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Science Technology

Fusion Reactor Project Largest After ISS 65

Posted by timothy from the put-it-in-france dept.
Maktoo writes "All proper geeks know Fusion is the Way of the Future. Dec 16th is the date set for selection of the site of the new International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter). A collaboration between the EU, Japan, the U.S., Canada, China, South Korea and Russia, 'ITER would be the world's largest international cooperative research and development project after the International Space Station.' Their goal over the next decade? '[T]o produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for 500 seconds or longer during each individual fusion experiment and in doing so demonstrate essential technologies for a commercial reactor.'"
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Fusion Reactor Project Largest After ISS More

Fusion Reactor Project Largest After ISS

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  • eep (Score:4, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @01:57PM (#7570573) Homepage Journal
    "Fusion Reactor Project Largest After IIS"

    I'd say the odds are pretty good that somebody's going to make a Microsoft joke here.

    • Re:eep (Score:1, Redundant)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 )
      Off-topic my ass. The original story said "IIS", not "ISS'. The Editors can go back in time and change what was originally written, but I cannot. Don't penalize me for something I cannot change.
  • I know that some people consider IIS to be the greatest web server around, but I don't think it really compares with the complexity of the ISS (International Space Station)

  • IIS? (Score:3, Funny)

    by dmayle ( 200765 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @02:01PM (#7570616) Homepage Journal

    Fusion Reactor Project Largest After IIS

    Don't you mean the largest thermonuclear disaster, second only to IIS? Oh... you meant ISS...

    • Re:IIS? (Score:2, Informative)

      by chl ( 247840 )

      largest thermonuclear disaster

      From a disaster point of view, fusion devices are extremely boring. If the reactor vessel was breached, the inrushing air would be to the plasma as the inrushing ocean on a candle flame. A magnetically confined plasma is about a factor one million less dense than normal air. It is also about one million times hotter than normal air, so you actually have a plasma pressure of one atmosphere.

      This means that the energy content of the plasma and the confining magnetic field is

  • ITER Website (Score:4, Informative)

    by displague ( 4438 ) <slashdotNO@SPAMdisplague.com> on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @02:04PM (#7570636) Homepage Journal
    http://www.iter.org/ [iter.org] is the ITER Project web site. The ITER U.S. [iter-us.org] is not really in production.
  • I sure hope it is cold fusion; I need a place to put my beer.

  • awesome stuff! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Leroy_Brown242 ( 683141 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @02:05PM (#7570660) Homepage Journal

    I am all for more huge international projects, that aren't war!

    The more countries work together, the more it gets set into society that people from other countries are okay, and working with them is NOT like working with the enemy.

    • The more countries work together, the more it gets set into society that people from other countries are okay, and working with them is NOT like working with the enemy.

      You're very much right. Before the election of 2000, the US was on its way to becoming a cooperative international power. We were involved in negotiations on the Kyoto treaty, we weren't developing "Star Wars" ABM weapons, and we were even showing signs of getting with the program on such no-brainers as land mines.

      It was looking for a wh
      • "Before the election of 2000, the US was on its way to becoming a cooperative international power. We were involved in negotiations on the Kyoto treaty, we weren't developing "Star Wars" ABM weapons, and we were even showing signs of getting with the program on such no-brainers as land mines."

        In the spirit of the holidays I say...horseshit.

        The Senate voted 97-0 against Kyoto, not voting on the Treaty, but voting to show Clinton they were not interested in the least in the form Kyoto was taking.

        The US sta
      • Oh, yes.

        The Kyoto Treaty, which the U.S. Senate unanimously declared it would not ratify.

        The "Star Wars" ABM weapons we weren't developing, except for through the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, which is the name under which Clinton continued to fund the Reagan-established Strategic Defense Initiative Organization.

        The land mine treaty, which Clinton refused to sign because it didn't include the Korea exemption.

        Meanwhile, those of us back here on planet Earth note that the difference between the
    • I am all for more huge international projects, that aren't war!

      But if we called it "The War on Fossil Fuels" Congress would fund it better. They're particularly fond of that metaphor.

  • Great Scott! (Score:4, Funny)

    by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @02:16PM (#7570858) Homepage Journal
    "[T]o produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for 500 seconds or longer during each individual fusion experiment and in doing so demonstrate essential technologies for a commercial reactor"

    500 megawatts? Wow, that's almost in the gigawatt range. If anybody's curious, I found a mockup [bttf.com] of what the commercial product will look like.
    • Wow, that's almost in the gigawatt range.

      Yes, and all they need is 1.21 to time travel!

      • Re:Great Scott! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by neocon ( 580579 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @04:27PM (#7572181) Homepage Journal

        Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

        If someone else screws your girlfriend so much that you don't get to, you stay a virgin. If brave US soldiers go fight terrorists overseas so you don't have to fight them here, you get to live in peace.

        Any questions?

        • Re:Great Scott! (Score:2, Insightful)

          by jlehtira ( 655619 )

          Indeed. The fighters will never know peace, but I sure am grateful that USA is making itself THE target for all those nutty terrorists.

          Then again, Hussein's not my girlfriend..

          Seriously; it's only a matter of time that everybody gets nuclear weapons, so quarreling with half the world seems a bit.. Overconfident?

          • Seriously; it's only a matter of time that everybody gets nuclear weapons, so quarreling with half the world seems a bit.. Overconfident?

            Confident is the attitude that they're trying to project. My impression is that it's really a bizarre combination of arrogant and desperate. I'm afraid that what the US Admin is really doing is the political equivalent of artificially inflating the stock price. The collapse is gonna be really ugly.

    • 500 MW is good but you need 1.21 Gigawatts for that to work

  • Website (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'd go and learn all about this project if their website wasn't on drugs.

    Neon-gradient backgrounds? What is this, 1995?

  • Does this project get the funding it does because a fusion reactor is also a neutron source?

    And what can be done with a high flux of neutrons?

    An excercise for the reader.

    • Re:Neutron Source (Score:3, Insightful)

      by deglr6328 ( 150198 )
      High flux neutron beams are commonly available from plain old fission reactors [www.ill.fr]. I doubt they'd go through the trouble.
    • penetrate your tinfoil hat perhaps?

      it's not like it's a good way to get them even is it? the reason to do them is to 'unleash the power of the atom' so to speak.. or rather not unleash it but put it on a leash so we can use it.

      cheap electricity is worth investing for.

    • The neutrons are going to be (eventually) absorbed in a liquid lithium metal jacket. The lithium absorbs the neutrons to create tritium and or deuterium which can be extracted and recycled back into the reactor as fuel
      • The lithium absorbs the neutrons to create tritium and or deuterium

        I'm not a nuclear physicist, but I'm always curious about the processes involved. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] says that Li has two natural isotopes (6-Li and 7-Li), and that 8-Li (with the added neutron) has a half-life of less than a second.

        The extra neutron in 8-Li gets converted to a proton plus a high-energy electron (a Beta Particle [wikipedia.org]). That leaves you with 4 protons and 4 neutrons, which could simply remain 8-Be. Apparently, though, it's more likely

        • Re:Neutron Source (Score:3, Informative)

          by krysith ( 648105 )
          It is the Li-6 that generates the additional tritium when it is hit by neutrons. A useful reference. [rzg.mpg.de] The tritium must be regenerated because it is rather expensive. Deuterium on the other hand is cheap and plentiful, and thus does not require regeneration.
          • The tritium must be regenerated because it is rather expensive.

            Tritium also has a half life of about 12 years, so that even if it did grow on trees, it would be practically gone after 120 years, so it does not accumulate in nature the way coal, oil etc. do. Breeding tritium on a JIT basis therefore is the best way.

            chl

    • And what can be done with a high flux of neutrons?

      Breed fissionable reactor fuel from thorium to keep the fission plants running until we can switch to all fusion? Although I doubt the ITER team can afford to waste money and effort on this. Also, the earth's uranium resources are not going to run out until long after the ITER timeframe.

      Then, there are the neutron diagnostics for the solid state physicists, but they can usually make do with conventional fission-based neutron sources.

      chl

  • Another possibility... (Score:5, Informative)

    by deglr6328 ( 150198 ) on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @02:36PM (#7571128)
    As someone who works in the laser fusion camp(though just as a lowly technician), I feel obligated to point out that there may be something of a dark horse in the race to fusion power currently in the running... Besides the obvious method of magnetic confinement in Tokamaks and Stellarators [nifs.ac.jp], which do still have the best chance at becoming true fusion reactors of the future attaining ignition and breakeven; there is another way that inertial confinement [rochester.edu] fusion using lasers may still hold promise. There are 2 new beams (will be called "Omega EP")currently being built [rochester.edu] which will be added to the 60 beam 60 Terawatt Omega Laser in the next few years. What is special about these new lasers is they are over 1,000 TIMES more powerful than the old Omega beams at over 1 Petawatt [rochester.edu] each! The new lasers will be used to ignite a Hydrogen fuel capsule at exactly the moment of highest compression by the old Omega laser, sort of acting like a spark plug [lookjapan.com] effect. The GekkoXII [osaka-u.ac.jp] laser in Japan which has a (much weaker) Petawatt laser attached to it's also less powerful compressing laser recently verified this method as increasing fusion yield by a couple orders of magnitude, this puts the Omega laser as having a very high likelihood of igniting it's fusion capsules by using the new laser in conjunction with the old 60 beam Omega. If someone can then figure out how to ramp the laser up to a high pulse repetition rate (burning many capsules/second) possibly using a diode pumped Nd:glass system then you have a real contender for a fusion power plant.
    • Most fusion-research in the EU is with tokomaks and stellerators, indeed.
      A lott of the research into ICF (inertial confinement fusion, meaning with lasers) happens in the United States.

      I guess it's no coincident that fusion through tokomaks can only be used as a power source, but ICF also as a weapon.

  • Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by NegativeK ( 547688 ) <`moc.liamtoh' `ta' `neiraket'> on Wednesday November 26, 2003 @02:39PM (#7571157) Homepage
    It's good to see the US back on big-science again. After the Super-Collider in Texas fell through.. What was it, half the budget spent, and they dropped a project that could open up amazing new areas in particle physics?
    Then there's JET, which America pulled out of.. From what I understand, most of the new grounds in fusion research occured there.
    Oh, and who can forget - the moon. We dropped that like a bad habit. When it comes to big science, this country seems to have the attention span of a goldfish. Sure, we'll make great strides, but then we'll just.. Drop it if it doesn't push votes for the politicians anymore. Argh.

    Let's just hope that we stick to this project.
    • It's good to see the US back on big-science again. [SSC,JET,etc.]

      And curious which administration killed the projects and which is getting on board. Not what one might expect.

  • A collaboration between the EU, Japan, the U.S., Canada, China, South Korea and Russia

    What about Iran and North Korea? Surely they have nuclear experience to bring to the table...
  • General Fusion [generalfusion.com]

    Similar to inertial confinement, but without all the expensive lasers and without said lasers using up huge amounts of power themselves making breakeven pretty tenuous.
    • I can't help but think that organization is BS. The initial acoustic cavitation fusion experiment which was said to have produced neutrons was never [bbc.co.uk] sucessfully repeated. The method described in that website of using Lithium as the cavitation "pusher" has, to my knowledge, not even been attempted or if it has, has never been published. As to their claim that "It is the goal of General Fusion to develop this reactor and generate clean, safe and economical fusion energy by the end of 2004."...well... that's
  • There is a theoretical physicist in the UK supporting himself as a tutor while working on getting a plasma to contain itself with the electric/magnetic fields that arise from it's own vortex. He's experiencing some technical difficulties at this time jump-starting the vortex, but hey, if it was easy everyone would do it. So far, he has managed to create a tornado in a petri dish No, I am not making this up. Take a look: http://www.peter-thomson.co.uk/tornado/fusion/Int r oduction_to_the_charge_sheath_v

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