as we all know how prone to Earthquakes Japan is.

Scary level of technology though... it's going to run hotter than the centre of the sun.

SeanW

it probably takes a load of energy to get the plant or whatever up to a million degrees ...

Pocari Sweat

Temperature is somewhat separate to heat though.

Ye could easily knock up millions of degrees in a lab, and have small amounts of heat, but huge amounts of heat for power production coupled with those sorts of temps is serious energy.

Samos

The experts always claim that fusion power is "50 years way". This is sometimes termed the "fusion constant"! It is certainly an enticing prospect, but I think it may be too little too late. I am concerned at the vast amounts of fossil fuels being used to research fusion power, and after all of these years it has not provided a single watt. Perhaps it will come to fruition in (say) forty years, but at current rates of comsumption there will be little oil or gas left then, and there will not be any to invest in renewable technologies. Should it fail, there will then be other reliable source of power.

I think it would be wiser to invest the fossil fuels that we currently have on proven renewable energy technologies, so that they may sustain our everyday requirements. It seems a little too risky to invest everything in a massive project that has no guarantee of success at such a critical time. In addition to this I think it is paramount that we stop squandering non-renewable resources as though it is current expenditure. We need to cut down on driving and flying when we don't absolutely need to, and source our food requirments in the locality to reduce wasteful transportation. If we can do these things first, then it may be time to investigate fusion power.

SeanW

Well this ITER thing is in France, so it's probably getting its juice from Nuclear Fission Power.

killerwatt

Look up these
Fusor
Bussard - kind of hard to find these days - EMC2 energy matter convervsion corporation
Also watch : Should Google Go Nuclear.

Believe it or not... Google may be sponsoring an already proven and demonstrated fusion reactor. Dr. Bussard with the US Navy built and demo'd a functional machine last year. Concept, plans and home lab version already in public domain...

professore

Have a look at this one: http://www.focusfusion.org. Looks plausible to me.

piraka

Of course cold fusion never went away.

Science 8 March 2002:Vol. 295. no. 5561, pp. 1808 - 1809DOI: 10.1126/science.295.5561.1808
News of the Week
NUCLEAR FUSION:
'Bubble Fusion' Paper Generates a Tempest in a Beaker
Charles Seife
The heat from the controversy alone is nearly enough to trigger a nuclear reaction. This week in Science (p. 1868), scientists led by nuclear engineer Rusi Taleyarkhan of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee claim to have seen evidence for nuclear fusion in a beaker of organic solvent. That stunning claim, if true, could eventually have important consequences for nuclear proliferation and energy production. But other scientists, citing another Oak Ridge experiment that seems to belie the claim, are likening the paper to cold fusion. Adding to the brouhaha is a series of exchanges between the magazine's editor-in-chief and nonauthors seeking to influence Science during its publication of the paper.
Unlike nuclear fission, fusion is very difficult to initiate. Only at extremely high pressures and temperatures can atomic nuclei slam together hard enough to merge, or fuse, releasing energy in the process. A hydrogen bomb achieves those pressures by first setting off a small fission bomb to get the process going. A handful of labs are gearing up to do the same with enormous lasers or powerful magnetic fields (Science, 18 August 2000, p. 1126; 25 January 2002, p. 602). Small-scale "tabletop" fusion reactions, meanwhile, have remained far out of reach. And the scientific community is still wiping egg off its face from the 1989 debacle involving so-called cold fusion, in which some researchers erroneously claimed to have seen fusion catalyzed by a lump of palladium metal.
It is against this backdrop that Taleyarkhan, nuclear engineer Richard Lahey of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, and colleagues make their case for tabletop fusion. The work relies on a phenomenon known as acoustic cavitation, in which sound waves rattling through a fluid create tiny bubbles and then cause them to expand and compress. Under certain conditions, those bubbles give off tiny flashes of light as they collapse, a phenomenon known as sonoluminescence. Many scientists believe that the bubbles, compressed by the acoustic waves, reach great temperatures and pressures. Some speculate that under the right conditions, those bubbles might--just might--provide conditions extreme enough to trigger fusion.

Although there is still controversy

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/may06/3428

McSandwich

Interesting article about fusion research in the UK, looks like they're making real progress:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1573450.stm

I've searched (ITER, etc.) but have not found any Irish investment interest in fusion, I wonder why??

luapenak

Samos wrote:

It seems a little too risky to invest everything in a massive project that has no guarantee of success at such a critical time.
We need to cut down on driving and flying when we don't absolutely need to, and source our food requirments in the locality to reduce wasteful transportation. If we can do these things first, then it may be time to investigate fusion power.

I dont think there investing "everything", just a few billion (just under 5 billion for construction spread out over six countries over ten years. its not that much on the grand scale of things.

As regards waiting around. if we wait around for people to stop doing things that there not that likely to stop doing (not that i dont agree that people should cut down flying and driving), then it will be too late.

Capt'n Midnight

McSandwich wrote:

Interesting article about fusion research in the UK, looks like they're making real progress:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1573450.stm

Any update since 2001 ?

McSandwich

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

Any update since 2001 ?

Yeah, good point!!

The project was completed in 2005, here's an overview of the results which state that "Signifcant progress" has been made: www.fvolpe.co.uk/Phy/Publ/JC07_NF05_GCounsell.pdf

eoin5

I cant wait! Deep space exploration here we come

But seriously its a very interesting project and I think itll be fusion for mains power and hydrogen for vehicles in our future.

If I was living in the south of france I might be ducking and covering when they switch this thing on.

Grudaire

eoin5 wrote:

If I was living in the south of france I might be ducking and covering when they switch this thing on.

You can't create a chain reaction from fusion- if it's not working crank down the heat and it stops......

eoin5

Cliste wrote:

You can't create a chain reaction from fusion- if it's not working crank down the heat and it stops......

Yep, good auld thermonuclear stability, stick a fan in there an it'll be fine .