How To Line a Thermonuclear Reactor 184
sciencehabit writes "One of the biggest question marks hanging over the ITER fusion reactor project — a giant international collaboration currently under construction in France — is over what material to use for coating its interior wall. After all, the reactor has to withstand temperatures of 100,000C and an intense particle bombardment. Researchers have now answered that question by refitting the current world's largest fusion device, the Joint European Torus (JET) near Oxford, U.K., with a lining akin to the one planned for ITER. JET's new 'ITER-like wall,' a combination of tungsten and beryllium, is eroding more slowly (PDF) and retaining less of the fuel than the lining used on earlier fusion reactors, the team reports."
The Best Lining (Score:1)
Is composed of the bodies of energy ministers and power-generating companies.
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Or Ducky and Bunny wallpaper. I think an eastern exposure picture window would be nice too.
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So it's okay to use energy for your comfort and convenience as long as you demand that other people conserve it, since clearly you can't be expect
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If you run a 60watt laptop all day but then ride your bike to work you'll be using far less energy than someone who commutes 60 miles and never touches a computer.
It's also not hypocritical to be resentful of your only good options. If the people in power only are willing to offer you a bad option then you can simultaneously use that *bad* option while also resenting them.
I HATED my old cable company. 200ms pings. 1mbps internet and extortionist prices. But you know what my other alternative was? Dial
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We can sit on our high horse and demand that our leaders create policies which force good options to be made available while forcing those who cause damage to the public sphere to pay for the true cost of their product.
That used to be called progress, now it's called interference.
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If you run a 60 watt laptop all day that's a choice you made. You have the option of not running it, or installing solar batteries or pa
A better first wall (Score:5, Informative)
This is known as the "first wall" problem in fusion reactors. It's good to hear there's been progress.
It's discouraging to hear how slow progress is on ITER.
Solar (Score:5, Insightful)
Same thing with Fusion. Technologically, we have enough engineers and scientists in the world to make it a world-scale Apollo type endeavour and get Fusion to market by 2020-2030.... if we wanted to. But honestly, the economy doesn't want to. Not until it runs out of whatever is cheaper.
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You do realize most oil producing countries are on track to produce more oil then any previous year with greater known dril-lable reserves in the ground then at any other point in time???? So it's going to run out really fucking soon... like when we stop finding oil everywhere???? I am not saying burning oil doesn't have problems but the cost of the resource is not going to be one of them for a long time. Oh, I do will have my money where my mouth is am pretty close to shorting oil futures but it wouldn't s
Re:Solar (Score:5, Insightful)
Bananatree3 likely wasn't being ignorant, but rather stating the situation simply. The economics are driven by... economics. Just because they know where more is and are getting at it faster does not mean that it is the cheap stuff that used to spring out of the ground and soak the plains of Texas and Texans alike. This oil is deeper, dirtier, and more spread out.
We are really good at getting at oil, because we need it for every piece of modern life, or at least it is the only feasible way to do it. So we get the oil, however we can.
It would have been more accurate to say, "the CHEAP shit is running out". Other than that I think it is a fine comment.
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Re:Solar (Score:5, Insightful)
forbid some rich dude has see an oil platform...
Fucking this. God forbid they see a fucking windmill. I live here in the Northeast and the fucking Cape Wind project should have been finished 5 years ago (I may be exaggerating) but for the fucking douchebags on Nantucket being butthurt seeing windmills on the horizon TEN FUCKING MILES AWAY.
We could have a combination of wind, solar, tide, and nuclear weaning our asses off of the middle-eastern oil, but no, NIMBYism abounds. So we continue to get our asses mired in the middle east, where politics is not just a social structure, but a full contact sport with no rules and every day being a grudge match over slights done 1500 years ago.
We're fucking masochists wanting to be a part of that. We must be. No other explanation make sense.
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BMO
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Truth!
Re:Solar (Score:5, Informative)
"Nuclear" includes fusion. But consider this: Fusion has been "5 years away" for 40 years.
And it will continue to be "5 years away" for another 40 years. In the meantime, we should be building fission plants based on standard designs. And we should bring back breeder reactors, so we can make more fuel out of used fuel.
But that's not going to happen because of the politics of shrill earth-firsters and others who don't understand nuclear and who think that every nuclear plant is Fukushima or Chernobyl.
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BMO
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But that's not going to happen because of the politics of shrill earth-firsters and others who don't understand nuclear and who think that every nuclear plant is Fukushima or Chernobyl.
Ensuring that greed doesn't ruin the planet for my grandkids is what keeps me wary of a nuclear answer for our energy needs. I'm sure there are safe ways to store waste so that in 100 years it hasn't leaked and trashed the environment. I'm also sure these ways cost more money than something that barely does the job but keeps the company profits growing year on year and allows the executives to pocket huge bonuses.
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That it should have been completed five years ago is no exaggeration.
Re:Solar (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll switch over to alternative fuels long before we run out of Fossil Fuels, simply because they'll be cheaper to produce. A gallon of bio-diesel be cheaper per gallon than petrol diesel at some point, Solar will be cheaper per KWh than burning coal at some point. When that happens, the entire economy will flock over to these alternatives because of price benefits. There will probably be some economic swings as oil/gas/coal producers try to keep competitive, but they're prices will eventually be too high to compete against alternatives.
It's classic supply and demand. When exponential demand meets a finite resource, prices go up. All the alternative fuels are also finite (only so much KWh of sun can be extracted, for example) but they are also renewable. Fossil fuels don't.
grammar (Score:2)
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That's not such a simple certainty. It's very likely that solar will get cheaper than coal at some point, but the judge is still out on biodiesel.
There is a feedback loop hidden there, dumped by the EROEI of those sources.
EROEI (Score:3)
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Keep in mind that there is a huge noise on EROEI measures. Basicaly, no two studies find the same values.
Thus, while those values are a nice overview (enough to get gidelines, like "bio-sources have low EROEI", "hydro can be great" or "few things compete with coal"), don't take them too literaly.
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Unfortunately, no. Such a switch requires massive amounts of energy to build the necessary infrastructure. With the economy already being limi
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We either switch long before we reach the point where it's the physical supply limit that's driving up the price, or our civilization collapses.
With coal, that point is well past the point where AGW famines and migrations have significantly reduced the population and returned us to the dark ages. So yeah, "make hay while the sun shines" is good advice.
Economics 101 (Score:3)
Company B sells solar panels.
Both companies provide products for the electrical generation market.
One company provides the resource, and another provides a conversion technology and not the resource itself.
Both companies are expecting exponential demand growth in the electrical generation market. Company A's resource is limited and finite. Once it's used up, it's done.
Company B's conversion technology allows an unlimited resource to be tapped.
At some point, Company A's finite r
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Let's say a solar panel system on my house will cost 5 years to pay itself. Let's say it will output >80% of its original rating for 20 years.
If I take out a 5 year loan with minimal interest to pay for the solar panel system, all I'm paying for is the interest in the end. The next 15 years give me a net zero electric bill at least and possibly a net profit.
As a consumer that's a helluva deal. One option gives me a guaranteed
300% (Score:2)
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Alternative will never replace fossil fuels. It's classic supply and demand that even you should understand.
Alternative energies will never replace fossil fossil fuels, right up until the moment they do, and then they will. That's a simple enough example of how a planet of a fixed size will always have finite limits on mineral resources that I'm sure you should be able to understand.
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I think you're underestimating the ingenuity of the alternative energy sector manufacturers. They're producing a conversion technology rather than producing the r
THORIUM (Score:4, Insightful)
Thorium is better, it's clearly doable, much safer, and it's incredibly abundant.
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Thorium does not require any of this. It already works.
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AKAIK - nowhere at any time has ANY scientist shown ANY meaningful energy return on hot fusion research. ITER is the biggest failure of ideas I've ever seen.
Seriously, that money could be spent on beer and pizza.
Oil will be gone far sooner than expected - the strategic national stockpile or beer and pizza is not enough to sustain an energy-free economy. Beer and pizza won't just be for Sunday football No, we're going to need all those calories once the economy swings back to human power!
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Key word here...AFAIK.
Luckily the world is not limited by what *you* know.
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Really? Citations? The only similar large-scale experiment I know of was the Oxford JET which only produced 65% of it's input power.
Q problems by an order of magnitude (Score:3)
Technologically, we have enough engineers and scientists in the world to make it a world-scale Apollo type endeavour and get Fusion to market by 2020-2030
Bullshit. They've been at it for 30-40 years and still haven't broken Q 1, where Q is the ratio between power inputted and power generated. You need a ratio of 5:1 just to sustain the plasma. 10:1 is needed for power production. The best verifiable results have been Q=.75.
You can't claim a problem is solvable just by throwing enough money at it.
correction (Score:2)
You cannot escape the test/debug cycle.... (Score:2)
The probability of getting it to work in the near future demands we don't throw everything at it, the same probability combined with the potential payoff demands we keep tinkering and finding solutions to sub-problems or trying completely different designs. Some of those solutions will inevitably be useful in unrelated fields, most won't. We may never get a working fusion reactor but big science (such as the LHC and Fusion) is not just about the questions it was designed
State to fill market gap (Score:2)
Fusion. Technologically, we have enough engineers and scientists in the world to make it a world-scale Apollo type endeavour and get Fusion to market by 2020-2030.... if we wanted to. But honestly, the economy doesn't want to. Not until it runs out of whatever is cheaper.
If the market does not want it, the states can do it. The market is unable to cope with most of potential economic growth because it is not priced. You noticed Apollo was not drived by the market, did you?
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High temperature linings inside a fusion reactor? Just put together a mammoth, well ran, flush-with-cash R&D program and see some company somewhere invent the breakthrough. If the issue is just finding the right alloy, molecular structure, etc. etc. it simply comes down to how big your R&D and engineering programs are.
Thank you, Einstein. (Score:3)
New ways of thinking (Score:3)
New, more effective ways of doing things with existing resources/technology.
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Base Load (of bullshit) (Score:2)
Too bad solar together with pretty much all other renewable energy sources utterly suck for providing baseline energy load.
What the coal industry desperately wants you to think is that "base load" is referring to something more important than a flat output curve. It's irrelevant if the output curve is flat or variable, no single technology comes close to matching the demand curve, thus all individual energy sources suck at matching the demand curve [youtube.com] and nothing is maintenance free (eg: 1 in 7 coal plants are shut down for scheduled maintenance at any point in time).
Coal and Nuclear output a steady supply that has to be shaped
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best stuff to use is unobtanium.
Beryllium, that's inconvenience (Score:3)
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I'm told that children just can't resist the sweet taste of beryllium salts. They seem like logical candidates, if we can train them sufficiently in the necessary machining techniques.
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It's probably done by robots.
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> It's 'remote handling', not 'robotics', apparently.
Actually it's waldos. But it certainly isn't robotics.
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It's not inconcievable to use beryllium. The detectors at LHC have beam pipes made of beryllium. These are the vessels which separate the vacuum in which the particles travel from the detectors. ITER is a scientific institution of similar magnitude.
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Quantities needed are tiny. It's a surface coating on a few square meters of first wall per gigawatt scale power plant. Not a problem.
My first thought... shuttle tiles (Score:3)
The Space Shuttles TPS tiles are some amazing material... though even they are only spec'ed to maybe 1500C, but what is facinating about them, to me, is that they don't hold heat. They can be seared to 1200C and seconds later will be cool. So maybe a system that uses this technology combined with an extra liquid-based fast heat-removal system?
What material can withstand 100,000C ??? How do we test that?
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It's not just the temperature. They need a wall material that does erode impurities in to the plasma. Any impurities will radiate the heat away and cool down the plasma.
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The tiles weren't cool in seconds. They were such amazing insulators that you could pick them up by the corners and not get burned because they wouldn't transfer any significant amount of heat, thus calling them insulators.
Re:My first thought... shuttle tiles (Score:5, Funny)
What material can withstand 100,000C ???
The pastry wrapping a McDonalds Apple Pie.
Re:My first thought... shuttle tiles (Score:5, Interesting)
Space-age materials are pretty amazing, but Fusion-age materials are at a whole different level. I think the community hasn't expressed to the public just how daunting the challenges are. Controlling the plasma is one thing, but engineering the plasma-facing components (PFCs) is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.
The so-called "first wall" is the interior layer of the fusion reactor. It has to stand up to neutron bombardment, but it also has to avoid shedding particles into the plasma. For example high-Z materials such as tungsten, molybdenum, and vanadium are interesting for their neutron tolerance, but if atoms scrape off into the fusion plasma they will radiate like crazy (proportional to Z^2) and drain a lot of energy out of the plasma. That's why they are testing a Be coating (Z=4).
On the other hand, you have divertors, which sit in direct contact with the plasma and basically hold it in place so it doesn't randomly hit the wall. These have to withstand a high heat load. I admittedly don't know much about divertors so I will stop there.
There's also the superconducting material in the coils of the tokamak to consider. Of course there's a whole bunch of neutrons flying around. But also but it turns out that a lot of the issues with superconducting magnets are mechanical in nature. The HEP community has figured out how to build SC magnets consistently, but I think the magnets needed for a tokamak are quite different.
There is supposed to be a International Fusion Material Irradiation Facility, part of the ITER project (and basically a consolation prize to Japan), that will provide intense neutron beams for materials studies. But I am not really sure what the situation/timeline is for that given the funding problems ITER has faced.
Re:My first thought... shuttle tiles (Score:5, Interesting)
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> What material can withstand 100,000C ?
None. Fortunately, nothing has to. That's the temperature of the interior of the plasma, not the temperature of the wall.
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
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A beaker made out of frozen acid!
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Its a little like the old puzzle "What do you use to hold an acid that can eat anything?" Difficult, but interesting, problem.
I always wondered about that too. I remember being taught about the scientific search for the 'Universal Solvent'. Why didn't these people realized that they were dealing with an impossible subject? As far as I can determine fire is the closest thing to the Universal Solvent.
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Its a little like the old puzzle "What do you use to hold an acid that can eat anything?" Difficult, but interesting, problem.
Microgravity and surface tension?
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This problem also adds the additional problem:
"What do you use to hold an acid that can eat anything? And said container when dissolved must not neutralize the acid or reduce its potency."
Tough enough to build a container. Doubly difficult to find something tough enough that won't contaminate the solvent.
In related news ... (Score:3)
If this [youtube.com] is the alternative, I say we start developing rare earth mining in this country ASAP.
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Whatever thorium comes out of your mine along with the REEs has to be treated as "nuclear waste,"
And again we'll have to deal with the sobbing hippie factor. Someone should tell them that since it [wikipedia.org] is a naturally occurring radioactive element, it must be good for you. Just like everything else in the natural products store (like hemp).
Seriously, folks. Get over the "nuclear waste" histrionics. The technology to handle this stuff exists and it can be secured without too much trouble. Or, better yet, consumed in a reactor.
how long will it last with homer at the contols? (Score:4, Funny)
how long will it last with homer at the controls?
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From the Oak Ridge Nuclear Facility with rush delivery
Liquid Lithium (Score:3)
Have they checked instructables? (Score:2)
I find the weirdest shit every time I go there.
There is no way a tokamak can be cost competitive (Score:5, Interesting)
Twenty years ago I was a program officer at the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy. The ITER planning had started. My take -- there is no way on Earth that a tokamak can be cost competitive. Even if it works, even if the first wall problem is solved as may be indicated above, the engineering costs are so prohibitive as to price the whole concept out of consideration.
I earlier worked on Trisops [wikipedia.org], a simpler fusion concept that might be economically feasible, but I even doubt that. In the official fusion community, which is fixated on the the tokamak, it suffered from the NIH ( Not Invented Here ) syndrome and was defunded.
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Don't forget Dr. Bussard's Polywell [wikipedia.org] concept.
It's under a publishing blackout because it's a project currently being funded by the Navy, but the fact that it's still being funded is encouraging.
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So why are we still funding fusion research at a billion dollar level? Why can't program officers get the message up the chain that funding should go elsewhere? There are similar fields ticking along with $100M/year funding.
I'm just getting started reviewing programs, but I can't wrap my head around this concept that wasting money is what you have to do as part of government scientific oversight. There are way too many good projects that go unfunded to spend money on things serious scientists agree will
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One aspect is that we are part of an international consortium, and to pull back would initiate an diplomatic scuffle. In a more rational world we would't be building this.
To put things into perspective it is not more money than we use to bail out one sleazy banker so he can get his bonus, or run a few days of a stupid war.
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Twenty years ago I was a program officer at the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy. The ITER planning had started. My take -- there is no way on Earth that a tokamak can be cost competitive. Even if it works, even if the first wall problem is solved as may be indicated above, the engineering costs are so prohibitive as to price the whole concept out of consideration.
...
Right you are, and the economics are even worse than what you suggest. Consider the breeding blanket problem. Putting aside the immense difficulty of creating a blanket that meets its stringent neutron economy and heat transfer issues (it may be as hard as the break-even problem, and may not even be possible), the capital cost for such a blanket - just price din term of the raw materials - makes fusion power more expensive than conventional nuclear power, and nuclear power's high capital cost is already the
This stuff (Score:2)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5158972/Starlite-the-nuclear-blast-defying-plastic-that-could-change-the-world.html [telegraph.co.uk]
The inventor sounds a little eccentric, but if it does the job I'm sure someone can deal with that
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Beside that, if that article is true then that is an awesome material. To bad the stuff hasn't gotten in common use due to massive distrust (on all sides).
Nice cart (Score:2)
My Ex's heart (Score:2)
They should reinvestigate this.... (Score:2)
Shock, Horror ! : experimental science works!!! (Score:2)
We must band together to stop this erosion of the power of prayer to the All-Mighty YHWH. If these disgusting, sub-religious people and their filthy, filthy heresies were to gain a foothold, then you never know but the altars of Zeus will one day not be p
Re:Fraudsters (Score:5, Insightful)
Troll harder next time.
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Where are these temperatures of 100,000 C ? - Tungsten BOILS at 5660 C and Beryllium at 2970 C - Of course, that's at 1 atmosphere pressure. Something doesn't seem right to me unless the 100K is a good ways away from the walls or the pressure inside is incredibly high (doubtful).
Magnetic fields contain the plasma. That heat never reaches the walls.
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I think the pressure inside is low, and the temperature is the temperature of the (low pressure) plasma. So think a smallish number of ions at really high velocity.
From what I understand, the plamsa is confined by a magnetic field, but not perfectly. So, when some plasma ions go astray, they've gotta hit a material that can take high temperature. The beryllium is probably converted into some useful atom by a nuclear process when this happens.
I might be really wrong about this, but it's my best guess.
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From what I understand, the plamsa is confined by a magnetic field, but not perfectly. So, when some plasma ions go astray, they've gotta hit a material that can take high temperature. The beryllium is probably converted into some useful atom by a nuclear process when this happens.
The process creates plasma, which should be chemically destructive. Beryllium and tungsten sound like usual suspects for such an application.
The nuclear part comes from the nuclear reaction - it produces neutrons aka the worst type of radiation. This will transmute elements, and is hard to block. It's better blocked by light elements so Beryllium might have been picked due to that too. I'd guess the mentioned elements transform into something (relatively) benign, since the experts wouldn't pick something th
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I listened to a talk by someone doing materials research for the first wall. Apparently disruption of the plasma is not the big problem, what they are doing is optimizing the whole process of producing, running, cleaning and recycling the first wall tiles. They are testing different materials by bombarding them with neutrons, then they are trying to separate the nasty stuff and recycle what's useful.