ewsnow writes "The Focus Fusion Society reports that the scientists and engineers at Lawrenceville Plasma Physics have finally built an operational Dense Plasma Focus device. While still at less than half power, they were able to achieve a pinch on their device. The small company that Eric Lerner started recently gathered enough funding to start a two-year study on the validity of his theory regarding fusion-inducing plasmoids. If the theory holds, the device will produce more electricity than it consumes. In contrast to the billions of dollars spent on Tokamak fusion (think ITER), LPP is conducting their research on a budget around a million dollars. Yet, if it works, it will provide nuclear fusion with much simpler equipment and much less cost. Eric Lerner and Focus Fusion havebeendiscussed on Slashdot before."
It's the fusion of two isotopes.. which later break apart most of the time. A very small part of the time the ecited nucleus does not break apart: B11+H1 => C12 would you call that fusion and B11+H1 => 3He4 fission?
But wait, you're producing helium? Think about the environmental impact! Millions of adults walking around talking like chipmunks all the time! Won't someone think of the children!?!
Isn't that what they use on the sun!? I don't want that sort of thing in my backyard! what if the reaction gets out of control and it annihilates the entire solar system!? What are we going to do with all of the nucular waste?
Folks, can we pretty please think of another name for this stuff? 50 years worth of misinformation is, I fear, holding us back. People here the word "nuclear" and immediately start shitting their pants with fear.
I vote we call it "Hydrogen Energy". After all, hydrogen is 2/3 of the ingredients in water!
The public needs to be shown that the word "nuclear" is not cause for panic. Better yet, not to judge technology such as NMR as being dangerous simply because of the name. But I guess it is too much to ask that they have even a basic competency in science.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday October 18, @01:58PM (#29785903)
The public needs to be shown that the word "nuclear" is not cause for panic. Better yet, not to judge technology such as NMR as being dangerous simply because of the name. But I guess it is too much to ask that they have even a basic competency in science.
Woah there sparky!
We can't run banks without having them come falling down around our ears and you think the public is the problem with the perception of nuclear power?
In of itself nuclear reactions are predictable and can be made safe using correct precautions.
Nuclear magnetic resonance? God man don't you know how dangerous that is, it's got nuclear right in the name. You can only guess how many extra limbs you'd get from that. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get ready for my MRI tomorrow:)
Yes, as long as people openly brag about being too dumb to program a freakin' VCR/DVR, no chance here. Somehow, being a retard became cool, and being intelligent became uncool. The scene at the beginning of Idiocracy, where they chase Joe away from that burning barrel, because he sounds "pompous and faggy". That's what's already happening every day on TV.
And I know exactly, how it came to this! What do you think happens, when everyone for decades, follows the rules that * everyone is equal, (There are no two e
Let's I am going to cut your break lines in your car, and rig the throttle so that it goes to full and stays there. i will then call it a test to see and call what happens an accident.
Chernobyl had it's safety systems bypassed, and then had the reactor put into a dangerous configuration which ran out of control since the safety systems were bypassed. Fact is very few nuclear reactors use the type of reactor that this can be done with. Also Chernobyl was 4 reactors and at least until recently the 3 that were undamaged were still outputting power for the region. Not to mention that American reactors, have a secondary containment shell around them something the chernobyl reactors lacked.
To avoid t happening again all one has to do is use an american or chinese reactor that is designed to turn the reaction off as it fails, instead of requiring a second stage to actually force the reaction to stop.
yes there is more than one kind of nuclear reactor. Some are safer than others. Some are designed so that they only produce power under certain situations and turn themselves off when those aren't present.
The point he was making is actually it's not relevant to a discussion of nuclear power plant safety in regards to accidental malfunctions because in this case many of the safety devices were specifically turned off and the triggering event was deliberately initiated to see what would happen without proper authorization; in short it didn't "blow up" it was "Blown Up".
After all, the reasons the public gets nervous when it hears the words "nuclear" and "power" in the same sentence are related to the checkered history of commercial nuclear power generation.
nonsense. The public is afraid because of two reactor accidents; the first one was caused in large part because the reactor in question was little more advanced than the graphite/uranium pile we used in the 40's and that the reactor's safety mechanisms and proper procedure were ignored by a quota happy communist state. The second was contained. The incident at three mile island was also caused by ignoring the safety mechanisms in the reactor *again*. You want an example of an industry with a checkered past? Try Coal for once. The number of people killed mining coal and all the mercury, uranium and thorium release not to mention that it's fraking up our atmosphere and climate with excess CO2 and you're worried about nuclear energy? Where the only problems with nuclear power involved two incidents with 30 and 40 year old reactor designs where even then didn't come close to the kill score that coal has. Not even an order of magnitude.
Folks, can we pretty please think of another name for this stuff? 50 years worth of misinformation is, I fear, holding us back. People here the word "nuclear" and immediately start shitting their pants with fear.
Folks, can you all stop reacting to stories regarding nuclear power on slashdot by falling over at your computers, foaming at the mouth, and shrieking about how the general public are all so stupid that they oppose any use of nuclear power because they're luddites and they're not as scientificall
No, there are ten reactors in use in this country.
Oh wait, you just assumed that anyone with access to a computer, an internet connection and reading slashdot was from the US, I'm so sorry, your bad (no, I wasn't the one who screwed up, you did).
There have not been any new nuclear plants built in this country in a long time not because of protesters, but because they are insanely and hideously expensive to build. They are for the most part not cost-effective.
Nuclear plants are actually a viable long-term investment - there are several scheduled for construction in the US right now. The limiting factor until recently was the mind-boggling amount of red tape, but the situation has improved. There is still the ban on reprocessing and an implied moratorium on the construction of breeder reactors, but the recent changes are a promising move in the right direction.
There are groups who argue against nuclear power for a variety of reasons, some environmental, some political, and some were formed to protest the operation of specific plants that have a track record of environmental damage.
You are FUDding at this point. There are no such plants. They would have been shut down long ago if there was any significant release of radioactivity. If you're talking about tritium leaks - they are not even measurable in the environment, and actually highlight the ignorance of the masses ("it leaks something radioactive so it must be very dangerous" - well, except it's not, as you will be irradiated more by decaying potassium-40 in the body of a girl you're sleeping with than by most tritium leaks).
Some of these organizations are led by or advised by nuclear physicists and engineers, who know a hell of a lot more about the technical aspects of nuclear power than 99% of the people reading this.
There is a PhD at my university who is an expert on chemical NMR, so you could say he is a nuclear physicist to some extent, yet he keeps saying stupid things like "nuclear chemistry is dying" (in case you wonder, it's not - see positron emission tomography). The fact that you're competent in one field does not give you much credibility in other fields.
"it leaks something radioactive so it must be very dangerous" - well, except it's not, as you will be irradiated more by decaying potassium-40 in the body of a girl you're sleeping with than by most tritium leaks
Those of us not sleeping with a girl take exception to that comparison.
Could you please put that in time of CRT exposure? Or some other more comprehensible metric?
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday October 18, @05:10PM (#29787483)
There have not been any new nuclear plants built in this country in a long time not because of protesters, but because they are insanely and hideously expensive to build. They are for the most part not cost-effective.
They have become insanely and hideously expensive to build primarily because of the influence of your sign-waving hippie-hordes and mouth foaming idiotic masses. The actual cost to build a nuclear power plant would be a secondary consideration if it weren't for the likewise insane regulatory requirements, which if you ask me are slanted disproportionately at nuclear power. Ergo, the sign wavers won, and sanity lost.
The evidence is there. A power company can dump millions of tons of slightly radioactive and toxic coal ash under a golf course (a few tons of which contains vastly more radioactive waste than the totality of materials released by all civilian power related nuclear accidents). However, if that measly amount of waste came from a nuclear facility someone would have hung, certianly metaphorically, possibly in actuality. Furthermore, worker deaths occurring at fossil plants and related activities (especially coal mining naturally) are more numerous and held under far less scrutiny. If that number of people were killed because of nuclear power, there would be a huge price to pay.
I'm not arguing that regulation of dangerous materials is bad... But sanity should prevail. Were we able to process the wastes available and store unprocessable waste, and let investors build safe plants without having excessive governmental burden, it would prove to be a very cost effective and safe enterprise. Japan is prone to earthquakes, and there haven't been significant problems.
Folks, can you all stop reacting to stories regarding nuclear power on slashdot by falling over at your computers, foaming at the mouth, and shrieking about how the general public are all so stupid that they oppose any use of nuclear power because they're luddites and they're not as scientifically informed as all of us blah blah blah.
There are 104 nuclear reactors in this country. They provide almost 20% of the country's electricity consumption.
There's more than "this country" in the world, and in some of them luddites do shut down nuclear plants simply because of the irrational fear of the word "nuclear". Nuclear power phase-out in Germany [wikipedia.org] is a good example of that.
I really hope this works. I get more excited about science for cheap and clean energy production than I do about efforts to raise the cost of energy consumption as a means to drive conservation. Too much emphasis on conservation will lead to a world where only rich people have the freedom to consume large amounts of energy. Access to cheap and clean power must be pushed down to today's poor. This will offer lots of ways for them to overcome their systemic poverty.
If you change 'energy' and 'power' for 'food', you have got what the green revolution [wikipedia.org] achieved from the 50's or so onwards. I think this is a good model for what would happen if cheap energy became universal - consumption simply increases to match what is available and the underlying issue remains unresolved.
Restating the failed predictions of Malthus doesn't deserve to be modded 'insightful'. The fact is, fertility rates are determined by social factors (generally, higher gender equality leads to sustainable fertility rates) - if, as you so unthinkingly suggest, rates are determined simply by the availability of resources, then a family who is five times wealthier should have five times as many children (obviously wrong) and the UK should have 3 times the fertility rate of Equitorial Guinea (again, obviously w
People starve today not because there isn't enough food to go around, but because of politics. The world lines up cargo planes full of food aid to avert a humanitarian disaster and they idle on the tarmac while the 'leaders' of the starving people claim there isn't a problem and say the aid is unwelcome.
Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to halt growth in most biological systems it to balance supply and demand.
Right now, food and energy production around the world outstrips demand. Thus, population continues to increase.
The 3 major governors of biological systems seem to be raw materials, energy and space. To some degree, they're convertible. If you remove "energy" as a limiting factor, we're just going to hit a wall with one of the other two at some point.
Western countries have by far most access to cheap energy and cheap food. Yet their population diminshes and they (we) import immigrants to fill the gap. It is true for all advanced economies. Once a nation gets sophiscated enough to have people educated and equipped with birth control means, growth halts as people can "trade" number of children for economic conditions. Emerging countries will see the same thing once their societies will get sophiscated enough.
Your model omits some readily [susps.org] available [businessweek.com] data [cbsnews.com] that would seem relevant. Population growth among non-immigrants of advanced, wealthy nations such as the US, Japan and parts of western Europe has plateaued at or below replacement. The "western" world has, despite an abundance or food, energy and space (in the case of North America,) tamed its population growth. This has occurred without coercive government control of breeding behavior.
Apparently there are more factors involved in the growth curve than Malthusians such as yourself choose to allow. It is certain that our international governance is equally blind; the next global treaty on the environment that acknowledges this success and, heaven forbid, incorporates population growth into its protocol bean counting will be the first.
"Supply and demand" is a tenuous bit of pop economics that you can't blindly apply to any situation you feel could do with a bit of market fundamentalism applied to it. The idea that human population growth is governed by it is utter horseshit. Rich countries have more resources per capita than countries in Africa, but they have lower fertility rates. That blows your little hypothesis out of the water straight away.
Misapplying pop economics. Ignoring real life fertility rates. Treating people of other races as if they were animals mindlessly breeding to fill an ecological niche. You've committed the three most common logical fallacies, and the three most disgusting ones, in this debate.
> Right now, food and energy production around the world outstrips demand. Thus, population continues to increase.
That is not true. The places on the world where energy and food are most abundant, such as the western countries, have populations that are no longer growing at a significant rate. If not for immigration, some of them would even be shrinking.
While it is obvious that the availability of food and energy influences population growth (without food to feed your children the population isn't going to grow any time soon) it is not possible to explain population growth with these things alone. Many other factors are at work here, such as religion ("Every sperm is sacred"). I hear having pensions can also have a big influence on population growth, because people won't need their 10 children to take care of them when they retire.
> The 3 major governors of biological systems seem to be raw materials, energy and space. To some degree, they're convertible. If you remove "energy" as a limiting factor, we're just going to hit a wall with one of the other two at some point.
Maybe for most animals, but I like to think humans are able to choose and ignore their instincts to have "OVER 9000!!!1!!11!!eleven" children and use some form of anticonception. Should this be incorrect we'll just have to invent some kind of ray-gun that turns people into slashdotters. This should bring down birth rates a lot and has the added benefit of giving me a relatively low UID...
I'm concerned about the idea of 'endless growth in a finite world' that cheap food and energy seem to sustain. If the world population was the same now as it was before the green revolution (2 billion or so) everything would be rosy. That is is now 6.8 billion, set for 7 billion in 2012 and utterly dependent on fossil-fuel centered food production is a worry for me.
Imagine owning a swimming pool with porous walls. In order to use it, we either have to build a new swimming pool with non-porous walls (or hack it somehow), or constantly fill it up with more water. Which makes more sense? Do we have a water efficiency problem, or a water shortage? To improve the analogy a bit, let's say that we live in a very dry area and get new water from an aquifer.
Energy efficiency vs energy shortage is analogous. And when these ultimately short term methods of energy production are e
Good call. The energy price spike in 2007-2008 caused a global food crisis; modern agriculture provides food as a function of how much energy is put into each unit area of land, so there is much more at stake than whether you can have incandescent light bulbs and leave your TV on standby.
Even if low-energy agriculture could somehow feed the world, that isn't our only problem. China and India have shrugged off imperialism, modernised their economies, and thats 2.5 billion people demanding western-level lifestyles and we don't have the political clout (nor the moral right) to say no to them. With our current energy sources, the planet simply can't handle it though.
Produce more energy. Promote gender equality (which reduces fertility rates to sustainable levels, without Chinese-style draconian population control methods). A better world is a higher energy one.
Produce more energy. Promote gender equality (which reduces fertility rates to sustainable levels, without Chinese-style draconian population control methods).
The idea is interesting- creating a self confining toroid of plasma instead of relying solely on external magnetic containment but from what I've seen of the "tech" it looks to be unfortunately the work of crackpots. Don't get me wrong, I really hope that they actually succeed in doing what they're claiming they can but I sincerely doubt it.
If I remember correctly from seeing watching the tech talk on youtube about a year or so ago, the idea is not to produce a continuous, stable fusion reaction, but to produce an unstable reaction that lasts for only a moment. By creating reactions many times per second, substantial amounts of energy are produced. (Hopefully more than is needed to initiate the reactions in the first place.)
The device is in some ways similar to a spark plug.
This is great news! If this works, I'll be able to install a Mr. Fusion device on my DeLorean, which should be able to generate the 1.21 Gigawatts of electricity that I need to run my flux capacitor! I'll no longer need to steal Plutonium from the Iranians!;-)
In fusion research it always look good when you do low-energy tests or low density etc... It is relatively easy to confine plasmas that don't "burn". A penning trap will do the job quite nicely. The problems always show up when you try to push your design to operate close to the lawson criterion, at which point many otherwise promising designs just fall short ( taking the penning trap as an example the required magnetic field for any practical confinement time exceeds that at which modern superconductors stop beeing superconducting ).
Now I admit that I don't know the details of this particular scheme, but I can say with almost certainty that when they try to get closer to break even the higher temperatures, densities and confinement times required will turn the thing into a massive headache.
Agreed. Every joker who builds a farnsworth fusor in his basement thinks he is going to be producing commercial power some time next year, and when they make a noise about this, and idiots with money buy into their promises of more for less, it can take funding from genuine research. When you are doing something that is inherently slow, costly, and prone to overruns, you've constantly got some bullshit artist nipping at your heels claiming they can do the same for less money, in less time, with big fucking bells and whistles on.
I'm involved in a cubesat project, and we recently had to explain why we were spending 100k on a launch when some random jokers on the internet with new-age mysticism and off-the-shelf amateur rocket motors claimed to be able to do the same for 10k "some time next year".
Both you and the GP should go watch http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760# [google.com] . Eric Lerner presented at Google, presumably looking for funding a couple of years ago. I've watched it a few times - very interesting stuff.
This one http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606# [google.com], by the now-deceased Dr Robert Bussard, is also very interesting as he was involved in nuclear research for over 50 years. He jokes that the Russian gave us the Tokamak to make sure we'd never get fusion
Wow. Thats one scientific quip there. Not one star in the sky is toroidal, but not one star in the sky can be kept in a building in the south of France...
You may want to take a closer look at this one then - they don't require any higher confinement times because they're setting this up like a piston not a turbine. It creates fusion in a microsecond pulse, the field collapses and then they start all over again. You set the sucker up to rapid fire (or line them up in series with one powering the generation of the field on the next) and you're in business.
Now of course we need to see if they can take that final step, but so far they're close enough to th
Which, just as with Inertial Confinemenet Fusion, means they just traded confinement time for Temperature and density.
There's this neat little thing called the triple product which relates to the power output of a fusion plasma.
n*T*tau
n is the number density, T is the temperature and tau is the confinement time. In Tokamaks n is low and T and tau are high. In other fusion schemes tau may be low, meaning they need higher n and T to make up for it. Thus while this particular machine may not need to increase the confinement time, they will then simply have to increase either temperature or number density instead.
Particularly with the p-B reaction, you lose all the net power to brehmstrahllung.
The design is supposed to mitigate this ; the magnetic fields involved are allegedly strong enough to prevent enough of the electrons hopping up to the quantum state they need to get to in order to emit X-ray photons. In addition, the design includes a photoelectric collector to harvest the X-rays that do get emitted (supposed to be 40% of the energy yield).
I'm no expert but I'm watching this keenly. Out of the fusion approaches this one seems the most elegant to me ; no heat-engine step to reduce it's efficiency, solid-state energy collection, reactors that are a sensible size and not some enormous aircraft-carrier sized construction of doom. And the fact that it isn't founded on the impossible conceit of containing the uncontainable in a steady state helps it image a lot in my eyes.
And if it turns out to be impossible... well, you could probably pay for the whole project out of the tea and biscuits kitty at ITER. They should fund a new project like this every year, just on the off-chance that one of them works.
by Anonymous Coward
on Sunday October 18, @04:56PM (#29787367)
An important facet of LPP's research is that they are pursuing aneutronic fusion. This is truly clean nuclear energy. Explained well here. [cafepress.com] and here. Nuclear Power without Nuclear Waste: It's Closer Than You Think
Nuclear fusion has the potential to generate power without the radioactive waste of nuclear fission, but that depends on which atoms you decide to fuse. Conventional fusion approaches work with deuterium and tritium, while focus fusion works with hydrogen and boron. When a boron-11 atom fuses with a hydrogen atom the result is three helium atoms and energy, but no radioactive waste. This is because: the fuel (boron and hydrogen) is not radioactive, the reaction product (helium) is not radioactive, and the reaction releases no neutrons (it's "aneutronic").
Your point of view is common, but not correct. From dictionary.com:
Theory: "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity."
A theory is a group of explanations for something, NOT a hypothesis that has been confirmed. Theories are generally formulated, then hypotheses (otherwise known as "predictions") are generated from them, then these hypotheses are tested. If a hypothesis that is supported by the theory is shown not
Fusion? (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry but the reaction "H + B -> 3 He" is nuclear fission -- the fission of boron.
Re:Fusion? (Score:5, Informative)
It's the fusion of two isotopes.. which later break apart most of the time. A very small part of the time the ecited nucleus does not break apart: B11+H1 => C12 would you call that fusion and B11+H1 => 3He4 fission?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
By your reasoning, the fission of uranium would be fusion because the reaction n + U temporarily creates a heavier nucleus.
The real reason the AC is wrong is because in the H + B -> 3 He reaction, most of the energy comes from combining H with something, not splitting B.
Re:Fusion? (Score:5, Funny)
But wait, you're producing helium? Think about the environmental impact! Millions of adults walking around talking like chipmunks all the time! Won't someone think of the children!?!
:-D
Parent
Fusion!? (Score:5, Funny)
Isn't that what they use on the sun!? I don't want that sort of thing in my backyard! what if the reaction gets out of control and it annihilates the entire solar system!? What are we going to do with all of the nucular waste?
Folks, can we pretty please think of another name for this stuff? 50 years worth of misinformation is, I fear, holding us back. People here the word "nuclear" and immediately start shitting their pants with fear.
I vote we call it "Hydrogen Energy". After all, hydrogen is 2/3 of the ingredients in water!
Re:Fusion!? (Score:5, Funny)
You mean dihydrogen monoxide [dhmo.org]--pretty dangerous stuff...
Parent
Re:Fusion!? (Score:5, Insightful)
The public needs to be shown that the word "nuclear" is not cause for panic. Better yet, not to judge technology such as NMR as being dangerous simply because of the name. But I guess it is too much to ask that they have even a basic competency in science.
Parent
Re:Fusion!? (Score:5, Insightful)
The public needs to be shown that the word "nuclear" is not cause for panic. Better yet, not to judge technology such as NMR as being dangerous simply because of the name. But I guess it is too much to ask that they have even a basic competency in science.
Woah there sparky!
We can't run banks without having them come falling down around our ears and you think the public is the problem with the perception of nuclear power?
In of itself nuclear reactions are predictable and can be made safe using correct precautions.
This is a layer 8 problem not a science problem.
Parent
NMR, No that's too dangerous (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, as long as people openly brag about being too dumb to program a freakin' VCR/DVR, no chance here.
Somehow, being a retard became cool, and being intelligent became uncool. The scene at the beginning of Idiocracy, where they chase Joe away from that burning barrel, because he sounds "pompous and faggy". That's what's already happening every day on TV.
And I know exactly, how it came to this!
What do you think happens, when everyone for decades, follows the rules that
* everyone is equal, (There are no two e
Re:Fusion!? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Fusion!? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's I am going to cut your break lines in your car, and rig the throttle so that it goes to full and stays there. i will then call it a test to see and call what happens an accident.
Chernobyl had it's safety systems bypassed, and then had the reactor put into a dangerous configuration which ran out of control since the safety systems were bypassed. Fact is very few nuclear reactors use the type of reactor that this can be done with. Also Chernobyl was 4 reactors and at least until recently the 3 that were undamaged were still outputting power for the region. Not to mention that American reactors, have a secondary containment shell around them something the chernobyl reactors lacked.
To avoid t happening again all one has to do is use an american or chinese reactor that is designed to turn the reaction off as it fails, instead of requiring a second stage to actually force the reaction to stop.
yes there is more than one kind of nuclear reactor. Some are safer than others. Some are designed so that they only produce power under certain situations and turn themselves off when those aren't present.
Parent
Re:Fusion!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it was a nuclear plant and it blew up?
The point he was making is actually it's not relevant to a discussion of nuclear power plant safety in regards to accidental malfunctions because in this case many of the safety devices were specifically turned off and the triggering event was deliberately initiated to see what would happen without proper authorization; in short it didn't "blow up" it was "Blown Up".
Parent
Re:Fusion!? (Score:5, Interesting)
nonsense. The public is afraid because of two reactor accidents; the first one was caused in large part because the reactor in question was little more advanced than the graphite/uranium pile we used in the 40's and that the reactor's safety mechanisms and proper procedure were ignored by a quota happy communist state. The second was contained. The incident at three mile island was also caused by ignoring the safety mechanisms in the reactor *again*. You want an example of an industry with a checkered past? Try Coal for once. The number of people killed mining coal and all the mercury, uranium and thorium release not to mention that it's fraking up our atmosphere and climate with excess CO2 and you're worried about nuclear energy? Where the only problems with nuclear power involved two incidents with 30 and 40 year old reactor designs where even then didn't come close to the kill score that coal has. Not even an order of magnitude.
Parent
complete strawman (Score:3, Informative)
Folks, can you all stop reacting to stories regarding nuclear power on slashdot by falling over at your computers, foaming at the mouth, and shrieking about how the general public are all so stupid that they oppose any use of nuclear power because they're luddites and they're not as scientificall
Re:complete strawman (Score:4, Interesting)
There are 104 nuclear reactors in this country.
No, there are ten reactors in use in this country.
Oh wait, you just assumed that anyone with access to a computer, an internet connection and reading slashdot was from the US, I'm so sorry, your bad (no, I wasn't the one who screwed up, you did).
/Mikael
Parent
Re:complete strawman (Score:5, Informative)
There have not been any new nuclear plants built in this country in a long time not because of protesters, but because they are insanely and hideously expensive to build. They are for the most part not cost-effective.
Nuclear plants are actually a viable long-term investment - there are several scheduled for construction in the US right now. The limiting factor until recently was the mind-boggling amount of red tape, but the situation has improved. There is still the ban on reprocessing and an implied moratorium on the construction of breeder reactors, but the recent changes are a promising move in the right direction.
There are groups who argue against nuclear power for a variety of reasons, some environmental, some political, and some were formed to protest the operation of specific plants that have a track record of environmental damage.
You are FUDding at this point. There are no such plants. They would have been shut down long ago if there was any significant release of radioactivity. If you're talking about tritium leaks - they are not even measurable in the environment, and actually highlight the ignorance of the masses ("it leaks something radioactive so it must be very dangerous" - well, except it's not, as you will be irradiated more by decaying potassium-40 in the body of a girl you're sleeping with than by most tritium leaks).
Some of these organizations are led by or advised by nuclear physicists and engineers, who know a hell of a lot more about the technical aspects of nuclear power than 99% of the people reading this.
There is a PhD at my university who is an expert on chemical NMR, so you could say he is a nuclear physicist to some extent, yet he keeps saying stupid things like "nuclear chemistry is dying" (in case you wonder, it's not - see positron emission tomography). The fact that you're competent in one field does not give you much credibility in other fields.
Parent
Re:complete strawman (Score:5, Funny)
"it leaks something radioactive so it must be very dangerous" - well, except it's not, as you will be irradiated more by decaying potassium-40 in the body of a girl you're sleeping with than by most tritium leaks
Those of us not sleeping with a girl take exception to that comparison.
Could you please put that in time of CRT exposure? Or some other more comprehensible metric?
Parent
Re:complete strawman (Score:5, Insightful)
There have not been any new nuclear plants built in this country in a long time not because of protesters, but because they are insanely and hideously expensive to build. They are for the most part not cost-effective.
They have become insanely and hideously expensive to build primarily because of the influence of your sign-waving hippie-hordes and mouth foaming idiotic masses. The actual cost to build a nuclear power plant would be a secondary consideration if it weren't for the likewise insane regulatory requirements, which if you ask me are slanted disproportionately at nuclear power. Ergo, the sign wavers won, and sanity lost.
The evidence is there. A power company can dump millions of tons of slightly radioactive and toxic coal ash under a golf course (a few tons of which contains vastly more radioactive waste than the totality of materials released by all civilian power related nuclear accidents). However, if that measly amount of waste came from a nuclear facility someone would have hung, certianly metaphorically, possibly in actuality. Furthermore, worker deaths occurring at fossil plants and related activities (especially coal mining naturally) are more numerous and held under far less scrutiny. If that number of people were killed because of nuclear power, there would be a huge price to pay.
I'm not arguing that regulation of dangerous materials is bad... But sanity should prevail. Were we able to process the wastes available and store unprocessable waste, and let investors build safe plants without having excessive governmental burden, it would prove to be a very cost effective and safe enterprise. Japan is prone to earthquakes, and there haven't been significant problems.
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Re:complete strawman (Score:4, Informative)
Folks, can you all stop reacting to stories regarding nuclear power on slashdot by falling over at your computers, foaming at the mouth, and shrieking about how the general public are all so stupid that they oppose any use of nuclear power because they're luddites and they're not as scientifically informed as all of us blah blah blah.
There are 104 nuclear reactors in this country. They provide almost 20% of the country's electricity consumption.
There's more than "this country" in the world, and in some of them luddites do shut down nuclear plants simply because of the irrational fear of the word "nuclear". Nuclear power phase-out in Germany [wikipedia.org] is a good example of that.
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Re:complete strawman (Score:5, Funny)
If a Ford is better car than a Chevvy, that doesnt make it a good car!
There ya go!
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Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Insightful)
If you change 'energy' and 'power' for 'food', you have got what the green revolution [wikipedia.org] achieved from the 50's or so onwards. I think this is a good model for what would happen if cheap energy became universal - consumption simply increases to match what is available and the underlying issue remains unresolved.
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Re: (Score:3)
Restating the failed predictions of Malthus doesn't deserve to be modded 'insightful'. The fact is, fertility rates are determined by social factors (generally, higher gender equality leads to sustainable fertility rates) - if, as you so unthinkingly suggest, rates are determined simply by the availability of resources, then a family who is five times wealthier should have five times as many children (obviously wrong) and the UK should have 3 times the fertility rate of Equitorial Guinea (again, obviously w
Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Insightful)
People starve today not because there isn't enough food to go around, but because of politics. The world lines up cargo planes full of food aid to avert a humanitarian disaster and they idle on the tarmac while the 'leaders' of the starving people claim there isn't a problem and say the aid is unwelcome.
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Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:4, Informative)
Apparently, he's against cheap power AND cheap food. The poor should starve! That'll solve the problem.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it seems that the only way to halt growth in most biological systems it to balance supply and demand.
Right now, food and energy production around the world outstrips demand. Thus, population continues to increase.
The 3 major governors of biological systems seem to be raw materials, energy and space. To some degree, they're convertible. If you remove "energy" as a limiting factor, we're just going to hit a wall with one of the other two at some point.
Hitting any resource barrier is p
Not really ... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a shame that western nations keep so mu
Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Interesting)
Your model omits some readily [susps.org] available [businessweek.com] data [cbsnews.com] that would seem relevant. Population growth among non-immigrants of advanced, wealthy nations such as the US, Japan and parts of western Europe has plateaued at or below replacement. The "western" world has, despite an abundance or food, energy and space (in the case of North America,) tamed its population growth. This has occurred without coercive government control of breeding behavior.
Apparently there are more factors involved in the growth curve than Malthusians such as yourself choose to allow. It is certain that our international governance is equally blind; the next global treaty on the environment that acknowledges this success and, heaven forbid, incorporates population growth into its protocol bean counting will be the first.
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Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop. Just stop.
"Supply and demand" is a tenuous bit of pop economics that you can't blindly apply to any situation you feel could do with a bit of market fundamentalism applied to it. The idea that human population growth is governed by it is utter horseshit. Rich countries have more resources per capita than countries in Africa, but they have lower fertility rates. That blows your little hypothesis out of the water straight away.
Misapplying pop economics. Ignoring real life fertility rates. Treating people of other races as if they were animals mindlessly breeding to fill an ecological niche. You've committed the three most common logical fallacies, and the three most disgusting ones, in this debate.
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Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Insightful)
> Right now, food and energy production around the world outstrips demand. Thus, population continues to increase.
That is not true. The places on the world where energy and food are most abundant, such as the western countries, have populations that are no longer growing at a significant rate. If not for immigration, some of them would even be shrinking.
While it is obvious that the availability of food and energy influences population growth (without food to feed your children the population isn't going to grow any time soon) it is not possible to explain population growth with these things alone. Many other factors are at work here, such as religion ("Every sperm is sacred"). I hear having pensions can also have a big influence on population growth, because people won't need their 10 children to take care of them when they retire.
> The 3 major governors of biological systems seem to be raw materials, energy and space. To some degree, they're convertible. If you remove "energy" as a limiting factor, we're just going to hit a wall with one of the other two at some point.
Maybe for most animals, but I like to think humans are able to choose and ignore their instincts to have "OVER 9000!!!1!!11!!eleven" children and use some form of anticonception. Should this be incorrect we'll just have to invent some kind of ray-gun that turns people into slashdotters. This should bring down birth rates a lot and has the added benefit of giving me a relatively low UID...
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Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm concerned about the idea of 'endless growth in a finite world' that cheap food and energy seem to sustain. If the world population was the same now as it was before the green revolution (2 billion or so) everything would be rosy. That is is now 6.8 billion, set for 7 billion in 2012 and utterly dependent on fossil-fuel centered food production is a worry for me.
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when the energy runs out - social justice... isn't (Score:3, Interesting)
Imagine owning a swimming pool with porous walls. In order to use it, we either have to build a new swimming pool with non-porous walls (or hack it somehow), or constantly fill it up with more water. Which makes more sense? Do we have a water efficiency problem, or a water shortage? To improve the analogy a bit, let's say that we live in a very dry area and get new water from an aquifer.
Energy efficiency vs energy shortage is analogous. And when these ultimately short term methods of energy production are e
Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Interesting)
Good call. The energy price spike in 2007-2008 caused a global food crisis; modern agriculture provides food as a function of how much energy is put into each unit area of land, so there is much more at stake than whether you can have incandescent light bulbs and leave your TV on standby.
Even if low-energy agriculture could somehow feed the world, that isn't our only problem. China and India have shrugged off imperialism, modernised their economies, and thats 2.5 billion people demanding western-level lifestyles and we don't have the political clout (nor the moral right) to say no to them. With our current energy sources, the planet simply can't handle it though.
Produce more energy. Promote gender equality (which reduces fertility rates to sustainable levels, without Chinese-style draconian population control methods). A better world is a higher energy one.
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Re:Cheap energy is social justice (Score:5, Interesting)
Produce more energy. Promote gender equality (which reduces fertility rates to sustainable levels, without Chinese-style draconian population control methods).
And educate, for the love of God, educate!!!
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ah... (Score:3, Interesting)
The idea is interesting- creating a self confining toroid of plasma instead of relying solely on external magnetic containment but from what I've seen of the "tech" it looks to be unfortunately the work of crackpots. Don't get me wrong, I really hope that they actually succeed in doing what they're claiming they can but I sincerely doubt it.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You should take a look at the video [google.com] they made on google; yes they are crackpots [wikipedia.org] unfortunately...
Re:ah... (Score:5, Informative)
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Excellent! (Score:3, Funny)
Anonymous Coward (Score:5, Funny)
I hear Fusion has moved from "Always being 10 years away" to "Always being 5 years away." Great progress!
Step closer to nuclear fusion (Score:5, Funny)
It always looks good at first (Score:5, Insightful)
In fusion research it always look good when you do low-energy tests or low density etc... It is relatively easy to confine plasmas that don't "burn". A penning trap will do the job quite nicely. The problems always show up when you try to push your design to operate close to the lawson criterion, at which point many otherwise promising designs just fall short ( taking the penning trap as an example the required magnetic field for any practical confinement time exceeds that at which modern superconductors stop beeing superconducting ).
Now I admit that I don't know the details of this particular scheme, but I can say with almost certainty that when they try to get closer to break even the higher temperatures, densities and confinement times required will turn the thing into a massive headache.
Re:It always looks good at first (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed. Every joker who builds a farnsworth fusor in his basement thinks he is going to be producing commercial power some time next year, and when they make a noise about this, and idiots with money buy into their promises of more for less, it can take funding from genuine research. When you are doing something that is inherently slow, costly, and prone to overruns, you've constantly got some bullshit artist nipping at your heels claiming they can do the same for less money, in less time, with big fucking bells and whistles on.
I'm involved in a cubesat project, and we recently had to explain why we were spending 100k on a launch when some random jokers on the internet with new-age mysticism and off-the-shelf amateur rocket motors claimed to be able to do the same for 10k "some time next year".
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Both you and the GP should go watch http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1518007279479871760# [google.com] . Eric Lerner presented at Google, presumably looking for funding a couple of years ago. I've watched it a few times - very interesting stuff.
This one http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1996321846673788606# [google.com], by the now-deceased Dr Robert Bussard, is also very interesting
as he was involved in nuclear research for over 50 years. He jokes that the Russian gave us the Tokamak to make sure we'd never get fusion
Re:It always looks good at first (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Now of course we need to see if they can take that final step, but so far they're close enough to th
Re:It always looks good at first (Score:5, Informative)
Which, just as with Inertial Confinemenet Fusion, means they just traded confinement time for Temperature and density.
There's this neat little thing called the triple product which relates to the power output of a fusion plasma.
n*T*tau
n is the number density, T is the temperature and tau is the confinement time. In Tokamaks n is low and T and tau are high. In other fusion schemes tau may be low, meaning they need higher n and T to make up for it. Thus while this particular machine may not need to increase the confinement time, they will then simply have to increase either temperature or number density instead.
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Re:It always looks good at first (Score:4, Interesting)
Particularly with the p-B reaction, you lose all the net power to brehmstrahllung.
The design is supposed to mitigate this ; the magnetic fields involved are allegedly strong enough to prevent enough of the electrons hopping up to the quantum state they need to get to in order to emit X-ray photons. In addition, the design includes a photoelectric collector to harvest the X-rays that do get emitted (supposed to be 40% of the energy yield).
I'm no expert but I'm watching this keenly. Out of the fusion approaches this one seems the most elegant to me ; no heat-engine step to reduce it's efficiency, solid-state energy collection, reactors that are a sensible size and not some enormous aircraft-carrier sized construction of doom. And the fact that it isn't founded on the impossible conceit of containing the uncontainable in a steady state helps it image a lot in my eyes.
And if it turns out to be impossible... well, you could probably pay for the whole project out of the tea and biscuits kitty at ITER. They should fund a new project like this every year, just on the off-chance that one of them works.
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This is aneutronic. No radiation (Score:5, Informative)
An important facet of LPP's research is that they are pursuing aneutronic fusion. This is truly clean nuclear energy. Explained well here. [cafepress.com] and here. Nuclear Power without Nuclear Waste: It's Closer Than You Think
Nuclear fusion has the potential to generate power without the radioactive waste of nuclear fission, but that depends on which atoms you decide to fuse. Conventional fusion approaches work with deuterium and tritium, while focus fusion works with hydrogen and boron. When a boron-11 atom fuses with a hydrogen atom the result is three helium atoms and energy, but no radioactive waste. This is because: the fuel (boron and hydrogen) is not radioactive, the reaction product (helium) is not radioactive, and the reaction releases no neutrons (it's "aneutronic").
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Your point of view is common, but not correct. From dictionary.com:
Theory: "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity."
A theory is a group of explanations for something, NOT a hypothesis that has been confirmed. Theories are generally formulated, then hypotheses (otherwise known as "predictions") are generated from them, then these hypotheses are tested. If a hypothesis that is supported by the theory is shown not