China to Build World's First "Artificial Sun" 429
cletuii writes to tell us the People's Daily Online is reporting that China is planning on building the world's first "artificial sun" device. From the article: "The project, dubbed EAST (experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak), is being undertaken by the Hefei-based Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It will require a total investment of nearly 300 million yuan (37 million U.S. dollars), only one fifteenth to one twentieth the cost of similar devices being developed in the other parts of the world."
Sun Tzu (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Sun Tzu (Score:5, Funny)
Is China getting a civilization advance for this, or can they update all energy units for half the cost once this is complete? Mr. Chairman! We have completed a great wonder...Artifical Sun
Re:Sun Tzu (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Sun Tzu (Score:3, Funny)
Looks like they need an artificial sun.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Gasp (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gasp (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Gasp (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Gasp (Score:3, Interesting)
When the Chinese looked towards Japan (east) they see a rising sun, so the chinese characters for Japan represent a sun (ri4) and its origin (ben3). Japan didn't have a writing system of their own and through a protracted process adopted the Chinese characters even tho the language was totally different (approx 5th century). The character for ri4 meant "sun" and was mapped by the japanese to the word 'Ni' which meant the same. The chinese character (ben3) which meant "or
Not Funny: Taiwan Supplies the Technology (Score:3, Informative)
Obligatory cliche (Score:5, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Poor relations with Mexico? (Score:3, Insightful)
Hunh? The US hasn't been at war with any of its neighbors (Canada and Mexico) for over 150 years. I'll grant you that Cuba may qualify, but Mexico? Compare that with Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia -- a couple of World Wars come to mind at the very least.
And you think we have poor relations with Mexico? Admittedly the relations aren't at all perfect, but poor? Last time I was down there, in Mexico City, no one spit on me. Sure the
Re:Poor relations with Mexico? (Score:3, Insightful)
(With apologies to Aristotle, I think. Google didn't turn up the original which I remember as "We will stop needing slaves when the looms run themselves".)
In Other News.... (Score:5, Funny)
Tokawha? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tokawha? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Tokawha? (Score:2)
Re: Hairy-ball not a troll ;-) (Score:3, Informative)
The Wikipedia article is indeed accurate, although very terse.
-- and yes, I AM a plasma physicist (or at least, was one for 4 years)
Re:Tokawha? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Tokawha? (Score:5, Informative)
Fission is what powers nuclear power plants and atomic bombs. It works by splitting the atom (lot's of energy is released on splitting the atom's nucleus.)
Fusion is what powers the Sun by combining atoms into bigger attoms (even more energy is released.)
To combine two atoms together, it is necessary to overcome nuclear forces that are very strong. In the Sun, it happens because the gravity that pulls the Sun together heats up the atoms so much. The atoms become very fast and slum into each-other at huge speeds (above 10,000,000K to do this) and overcome the nuclear forces and join into bigger atoms. This releases more energy than fission (splitting atoms.)
If we can find out a way to use Fusion to actually generate power, we will have virtually endless supplies of power (just use hydrogen from water to combine it into Helium for example.)
TOKAMAK is a machine that generates large thoroidal electromagnetic fields ( a donut type of a field), and inside the donut's tunnel, it is possible to hold superfluid material - plasma in a suspended state.
The plasma is created by speeding up the atoms within the thorus. Fast atoms then will hit into each other at higher speeds, and once the speeds are high enough to merge them, you get a thermonuclear reaction. Until recently it was impractical to use TOKAMAKs for energy generation, because the amount of energy spent on heating up the atoms was greater than the energy retrieved from the reaction.
1-2 years ago I heard the news that there was a break even somewhere in the world, but I can't confirm it.
(Some history: Work of Lev Davidovich Landau (a Soviet physicist,) on superfluidity of Helium and plasmas [nobelprize.org] allowed further work on TOKAMAKs which were invented in the 1950 by another Soviet - Andrei Saharov) [aip.org]
yay (Score:3, Funny)
KaBOOM ! (Score:5, Funny)
Infinite energy?
Uh
Re:KaBOOM ! (Score:5, Funny)
The article says that the reactor "aims to generate infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy". Infinite energy?
Anything that outlives you can be considered infinite. For example, my honda CRX is infinite.
Re:KaBOOM ! (Score:2)
Re:KaBOOM ! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:KaBOOM ! (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, because the reporter probably doesn't know what he's talking about. :)
When we have a working fusion reactor (expected somewhere in the second part of this century), the reactor itself of course won't provide infinite energy. But there is enough fuel on earth (and by extension on the moon) to last us a few million years. Longer than humans have been around. So in that sense, the first working fusion reactor will provide infinite energy, because we finally figured out how to build one. Once the first one is build, building dozens more is merely left as an exercise for the engineers.
Theoretically, when there is ignition, all the energy generated is pure profit. You don't have to add energy anymore, only fuel. So the energy output/energy input = infinite. But that is not the same as infinite energy. You still needs to add fuel. The amount of fuel injected in a reactor determines how much you get out of it. That is certainly high, but definitely less than infinite. And in practice, there will always be some losses. So the ouput/input ratio may be high, but not infinite.
There is also no need to worry about something like TMI or Chernobyl. In a classical nuclear reactor, all the fuel needed for years sits inside the reactor waiting to be used. In a fusion reactor, the fuel pellets are injected from the outside on a need to have basis.
loss of containment (Score:3, Interesting)
Can a knowledgeable person comment about escaping neutrons, gamma rays and stuff in such an event? Could that lead to a nasty cloud of radioactive strontium or something similar to what we think of with "fission gone bad"?
Re:loss of containment (Score:4, Informative)
Re:loss of containment (Score:5, Informative)
What do you mean by losing containment?
If the chamber bursts, the plasma comes into contact with the outside world. Everything in reach of the plasma is going to have a lousy day, but there isn't an explosion. Also, such an environment isn't exactly beneficiary to fusion reactions.
If the magnetic fields disappear, the plasma comes into contact with the wall. Again not very positive, for the wall and potentially for everything outside. Again, something which doesn't exactly promotes fusion reactions.
The only way, as I see it, for such a reactor to explode is to maintain confinement and keep adding fuel and fuel until it explodes.
An explosion is a lose of containment, but lose of containment doesn't imply an explosion.
In my other post, I did forgot to mention x-rays. But I have no idea about the amount of x-rays produced in a tokamak or in case of failure or the effect of it on humans, so I won't comment on that.
As to the radioactive particles from fission. It's the short lived ones that are dangerous, not the ones that are stable for a few billion years. Heck, we are living in a world filled with particles that have a 4+ billion years half live. Everything else has mostly decayed and disappeared since Earth's formation.
Re:loss of containment (Score:3, Informative)
Re:loss of containment (Score:5, Informative)
A magnetically confined fusion plasma is a very tenuous beast. If all operating conditions are not satisfied, the background plasma requisite for fusion will not be created -- and if you go from 'good' to 'bad' operating conditions, the plasma snuffs itself out on the order of a confinement time (several milliseconds depending on device parameters).
has any scientist working on such a reactor deliberately simulated a total containment field failure?
Sure -- in modern research devices these failures happen for a myriad of reasons. Disruptions have happened a lot in the course of this research. On current devices, a disruption can be a 'no big deal' operation or force repairs; on a fusion reactor they really need to be avoided. Fortunately, the cause of showstopper disruption events are well known and techniques exist to stay away from the region of parameter space that causes them! There are also techniques to mitigate disruptions from unexpected failures [wisc.edu] (PDF warning).
think a popcorn kernel what happens when it reaches the right temperature? *pop*
There's a difference between temperature and energy density. For instance, if you blow out a candle you can snuff out the glowing wick with your fingers without burning them -- despite the wick being around 1000 K. The reason is that the candle wick doesn't have much energy stored inside. The same goes for a magnetically confined plasma. While the plasma has a very small tail in its energy distribution which allows thermonuclear fusion, the stored energy in the plasma itself is insufficient to, say, melt a building and set off an incindeary firestorm.
Re:loss of containment (Score:5, Funny)
I do not think this word means what you think it means.
"Disclaimer" here means "take this with a grain of salt; I might be biased." Now, if you weren't actually a plasma physicist--say, if you were a gardener--I could see adding a disclaimer. But since you are a plasma physicist...
Re:loss of containment (Score:5, Informative)
Worst cases I can think off. Mind you, I haven't studied fusion reactor disasters, yet. So I could be wide off. However, it is my impression that not many people are worried about this. And that what I write down here is the prevailing knowledge. I have a masters degree in physics and worked on a tokamak for my masters thesis. For my PhD, I will be working on plasma's within a few weeks. So, that you know, I am not a crackpot scientist. English is not my native language, have patience.
You fill the reactor with as much fuel as you can, and you keep the machine going (i.e. you keep the magnetic field lines on, so that the plasma is confined and fusion reactions are going on.). Once enough fuel is inserted and energy is build up, you get an hydrogen bomb. An hydrogen bomb requires a classical fission bomb to get temperatures high enough so that fusion starts. But this can not happen accidently. In other to use a fusion reactor as a bomb, you intentionally have to add fuel to get it that far that it will explode. Any fusion reactor will have safety mechanisms. Now such things can fail. But since the fuel is sitting outside, safety systems can be designed that no fuel is inserted unless the operator (assisted by a computer) authorises fuel injection.
Contrast this to a fission reactor (the ones in operation now). All the fuel is present inside the reactor. The only thing operators can do is manipulate the burning rate. When something fails here all the fuel just keeps burning.
If something goes wrong in a fusion reactor, the reactor simply has to burn out. This happens rather quickly. there is no need to keep fuel inside that is needed more than for a minute or so. (Don't know how much or how long, just below the critical value for a explosion.) Fission reactors have fuel rods inside that lasted for years. Fusion reactors can be designed that fail safe means that no fuel is injected. You have to override such systems just to inject fuel, just to keep it going. In fission, fail save means that carbon rods are inserted between the fuel rods and you hope/pray that the fission reactions stop.
Okay, so what happens when everything goes wrong. No extra fuel is injected and the operators are no longer in control of the machine. It can not explode because there is not enough fuel inside. So forget Chernobyl and TMI. This means that everything outside the building is safe.
So, it can not explode. That leaves radiation. These are neutrons, gamma's (high energy light waves), high energy particles (alpha's mostly). There are other particle inside a reactor than alpha particles. Alpha particles (20% of the energy of a fusion reaction, 80% goes into the neutrons) are needed to keep temperaturs high. But this needs to be supplemented by external energy sources (another fail save, stop injecting energy.) Now these other particles, such as helium (this is the waste from fusion reactors. Even the waste has high economical value ! ) and carbon (eroded from the wall) have to be continually extracted from the reactor because the are bad for maintaining the required temperatures and energy levels. Alpha particles are stopped by a piece a paper. Don't worry about them. The neutrons are needed to generate tritium (tritium is radioactive, I think it has a 20 minute halve life inside the human body). But tritium will only be needed in the first few generations. Because using tritium is the easiest way to get towards a working fusion reactor. So the neutrons activate the reactor and the reactor will be stored for 50-100 years as high radioactive waste. Strontium, as you mentioned, although present in carbon and a waste product of coal plants is not present in fusion reactors. So these neutrons hit the wall, generate tritium and heat the wall/water in pipes and exit the chamber. (the water inside the chamber wall is the first water pipe system and generates steam in a secondary pipe system. From here you have a classical power plant of any kind.) Blocking those neutrons coming from the reactor chamb
Re:loss of containment (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't really have any way of knowing that you are who you say you are, or verifying that you know what you say you know, but assuming that you are and you can (respectively), I'd like to tell you that you rock! That was the best explanation of a complex subject to a mostly layman audience I've read in a long time.
[Posted AC so I don't get a reputation for being complimentary to people]
Re:loss of containment (Score:3, Interesting)
Rest assured I am who I claim I am. In posts as this I am very careful in what I write and I doubt every line. First to make sure I didn't make stupid mistakes, because I don't feel like being made an idiot by someone who knows better, and second because I know myself that there is much knowledge about this and that I still have much to learn about it. It's also easy to make a mistake in a rather quickly written comment.
At the moment I making a site
Re:loss of containment (Score:3, Interesting)
1) An optimistic version of an extreme worst case. My worst case would have had the fuel feed under computer control, and the problem being, say, a virus controlling the computer...and, naturally, falsifying the readouts.
2) A pessimistic version of an extreme worst case. When the pressure valve lets go (or the containment chamber cracks) all reactions stop immediately. Loss of pressure reduces both heat and pressure below the critical amount.
OTOH, I'm only a dilitante at physics...a
Re:loss of containment (Score:3, Insightful)
I do know that there is less waste than with a fission reactor. In both cases the chamber has to be treated as waste. The fuel itself from fission is additionnel waste compared to fusion. The problem, while still there, is definitely not as bad. As to figures regarding volume, I don't know. As to years, I always heard something like 50 years of storage for the vault.
Fusion research is a difficult, m
Re:loss of containment (Score:3, Informative)
The concept of the question is that any one of those three things would give us a viable fusion reactor. They're all technical issues.
1) Superconducting magnets. Tokamaks rely on SC magnets to create their st
Re:loss of containment (Score:4, Interesting)
Still, it would be nice to know exactly what the problems are with continuous running of a fusion reactor.
Re:loss of containment (Score:3, Informative)
Re:loss of containment (Score:4, Informative)
Point one: tokamaks run their plasmas at about 1 millionth of atmospheric density; the rule of thumb is 10^20 particles/meter^3. This means the plasma is in a vacuum vessel.
Point two: for DT fusion, you've always got neutrons coming from the reactions. And they're fast neutrons, which means they'll react with the Nickel in stainless steel to form Cobalt-60, which is a gamma emitter. But that's stuck in the wall, and you'd want to use a different material for your walls anyway.
Point three: if magnetic containment fails and the plasma hits the wall, the plasma just dumps its thermal energy into the wall, and fusion can no longer be sustained. This happens in experiments all the time, though they try to avoid it. At worst, this could rupture the wall.
Point four: I haven't studied this in detail, but if the wall ruptures, then there will be air sucked _into_ the reactor to equalize pressure. In a real plant design, you'd probably have separate air circulation for this region of the plant, but for disaster analysis you'd assume a small amount of what's inside the reactor gets outside into the world. The only radioactive stuff would be tritium, which is relatively harmless, but still a problem.
So if a fusion reactor fails, nothing catastrophic happens. You need extreme extreme density to have an H-bomb. This is what they do with in Inertial Confinement Fusion, compact DT ice with lasers. I don't have my notes right now, but that resultant density is a whole fricking lot more than 10^20 per meter^3.
Neutron embrittlement (Score:5, Informative)
There are no free lunches especially when it comes to nuclear engineering/physics. The promising thing here is that you have the potential to have a much higher power density and cheaper fuel since deuterium, in the form of heavy water recovered from the ocean, is not exactly hard to come by. Desalinization followed by reduction of the water to hydrogen and oxygen and then just gather ye heavy hydrogen in the form of deuterium and tritium. Heck, if they don't use the tritium in the reactor, even though it is a fine lower temperature ignition source, they could always sell it on the open market. It's quite valuable on its own.
Re:Neutron embrittlement (Score:5, Interesting)
I think a distinction needs to be made between the use of fusion to produce net energy versus fusion for other purposes, such as a low-volume neutron generator. It is the latter which IEC devices currently find their use. For instance, a friend of mine is working on using the IEC device to produce medically useful isotopes; another works on detecting explosives/land mines via the emitted neutrons.
When it comes to making power, IEC grids suffer from the same neutronics issues. A real fusion reactor will be undoubtedly the harshest material environment on Earth. These neutronics material issues are of fundamental importance, so much so that a separate neutron irradiation facility will be constructed as a part of the ITER negotiations to study the topic.
This has been a pipe dream so far (Score:2, Insightful)
China's experimental device could reveal some breakthroughs and might eventually help tide the energy deficit faced the world over.
Re:This has been a pipe dream so far (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This has been a pipe dream so far (Score:5, Informative)
Good thing too (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Good thing too (Score:2)
How far off is fusion power? (Score:2, Interesting)
Are we looking at a pipe dream here?
Re:How far off is fusion power? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How far off is fusion power? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How far off is fusion power? (Score:3, Funny)
In pre-historic times: a chimp useses a stick as a tool -- all the other chimps: "Holy Crap, Hydrogen Fusion is only 30 years away! Eep Eep Eep..."
Exponential fast-forward to 1950s: first H-Bomb is detonated -- everyone else: "Cool, we can bomb the hell out of each other, oh and we almost forgot: Hydrogen Fusion is only 30 years away! Eep Eep Eep Hooray!"
2006: After
Re:How far off is fusion power? (Score:2, Funny)
You have 30 years to go...
You have 31 years to go...
You have 45 years to go...
You
See also (Score:5, Informative)
Title is misleading (Score:5, Informative)
On another note, this is not a one of a kind device. Europe has one called JET, and is planning on making another, ITER.
2010... (Score:2, Insightful)
uh (Score:5, Funny)
Walmart (Score:2)
Skip Fusion (Score:3, Funny)
This probably also explains the Chinese Moon program. They plan to go up there and steal all the Helium-3 before we can get it for ourselves.
Don't you know (Score:2, Interesting)
Costs. (Score:2)
Yeah right. If you have to follow Chines safety standards and can pay your workers Chinese wages, of course the thing will be a lot cheaper
Yikes... (Score:2)
Siderman II (Score:2, Informative)
The scene with the artificial sun has to be pretty close to what the process looks like.
Re:Siderman II (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.moviesonline.ca/movie_gallery.php?page
Some confusion? (Score:3, Insightful)
There seems to be a degree of confusion here. Building a fusion reactor is not like making trainers in a sweatshop. A huge proportion of the work done will simply be in the design. That requires engineers and mathematicians and believe me, engineers and mathmos of this level who aren't getting an acceptable wage in China can find a job damn easily in England.
Break even will never occur with a Tokamak.
Need to use pressure,radiation and heat.
A tokamat is essentially a huge torus covered in magnets to squeeze a ring of plasma (read "gas minus the electrons") as close as possible. That is where your pressure and heat comes from. And no, you do not need radiation.
Re:Some confusion? (Score:2)
My understanding of fusion in the sun is that it never takes place with the density we hope to achive inside a tokamak. In fact fusion events are relatively rare inside the sun, and the heat flow out of the surface is not that great given the volume within which fusion takes place.
So ar
we already have clean nuclear power technology (Score:5, Informative)
Why aren't they being used? Hard to say. The US claims it's because of nuclear proliferation, but that doesn't seem like a particularly strong argument. In light of the hazards of current fission reactors, and the difficulties of achieving fusion, maybe that's the third option.
Of course, the best solution would be to stick with the fusion power plant in the sky: it provides more than enough energy for our needs, with current technologies, if we only made a concerted effort to capture it.
Re:we already have clean nuclear power technology (Score:5, Insightful)
BTW, I used to belong to several of eco-freak organizations and tried to pound some sense into them about the risk/cost/benefit ratios of various means of energy production with zero success. Which is why I parted ways with them. I'm ecologically minded, and well trained in the science and the economics of same, they weren't. Those people are not rational, sadly. It's all about what feels good.
Re:we already have clean nuclear power technology (Score:3, Insightful)
im buying one as soon as its in walmart. (Score:2, Funny)
Unforeseen Consequences (Score:2, Informative)
Bzzzzzzt! Boom!
Oh dear! Gordon, get away from the...
Shutting down, attempting shut down, it's not, it's not shutting down, it's not...
B O O M!
Horribly inaccurate. (Score:5, Informative)
Especially if they're only spending $37 million US. I'd expect research and development costs to be at least 1000 times that. Of course, the article is too light on details to even begin to understand what the hell they're talking about.
The big question about fusion power is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Cheap labor? (Score:4, Funny)
-Disgruntled Grad Student
Re:Cheap labor? (Score:2)
With these kind of discounts, a bit more tweaking by Walmart and they could have these puppies on shelves for about 3.50
Re:Labor Costs? (Score:2)
The west has a culture dominated by traditionalists (Jung sJ types - think "lawyer") - the East, esp china is dominated by conceptualists (Jung NT types - think "engineer").
Other notable exapmles:
France,Tibet, Swiss - primarily idealists (NF)
Brazil, Sweden, Italy, Canada - primarily experiencers (SP)
Re:Labor Costs? (Score:2)
Re:What are the chances that ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where would all that mass come from?
A related point is that we probably needn't worry about inventing a device that annihilates the entire Universe, either. If such a device could exist, it probably would have already been invented elsewhere, and we wouldn't be here thinking about it.
That's why astronomy and cosmology are so important -- what we see when we look far enough out, is likely all that is possible.
Re:What are the chances that ... (Score:2)
Yeah, or a device that makes the entire universe completely screwed up and illogical.
Oh. Nevermind.
Re:What are the chances that ... (Score:2)
Sorta like an entity that can perceive and then miraculously intervene in human affairs at will. The supernatural. Or does the screwed-up-illogicalness still propagate at the speed of light for some absurd reason?
It doesn't have to be heavy (Score:2)
Re:It doesn't have to be heavy (Score:2)
To create a black hole to swallow the Earth you'd need to bring more mass to Earth first.
Re:It doesn't have to be heavy (Score:2)
Re:It doesn't have to be heavy (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, big enough, and there's not enough matter in a laboratory to create such an object, nor do we have technology sufficient enough to compress the mass present in a laboratory into a space small enough to create a threatening black hole. (by "threatening" I mean one that wouldn't evaporate instantly)
There's something known as the Schwarzschild radius, which is more or less the "event horizon" of an object of a given mass. Onl
Re:What are the chances that ... (Score:2)
Re:What are the chances that ... (Score:2)
And how do the portions which we can't see matter? Read this [wikipedia.org], a few links deep.
Re:What are the chances that ... (Score:2)
Re:What are the chances that ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Even if it does, though, I'd imagine it'll be a fairly small black hole. Most are, seeing as they're basically a supercondensed chunk of gravity. I saw somewhere that scientists hypothesized that the universe was about 3" in diameter prior to the big bang. And that's a damned universe worth of gravity and
Re:Yay, another tokamak (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yay, another tokamak (Score:2)
Re:*sigh* (Score:2, Funny)
even better (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubtful (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:even better (Score:3, Insightful)
WHile yes, it might eventually allow us to forget about oil in the DISTANT future...you need to consider a couple things.
First...there's existing technology and infrastructure which will be around for a LONG time that is quite dependant on the oil from the Middle East. This won't magically allow us to turn around the next day and say "ok, we got fusion, we don't need your oil anymore". Think of all the old
Re:*sigh* (Score:5, Funny)
Example from your life:
Coworker: So I started talking to this hot babe at the bar yesterday, and we were really hitting it off...
You, interupting: Bush wants to take away her voting rights and chain her to the stove!
Re:*sigh* (Score:3, Insightful)
I didn't read your post past the first two sentences because it's obvious you're taking it all too seriously.
Here's the chain of events:
1. You make a strained connection to politics in an unrelated thread.
2. I mock you for it.
3. You post a serious 3 page response.
It's just slashdot. Nothing here matters, we're all just a bunch of assholes opining about things that 99.999% of us have no power over
Exchange rate (Score:2, Interesting)
In addition, this is an experimental reactor, not a production reactor. What good would building 100 of them do for anybody?
Re:They don't work (Score:2)
Re:Where do we get tritium from ? (Score:3, Informative)
It turns out that the D-T fusion reaction yields a high-energy neutron. (In fact, these neutrons rattling around a shield/heating blanket around our reactor are what generates the heat we'll use to make electricity.)
However, there also exists a couple of favorible nuclear reactions which convert Lithium to tritium:
1) 6Li + n -> 4He + T + n + 4.5 MeV
2) 7Li + n + 2.5 MeV -> 4He + T + n
Effectively, the presence of Lithium, a very abundant element in the ground (more 7Li