Fusion Plasma Plant in The Future 640
NightWulf writes "The BBC reports that Europe and Japan are currently looking to host a new JET power plant. This new plant creates plasma, which is akin to creating a star on Earth. Interesting to note that 1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels."
Finally (Score:1, Interesting)
Although I'm not sure if they've actually achieved the energy break-even point yet. First time I heard about this was in school, when they were still having problems with the magnetic coils breaking down and letting the plasma vent. Here's hoping this'll be a little more reliable. Or sited a hell of a long way from any population centers...
How much energy? (Score:5, Interesting)
How much energy do they estimate it will take to create (and control?) that one kilogram of "fusion fuel"?
What the article doesn't mention... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I bought my own Plasma generator (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I had predicted 2050, actually (Score:2, Interesting)
Plasma plant?! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What the article doesn't mention... (Score:3, Interesting)
One reason the next machine will be larger is because it is easier to control the plasma (shown by the work done at JET).
Re:Helium (Score:3, Interesting)
Wow just to boil water (Score:4, Interesting)
More on containment and break-even points (Score:5, Interesting)
"The most advanced test reactors, the Tokomak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) in the U.S. and the Joint European Torus (JET), use the tokomak design and have come close to break even conditions. In fact, in November, 1991, the British-based Tokomak reported break even conditions. This occurs when the energy given off by the fusion reaction is equal to the energy input required to sustain the reaction. In order for a fusion reaction to generate useful amounts of electricity, the energy given off must be many times greater than that required to sustain the reaction. Even the most optimistic researchers feel that it will be well into the next century before this stage is reached." (from This site [iclei.org])
Re:Finally (Score:5, Interesting)
That's what I'm wondering about. (Score:1, Interesting)
That's what makes me curious.
The article says, "1kg of fusion fuel would produce the same amount of energy as 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels." However, how much does that 1kg of fuel cost as compared to those 10,000,000kg of fossil fuels? What if you amortize the projected differing cost of building the fusion reactor as opposed to a simple coal burner..?
Fusion vs. Anti-matter for energy (Score:5, Interesting)
I started thinking about that and the two biggest problems with that are: A> It takes a huge amount of energy to create anti-matter, a hell of a lot more goes into the production than comes from using it. B> We don't really have a system for containing significant amounts of anti-matter.
So I started thinking about alternative energy sources and one of them was fusion. Pound for pound, fusion produces about 1/27th of the energy of anti-matter (based on my naive calculations, so I may be way off) whereas other types of fuel are several orders of magnitude less efficient.
To me, that makes fusion a pretty good option. The only problems I have encountered so far with the idea are:
1: Fusion isn't quite ready for real applications, though by the time we're capable of sending an interstellar craft, I believe it will be.
2: For an interstellar journey, you'll need a power plant that can survive for no less than decades, if not centuries, without maintenance. That's a serious issue given the harsh environment it would be operating in.
I'm sure there are additional problems I haven't thought of yet, but I'm still thinking it might be a good option. Perhaps some sort of self-repairing reactor could be built to solve #2.
But another huge advantage of hydrogen is that you could collect fuel along the way using the Bussard Ramjet [wikipedia.org] idea. You'd just need a way of separating out deuterium and tritium from the hydrogen that doesn't suffer from problem #2 as well, but it should be doable. As most here are probably aware, fuel mass is a serious issue for space travel.
Anyway, I think fusion has a great deal to offer in a number of ways. Maybe I ought to work on my NIAC proposal
Re:Am I being too skeptical? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yet another step, not at the destination yet (Score:3, Interesting)
That said, this is the stuff that sci-fi dreams are made of. Maybe now that less geeks are going for CS degrees, they'll take some hard-science classes- that stuff is still sorely needed. As well as cool.
I was once a physics major who couldn't cut it because of a lack of discipline to be able to master the difficulties of engineering calculus. Props.
Re:And a plant explosion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Fission is a stable reaction, fusion is very unstable. The difficulty in sustaining fusion is due to the fact that it is so hard to sustain the conditions under which it will occur.
The implications for safety are obvious: current generation fission designs require all kinds of redundant safety systems to prevent an ongoing and very dirty accident. Such systems would not be needed in a fusion reactor, becuase the least hiccup, such as weakening of magnetic containment or the leaking of tiny amounts of contaminants into the reactor would cause the reaction to collapse. There is no possibility of anything like the reactor catching fire driven by the heat of a runaway reaction.
That said, I'm skeptical we're going to see practical fusion in my lifetime, because it is so difficult to sustain, although you can always hope. A more promising technology would be a stable fission designs, that would require intervention to maintain fission, or which would only output heat at a limited rate.
Re:I had predicted 2050, actually (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Fusion vs. Anti-matter for energy (Score:5, Interesting)
Nobody has ever seriously considered antimatter as a fuel source, aside from a few science fiction writers. It's simply too impractical for exactly the reasons you mention. Impractical to the point where it's pointless to even think about it, at least not right now.
Fusion isn't quite ready for real applications
Electric power generation isn't real enough for you?
For an interstellar journey, you'll need a power plant that can survive for no less than decades, if not centuries, without maintenance.
There already are these huge fusion plants which survive in space for billions of years with no maintenance. They're called "stars." :-) More seriously, the engineering issues involved in designing a fusion reactor center exclusively on the multi-million-degree plasma which must be confined. In comparison to that, the problem of making the thing run in outer space is a toy issue. What's more difficult to design for: the emptyness and relative quiet of space on the outside of the reactor, or the extremely hot, energetic, radiation-soaked interior of the reactor? I think once we have fusion figured out, flying in space will be a piece of cake in comparison.
As most here are probably aware, fuel mass is a serious issue for space travel.
Fuel mass is important because it determines the momentum of the escaping exhaust. But momentum is the product of two numbers: mass and velocity. You can make up for low propellant mass by increasing the exhaust velocity. A high-power reactor like a fusion reactor is precisely the way to do this.
And a reactor capable of producing a few megawatts could drive a high-power laser, and the craft could use pure light pressure to propel itself: no propellant required. Of course, this depends on how light you can make the craft, because even 100 megawatts of power will only produce 0.33 newtons of thrust :-)
Re:I had predicted 2050, actually (Score:3, Interesting)
However, there is this big fundamental problem. Earth is ~6,380km radius. That means that its cross sectional area is ~1.278e8 km^2 diameter. It is ~1.496e8km from the sun. A sphere of that radius has 2.812e17km^2 surface area, meaning that Earth intercepts ~4.544e-8% of its energy. So, creating our own "star" here, even if a tiny fraction of the sun's energy, would be very beneficial, because we intercept such a small amount of the sun's energy.
Lets say you have a 10th of a square kilometer needed for your average fission power plant complex (really big!). Depending on latitude/cloudcover/etc, you can generally get between 2 and 32 MWh per square kilometer per hour. So, in the best locations, you could, with a whopping 30% efficiency solar power center of the same size, get only ~10MWh/h produced in the best locations. One *unit* of one plant in one year (Unit 1, Vogtle plant (Georgia), 2000) produced 10,337,818 MWh of power - over 1,100 MWh/h. Try that comparison out.
Solar power has some serious problems, and there's only so much improvement we can get from more efficiency (ignoring that the higher efficiency cells cost a whole lot more - some of the metals used cost almost as much as gold).
Re:And a plant explosion... (Score:3, Interesting)
Last I heard, "christians" mainly get negatively involved in life sciences. I'm not sure how this relates to the topic at hand or why it would even be a concern. Especially since this is heavily a physics topic and not a life sciences topic. Worse, even if it were a concern, why would it matter. Unless you have proof that fusion creates souls, no one but zealots are going to listen to these crackpots anyways.
This could be a useful technology, please, please, please, nobody tell the christians about it.
Now, for some karma whoring. Since his comment was deemed karma worthy, surely my comment will make as much sense and someone with reward me accordingly. So, here goes. This could be a useful technology, please, please, please, nobody tell the inanimate carbon rods about it. We all know how involved in physics they are.
Was his comment supposed to be a joke which simply missed its target?
Re:And a plant explosion... (Score:4, Interesting)
As we can't create miniature stars at the moment, we have to compensate by supplying the heat and containment ourselves. One of the major barriers to a useful fusion reactor is getting it to produce more power than it draws.
Re:What's that about Magnetic energy? (Score:3, Interesting)
It would also probably cause objects to projectile towards the reactor rather than away from it (think MRI machine)
A magnetic field of that strength, thrown out of balance, could probably do nifty things like diflect electron orbits, and magnetize non-magnetic materials. However, since strength varies with the inverse cube of distance, the effective radius would be very small.
Nothing more to worry about than a coal-burning power plant exploding, except for the direction the shrapnel moves.
Re:And a plant explosion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Please don't paint all environmentalists with one big brush!
I like to consider myself a "green" kinda guy. I recycle, don't drive a SUV, etc. However, that said, bring on the nuclear power plants (provided we can properly secure them from whoever may want to crash a small plane into them... another story tho). Nuclear power is much cleaner than coal power, and the waste, while icky, isn't produced in huge quantities.
Some environmentalists will agree with me, some will disagree. But don't paint everyone with the same label. That'd be like me saying that most republicans are christian conservatives who want to turn the United States into a Christian version of Iran.
See how annoying that is?
Re:Helium (Score:5, Interesting)
Estimates for remaining Helium supplies suggest we may run out in about 20 years. Here's a little more for those who don't know as much about Helium as CodeMonkey.
Taken from here [k12.ca.us]:
For most of this century the world's precious supply of helium has escaped from natural gas wells into the air. Only in 1958 did politicians heed the warnings of influential scientists including John Bardeen, the inventor of the transistor, that all our helium would be gone by 1980. Congress reacted by spending $1 billion--an astonishing sum in the 1950s--on a separation plant in Amarillo, Texas, and began stockpiling helium in empty gas wells.
As it happened, helium turned out to be crucial to the success of NASA's space--programme. The most powerful rocket motors are fueled by hydrogen and oxygen, both of which have to be carried in liquid form, and helium is the ideal refrigerant. In fact, it was helium carried to the Moon on the Apollo spacecraft that determined how long the astronauts could stay on the lunar surface. Once the helium had boiled off it would have been impossible to keep hydrogen and oxygen in liquid form and the spacecraft would have been stranded.
Thanks to the conservation measures, helium supplies were not exhausted by 1980. and other rich sources of the gas were discovered. however, sources of helium have remained few and far between because the geology of natural gas wells must be very special in order to hold onto it in commercial quantities.
Against this background, the worldwide consumption of helium has increased by between 5 and 10 percent a year in the past decade, which the biggest growth in its use as a coolant for the superconducting magnets in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) body scanners. Present helium consumption is estimated to be about 100 million cubic metres, and is predicted to continue rising by 4 to 5 percent a year.
No one is claiming that we are in imminent danger of running out of helium--there should be at least 20 years supply left. However, new sources of the gas will have to be found to meet the ever-growing demand. If not, God forbid, we may have to celebrate helium's 200th birthday in the year 2095--without any Mickey Mouse balloons.
Monitors at D3D (Score:3, Interesting)
fusion is cool a stuff but... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:And a plant explosion... (Score:3, Interesting)
That depends. Fission reactions usually produce neutrons, which are very hard to turn into electricity. About all we can do is put something heavy in front of them to turn the escaping neutrons into heat, which we then turn into steam, etc, etc.
But if a reaction produced, say, free protons? Much easier! They have an electric charge, so we don't need old-fashioned matter to capture their kinetic energy. We can use magnetic fields, and converting forces applied to magnetic fields to electricity is something we do even better than steam. Isn't there a form of fusion that does exactly that?
Magnetohydrodynamics is sort of a cross between the two. Use heat to propel an electrically conductive fluid through a magnetic field. It's like a steam generator but with (theoretically) no moving parts.
Re:Toxic waste, but not much of it (Score:5, Interesting)
Exactly. If you look at something like the Clinton EPA new source review regulations, which punished corporations for more efficient energy production, and which environmentalists defend passionately, then its hard to reach any conclusion but that envnironmentalists are now pursuing an environmentally reckless anti-corporate agenda. As a result, there is new demand for legitimate environmentalism. This demand has spawned a conservative environmentalist movement. Among the tenets of conservative environmentalism:
- If the government internalizes externalities by imposing fees for despoiling or consuming public goods (air, water) then this eliminates the "tragedy of the commons" problem and incentivizes business to reduce environmental impact. When resources cost money, the market will favor business which produce the most efficiently, that is, the most output for the least monetary (and therefore environmental) cost. The key idea here is that no government regulations are required. You don't need regulators in the EPA to approve powerplant designs. Just license for the right to pollute, measure the output and enforce the law, and the market works to develop and choose new technology to reduce the overall level of pollution. Liberal environmentalists oppose this plan. Sierra Club and other groups lobby against tradable pollution credits because they "give corporations a license to pollute." But that's just not true. They are selling, not giving, corporations a license to pollute. The selling part is the crucial aspect.
- The primary goal of environmentalism should be to preserve and expand the land area of natural habitat. Liberal environmentalism, on the other hand, has set a whole bunch of additonal goals, such as advancing renewable energy resources, opposing fission, regulating private land use and regulating genetic diversity. These other actually work against expanding natural habitat.
- Reneable energy resources are anti-environmental because they have low-energy density; They take up too much space, displacing natural habitat. Ethanol fuel and solar power both require destruction of vast areas of natural habitat. The flux density of sunlight, collected either by crops or photovoltaics, is just too low to satisfy world energy demands without taking over a large surface area of the planet. The density of an energy source is the correct measure of environmental correctness. High density energy sources produce the most energy in the least space, displacing the least natural habitat. By this measure, petroleum is good. You only need about enough space to drill a hole in the ground and build a refinery. Fission has an even higher energy density. Geneticaly modified crops are good because they produce more food on less crop land, shrinking cropland and expaning natural habitat.
There are books about this stuff. I suggest "Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists". The phrasing is overstylized, manifesto screedish. Like a poor immitations of Abi Hoffman. (Though a more acurrate imitation would be worse). Nonetheless, IMHO its a fact-filled, well-reasoned argument.
Re:But does that matter? (Score:4, Interesting)
What he said.
Neutrons running amok in the reactor vessel (which, if it wasn't obvious, is a big metal container with the reactor core inside) cause two things to happen:
1. Some small fraction of the metal atoms absorb neutrons and change from stable isotopes to non-stable ones. Cobalt-60, with a half-life short enough to be pretty radioactive, and long enough to be a nuisance, is the biggest issue here.
2. Neutron embrittlement occurs. The reactor vessel becomes more prone to cracking instead of stretching under pressure changes. This is likely to be less of an issue in a low-pressure fusion reactor than in a high-pressure fission reactor. Both effects are known in advance, and designed around, though the earliest reactors were built without this (later) information. I don't know how many of the "earliest" reactors are still operational. My guess is none, but that's a guess.
Only real long term issue is the radioisotopes in the reactor vessel. This is why you have to mothball the reactor before dismantling it. Ideally, once you dismantle the things, you'd recover the Co-60 and related radioisotopes, but practically, it doesn't occur in amounts that are worth the trouble.
So you have to dispose of it in some "safe" way. Sealing it in glass bricks and stacking it in some out-of-the-way corner of the desert would do nicely.
comparing weight misleading (Score:3, Interesting)
Obviously I'm ignoring the environmental costs. Fusion would be FAR more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels.
(* Let's not get into the case of where fossil fuels are depleting and hence costs will skyrocket in the future (oil prices are expected to skyrocket over the next 15 years))