China Just Made a Major Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion Research (techienews.co.uk) 339
New submitter TechnoidNash writes: China announced last week a major breakthrough in the realm of nuclear fusion research. The Chinese Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST), was able to heat hydrogen gas to a temperature of near 50 million degrees Celsius for an unprecedented 102 seconds. While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research (that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius), it is the longest amount of time one has been maintained.
I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Interesting)
It is the second Tokamak reactor that China has built and it has been around for about 10 years. There is no inherent reason to disbelieve them. They have come a long way from 20 years ago.
From what I have read China are claiming a significantly lower temperature than the recent German test, approx 30 million degrees K lower, but a much longer duration. The Germans also believe that their system will comfortably run for much longer, the recent operation was just a test so potentially we are seeing a point where engineering capabilities can produce the accuracy of design needed for tokamaks to work.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Interesting)
There is no inherent reason to disbelieve them.
Their currency is manipulated. Their stock market has 2 books, one set you can see, the other you can't. They sell pet food that poisons pets. They sell baby formula that harms babies. They have no respect for IP property. They're poisoning their environment such that you can't see across the street due to air pollution, and can't drink the water because of some mining company upstream. The news media is censored so that non of their citizens know any of this, except what they can see with their own 2 eyes.
I tend to disbelieve them until shown proof.
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Their currency is manipulated - as is the US currency it's called Quantative Easing.
They sell pet food that poisons pets. They sell baby formula that harms babies. - Private companies that have been prosecuted, there are heaps of US equivalents. Asbestos is one of the biggest.
They have no respect for IP property. Why should they? They don't produce large amounts of IP so it makes sense for them to ignore IP law.
They're poisoning their environment such that you can't see across the street due to ai
Re: I am not a physicist but... (Score:3, Insightful)
You've just described the US.
How is the water in Flint?
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Their currency is manipulated.
Name a country that doesn't manipulate their currency. China's currency is ok, at least as much as anyone else's.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Informative)
China is also dumping US 1960's-style money in to scientific research and development. Of the three major space-faring countries, China, Russia, and the USA, you'll note that only China and Russian currently have manned spaceflight programs.
China has also built the largest ground recieving dish in the world, out-doing the one in Puerto Rico by a factor of almost two.
China is rocking the 1960s American Science Research meme so hard it hurts.
Meanwhile, American politicians are arguing about whether or not climate change is real, and we slot somewhere between countries like Latvia and Lithuania in Science globally. Hong Kong, (china), Singapore, and Japan are #1,2,3 globally, if you were curious.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Also worthy of note:
(Source: Top 500 lists November 2015 [top500.org])
Supercomputers are fundamental to leading edge scientific research.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Informative)
Um... the US spends more money on R&D than any other country, and more money per person than any other country except Israel and South Korea.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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the US spends more money on R&D than any other country, and more money per person than any other country except Israel and South Korea.
Where is that money counted? If it's on its way into the MIC, then you're not accounting for the massive waste and graft inherent to that system.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm a Professor in the US, and I have many colleagues in the hard sciences in China. China and the Middle East are spending a lot more money on basic research now, per researcher, than the US.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Insightful)
"They have no respect for IP property"
To be fair, "IP property" is not actually deserving of respect, so they got this one right.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't confuse lying with management. Manipulating currency and the stock market is an economics trick. It's not fake, it's quite real. As is the race to the bottom manufacturing that causes their health and environmental woes. They also do not lie about this to the western media (don't confusing lying and censorship either).
China have some of the best engineering and economic minds in the world. We should know, we in the west trained them at our grand universities.
This is not North Korea, and I find no reason to disbelieve that their long running fusion projects have seen some results.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Their currency is manipulated. Their stock market has 2 books, one set you can see, the other you can't.
Unlike [bloomberg.com] the West [ft.com]. LOL.
The west sells food that poisons humans. The west has no respect for personal property (unless you're a billionaire). They are poisoning their environment such that you can no longer catch a fish in the ocean whose belly isn't filled with plastic. Oh, and don't get me started on the censorship of western news media.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Insightful)
So we shouldn't believe them because they are just like us?
Do you need a better reason?
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Flint is an issue with naturally acidic water eating away lead pipes, and the corruption of the leadership that failed to act.
Expand that 100x - but with corporate water and air pollution - and you'll have the average city in China.
Re: I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Informative)
Flint is an issue with switching from a good water system to a more acidic and known polluted [cnn.com] one to save a few bucks. That's coupled with STOPPING procedures which helped prevent lead-leeching/corrosion in pipes, DENYING the issue despite people with rashes, hair loss, and other extreme symptoms, and then VICTIM BLAMING and COVER UPS (hey, it's better, we tested it... in homes that have already added filters [rollingstone.com]) when many cases started to surface. At the same time people and their children were being poisoned by lead - and the gov't was denying it - they added extra water coolers of nice clean water in the offices of those same government officials.
But hey, keep telling yourself how bad other countries are, and how yours is so much better. When the "best country in the world" is also a polluted, dry desert rock with a bunch of sick jobless people you can pat yourselves on the back that China is so much worse.
The first step to addressing a problem is to stop denying it exists. Part of that means you start to realize that "but hey... look over there" is a method to distract from the problems "over here"
Thanks! (Score:2)
Was wondering how this stacked up against the German test - which is oddly not referenced in the summary.
Cheers!
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One other thing to be aware of is that the team behind the German Stellaratar reactor have said that you really need 100m Kelvin plasma. Who knows how much difference the temp makes to containment.
Re:Thanks! (Score:5, Informative)
The german stellerator Wendelstein 7-X aims for up to 30 minutes of confinement. At the moment only a some very earlier tests have been done, that did not aim for long confinement but just to check that everything is okay with the installation. Wendelstein 7-X started operating end of last year and EAST started operating in 2006.
This chinese tokamak aims for confinement of up to 1000s and has reached 102 seconds of confinement after 10 years. At the end of 2013 they already had reached 30 seconds. Wendelstein 7-X will first do some experiments that do not aim for a really long confinement time, only up to 10 seconds. These experiments are planned to last about 2 years, after that they will install some additional equipment, that is planned to take 15 month. The chinese record should thus last for at least 3-4 years. But news from Wendelstein 7-x have been very positive, I would not be surprised if confinement works extremely well.
30+Min (Score:4, Interesting)
> The german stellerator Wendelstein 7-X aims for up to 30 minutes of confinement.
Unlike the Tokamak the Stellarator in theory runs continuously. The Wendelstein team just decided that 30 minutes would be enough for all experiments and designed the cooling system to last about 30 minutes.
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Actually, there are a lot of experiments in non-inductive current generation in tokamaks which can allow it to run continuously (in principle). Current generation is done with a combination of phased microwave antennas, tilted neutral beams, and harnessing a phenomenon called bootstrap current.
(Background: the plasma current in tokamaks is normally generated by a transformer and is called inductive current. The induced current is proportional to the time derivative of the transformer voltage, so for a const
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Aside from the duration of the plasma heating, I don't quite see the newsworthyness. JET [wikipedia.org] (a research TOKAMAK in UK) has achieved temperatures of 100 million C [euro-fusion.org] and several seconds of fusion to boot.
Comparison with the german Wendelstein 7-X may not be appropriate, as it's a different type of reactor (stellarator vs. TOKAMAK). Also, its experiments have just started; longer durations are fully expected, but will be a while to achieve.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I kept reading that and I think something has gone wrong. 15 million K is much higher than absolute zero.... But if I am right about what you are getting at the temps achieved by the German and Chinese tests are higher than the core temperature of the sun. It is because they have to be. One thing that is missing from a fusion reactor that the Sun has is gravity. The sun gets to use a combination of extreme temp & extreme pressure, where as on earth all we get to use is the extreme temperature part.
Re: I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Insightful)
A practical fusion reactor has temperatures higher than the sun, because the sun has a horrible power density. Fusion reactions in the sun generate only about 100 wattas per cubic meter, and you need a lot more than that to get a net gain in a human built reactor of a reasonable size. The target is usually around 10 keV for DT fusion, or about 120 million K.
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If memory serves, and google says it does, the temperature of the sun is around 15 million K. I'm not gonna bother googling it, but I'm pretty sure 15 million K is lower (much, much lower) than absolute 0. So the numbers flat out don't work.
A. The reaction rates differ by about 16 orders of magnitude: The sun is going to run about 10 billion years with no refueling. A Tokamak fusion reactor would run for a few seconds or minutes.
2. The sun is using a completely different set of nuclear reactions with completely different fuel. There is no direct comparison anyway.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not gonna bother googling it, but I'm pretty sure 15 million K is lower (much, much lower) than absolute 0.
You really should've googled it.
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From what I have read China are claiming a significantly lower temperature than the recent German test, approx 30 million degrees K lower,
If memory serves, and google says it does, the temperature of the sun is around 15 million K. I'm not gonna bother googling it, but I'm pretty sure 15 million K is lower (much, much lower) than absolute 0. So the numbers flat out don't work.
15000000 0 ? Nope, doesn't make any sense.
And why is the temperature of the sun of interest? This article/discussion wasn't about the sun at all, the comparison mentioned in the post you quoted was against another fusion experiment in Germany - not the fusion process of the sun!
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Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Insightful)
There have been some "big announcements" in other hard science fields from China in the past decade or two that have turned out to be bogus.
Why pick on China? Every country on the planet has been guilty of this. Until a scientific finding has been peer reviewed, and hopefully duplicated, it's just cold fusion all over again.
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Interesting)
An interesting trend to watch, even if this one doesn't turn out to be verified, is that China is where most of the the significant energy research is happening.
The US will be buying most of its advanced energy tech from China in just a couple decades. A couple decades ago that would have seemed unconscionable.
Say what you want about the relative historical value of the two governments, but one stymies progress with fear-based regulations and denial and the other takes the engineering approach to solving problems. Only one of those can drive prosperity - the leads to despair.
Re: I am not a physicist but... (Score:5, Informative)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/s... [slashdot.org]
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On the other hand, a lot of people die in industrial accidents in China. You could argue it's worth it, but you don't get to make that determination for the victims so it's irrelevant.
Anyway, Japan manages to innovate and develop its energy technology just fine, despite strong regulations. They just pick safer technologies, including fusion. The real difference is not the regulatory environment, it's the willingness to invest in new forms of energy and energy efficiency. The US is waking up to the huge new
Re:I am not a physicist but... (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a hint in this article that the previous time limit was safety related, http://www.scmp.com/tech/scien... [scmp.com]
I guess if you are in a race you sometimes have to take risks to get ahead of the pack, even at the risk of a wipe-out.
Totally worth it if they learned anything useful.
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There have been some "big announcements" in other hard science fields from China in the past decade or two that have turned out to be bogus.
Examples, quotations, please. There continues to be a lot of ill will against China and too much preparedness to accept stories that claim everything coming from there is crap. The same used to be said about Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, and in fact all emerging economies, so to rule out the suspicion of bias, quotation is needed, IMO.
Can someone comment on the likelihood of this being real?
It sounds real enough to me - it is progress on the kind of scale that you would expect, I think. 'Progress', to the extent that one can define and measure it, seems to tend to happ
Re: (Score:2)
Err... I can't believe you're asking for citations? Really? I can understand some healthy skepticism but there are actually SCIENTIFIC PAPERS published on this. But, let me help you out... I searched first for "china scientific fraud" and found that there were papers on this subject but I clicked on the first, non-scientific, paper:
http://www.ibtimes.com/chinas-... [ibtimes.com]
The money quote:
Just last month, BioMed Central, an open-access publisher based in Britain, retracted 43 papers, most of them from Chinese researchers, after discovering that reviewers who had supposedly signed off on the studies were made up by agencies hired by the original authors.
I liked their phrase better, so I searched for "china scientific credibility" and figured that I'd find you some more information
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And that is exclusive for China? Nope. The biggest scandals in science that I remember is faked stem cell results from Japan, faked medical research in Europe, faked physics research in the US etc. There have been a number of scandals where people actually died because of the faked research.
Another "popular" thing often mentioned here on /. is the case of the faked milk powder in China. Funny* enough I remember 3 cases of faked olive oil in Europe and a lot of cases of faked alcohol in Europe/US (not moonsh
Things that I wish wouldn't keep getting repeated (Score:5, Informative)
The goal of nuclear fusion research is to produce clean, renewable energy. It seeks to do this by replicating the same conditions that power the sun.
Clean is misleading here - the public's idea of "clean" does not line up with any known fusion reaction that we can hope to achieve. They're all going to produce radioactive waste, just less so (and generally less nasty stuff) than fission reactors. But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
... good god, no. Never. No one for a thousand years to come will ever seriously think about trying to smush two protons together hard enough for them to fuse without a sun-sized gravity well to assist with it. It takes an incredible amount of time for any two hydrogen atoms to fuse in the sun, on the order of millions of years.
Replicating the same conditions that power the sun
I realize that journalists need to summarize their stories, but fusion is a topic that is already understood more-poorly-than-normal by most people. They need to not be making people think about Spiderman 2.
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Except the general public doesnt understand fission or the relative radioactive material release of fossil fuels. The best thing we could have is fusion = sun = natural = clean.
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It's even more fun if they live in a brick house, or are holding a banana.
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Which gives you more radiation???
A. Flying from JFK to LAX. B. Going through that darn TSA scanner to get on the flight!
Answer is... A! (Wild surprise from the audience)
Which is worse?
A. Being an average flight crew employee B. Being an average nuclear power plant worker.
Answer is.... neither is "worse" you insensitive clod. "A" undergoes more radiation exposure but they both unfortunately have to work long and weird hours.
But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
Wow... people like the original poster are the true probl
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Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
Radionuclides emit radiation. What you need to understand is the behaviour of radionuclides in the environment. Until you do xkcd comics are only going to explain external radiation exposure to you. The difference between internal and external exposure is one damages you and the other probably won't do much of anything to you.
What radionuclides do in the body and how they get there is the understanding required, you insensitive clod.
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So Potassium is a great example of internal radiation, which is in biological equilibrium with your body almost always. That's routinely discussed for laypeople.
In my example of professions, both things I noted are based on external exposures; there are no internal exposures.
How radionuclides get in the body just follow the same path as how any chemicals get in the body; breathing, eating, absorbing, etc.
What is your problem with my statement?
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So Potassium is a great example of internal radiation, which is in biological equilibrium with your body almost always.
What really freaks laypeople out is when you tell them that radioactive potassium in their body gives off anti-matter [wikipedia.org]. For the curious, K-40 sometimes decays to Ar-40 by emitting a positron [wikipedia.org] and a neutrino.
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Thank you for the informative post; I always wondered about stars and how they used up the hydrogen fuel within them.
Re:Things that I wish wouldn't keep getting repeat (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also, it would seem that I misremembered the half-life of a proton in our Sun's core. It's a billion years; my millions of years is wrongish.
Re:Things that I wish wouldn't keep getting repeat (Score:5, Informative)
It takes billions (not millions) of years for hydrogen atoms to fuse in the sun - that is precisely why the sun has a billions-of-years lifetime. So in building a fusion reactor, we need many orders of magnitude higher reaction rates, and to achieve them at many orders of magnitude lower densities. One way of doing this is to have much higher temperatures. The solar core temperature is about 15 million degrees [wikipedia.org] and TFA has 50 million degrees for this new result, and 80 million degrees for half a second at a European reactor. This sounds unimpressive, but the reaction rates are very sensitive to temperature - proportional to about T^8 as I recall, but I didn't quickly find an online reference for this. 75 million degrees would therefore give a boost of about 5^8 which is about 400,000.
In the sun, the first reaction in the chain [wikipedia.org] (proton+proton->deuterium) is the rate limiting step. In a reactor, we can provide deuterium enriched fuel and bypass this step. I don't know what the reaction rates are, but I suspect that this will be a greater benefit that the higher temperatures. You can do even better with tritium in the fuel, but your reactor becomes an intense neutron source, leading to induced radioactivity in nearby materials. Some proposed designs use these neutrons to breed more tritium from a lithium blanket around the reactor. (Once I get beyond the proton-proton chain reaction, I'm just relying on pop-science knowledge, so corrections from the more knowledgeable are welcome.)
Stars a bit more massive than the sun burn hydrogen via the CNO cycle [wikipedia.org], which has even higher temperature dependence (from memory, about T^17). I've never heard of anyone suggesting using the CNO cycle in a fusion reactor - presumably there are good reasons, but I don't know what they are. One problem is you need to wait for radioactive decays, but these have half-lives on the order of 1 to 2 minutes, and a commercial reactor would be running for much longer than that.
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D-T reactors would activate the reactor materials, but the wastes would be relatively short-lived (most in the range of a couple hundred years). There wouldn't be any transuranic wastes.
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Clean is misleading here
But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
Snowballs thrown... no, YOU'RE misleading!!!
But seriously, people like you are the true problem. Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
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Clean is misleading here
But we need to get around the same stigma that has hamstrung fission reactors - that "radioactive" means "cancerous death" to the electorate.
Snowballs thrown... no, YOU'RE misleading!!!
But seriously, people like you are the true problem. Everyone else, let's try to understand the actual facts about radiation. Obligatory xkcd:
http://xkcd.com/radiation/ [xkcd.com]
Actually you are being unintentionally misleading. Certain radioisotopes can be ingested via metabolic processes, for example plutonium chloride is very water soluble and is readily absorbed. Within the body the radioisotope continues to emit radiation and some become organically bound to cells and other parts of the body and that's when the damage occurs, cumulative, slowly and, over time.
Dempending on what and where the radioisotope gets deposited, it eventually means cancerous death for some however it
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All of the waste of fission reactors are contained in the cladding. You actually get more radiation exposure living next to a coal plant, since the heavy metals are released into the atmosphere.
I don't want to discount your point that internal exposure is greatly more important for alpha emissions, but you cannot say that the environment has any alpha-emitting radionuclides that you can accidentally get into your body and worry about. Literally all radionuclides that you need to worry about for internal exp
RFTA - this has not been peer reviewed (Score:5, Insightful)
Very exciting until you see that the results have not been verified in any way.
If the claim is true, I would be very interested in reading how it was accomplished and what were the conditions. I would be particularly interested in finding out if the heat was contained or if energy was being continually driven into the system.
Claims are just that until verified and the apparatus and results are published.
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Not sure you know much about physics.
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You're an idiot.
Finally something warm enough (Score:2)
Now THAT is going to make for a super nice pizza crust.
4 trillion degrees ? (Score:4, Funny)
While this is nowhere near the hottest temperature that has ever been achieved in nuclear fusion research (that distinction belongs to the Large Hadron Collider which reached 4 trillion degrees Celsius), ...
Sadly, even at such temperatures, the LHC was, like the Mythbusters [discovery.com], also unable to successfully flash-fry shrimp in a shrimp cannon [youtube.com].
Cheap foreign helium atoms (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about you, but I'm not getting any cheap, shoddily made helium atoms.
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I don't know about you, but I'm not getting any cheap, shoddily made helium atoms.
I'm with you. I always buy the Morton Salt at the grocery store because they use only premium sodium atoms. Also, some cheaper salt is made from chlorine atoms that are scavenged from public swimming pool water, basically old and worn out.
Great, another inflationary new statement (Score:3)
The author of the article must have been running around the street, naked, screaming "fusion is here", "fusion is here". I'm not that excited. For one nobody has said anything about efficiency. Its easy to maintain a plasma if your dumping enough energy into it, so how much energy did they dump into it? Nobody knows. You have to confine the plasma, and get more energy out than you put in. I'm not convinced that they did this. Congrats for producing the longest lasting plasma "flame". But I can make a plasma "flame" in my microwave for minutes at a time. So tell me how much energy did they produce? I'll bet they didn't break even or everyone would be running naked through the streets.
Re:Great, another inflationary new statement (Score:5, Interesting)
Ummmm they didn't try to create a fusion reaction...... Or get any energy out of the system at all...... In fact it is at about half the temperature it needs to be for fusion to work. The whole point of the research currently is to create a system for containing plasma heated to 100,000,000K. The plasma can't come into contact with the walls of the chamber because, either it is so low in mass the chamber instantly cools it, or is has enough mass to melt the chamber walls down.
Once they have a containment system that can run for extended periods of time, the current target is 1000 seconds, then they will look to trigger a fusion reaction inside the super heated plasma. At that point the plasma starts pumping out heat rather than needing it.
Why the silly comparison? (Score:5, Informative)
50 years of fusion research (Score:2)
And all we have to show for it is a lousy 102 seconds. :(
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>> Kraft Diner cooks in 1ms.
And everyone in the diner dies too. But I wonder how long it would take to cook Mac and Cheese at that temperature?
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What kind of monster is 'cooking' a diner full of staff and customers in the first place?
Re: At that temperature... (Score:2, Funny)
A very hungry one, I imagine.
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Only if "JESUS" was an acronym for:
Just
Every
Stunned,
Uneducated,
Simpleton.
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My expectation is that LENR will be used for heat production. If you want gigawatt-scale electricity production, then the options are fission reactors or high-temperature fusion. The problem with using a low temperature process for thermal electric power generation is that thermal cycles perform better at higher temperature differentials. In terms of using LENR for electricity generation, this means that the practical issues of turning the heat back into electricity wipe out the benefits of using LENR to
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My expectation is that LENR will be used for heat production.
It's actually mainly used for hot air production.
Re:High vs Low (Score:5, Insightful)
The trouble with LENR is we can see it work, but we don't know why or how...
Another problem is that nobody has been able to see it work reproducibly. Or work at all for that matter, in any verifiable way. The crank piece you linked does nothing to change my impression of that. As for military involvement in (let's say it) cold fusion, that does not exactly inspire confidence. [wikipedia.org]
Security Implications (Score:3)
As for military involvement in (let's say it) cold fusion, that does not exactly inspire confidence.
I completely agree that there is absolutely nothing of substance in any of the so-called evidence of LENR/cold fusion presented so-far. However I actually don't think it is a bad idea for the military to be involved in checking out the claims because the security implications are enormous. Any fusion reaction will produce neutrons and if these are moderated and then incident on uranium you can produce plutonium. This is essentially how a fast breeder reactor works.
Plutonium can be chemically separated f
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Any fusion reaction will produce neutrons and if these are moderated and then incident on uranium you can produce plutonium.
One of the notorious characteristics of supposed cold fusion is that it does not produce neutrons. If that leads you to think that there is in fact no fusion reaction, you would find yourself in good company.
Neutron Detection (Score:2)
One of the notorious characteristics of supposed cold fusion is that it does not produce neutrons.
Actually I understood that the way they "detected" that a nuclear reaction was taking place was by the production of neutrons. Indeed without neutrons how can you possibly say that fusion has occurred because then all you have is an unexplained heat gain which could be due to one of any number of things.
Neutron detection is hard to get right at these low energies and I understood that this was the explanation why so many people were fooled into thinking that fusion had occurred. This was certainly the r
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the problem with the E-Cat is that it can't be shown to "work" without electrical input from the mains which in turn is NOT properly metered so (this is part of the blackbox scam) we don't know how much energy is going IN to the system.
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The name change ("cold fusion" to "LENR") also does not inspire much confidence. Cold fusion is clearly a damaged brand... So why not try marketing it again with a new name?
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You tell us, McCubre hasn't stepped near a fuel cell since 1992 (New Scientist, 11 January 1992, 1803, p. 12ff). His work since then has been entirely theoretical.
Re:High vs Low (Score:5, Informative)
https://www.lenr-forum.com/forum/index.php/Attachment/386-IEEE-brief-DeChiaro-9-2015-pdf
Dear reader, I quit reading this document as soon as I saw convicted fraudster and scam artist Andrea Rossi [wikipedia.org] cited by it unironically -- as you should as well.
Hot fusion is also going nowhere until anuetronic fusion becomes practical (pro tip: it's quite a bit harder to do) because the fast neutrons eventually destroy every known material used as the plasma-facing "first" wall. That's something the ITER fanboys are not telling you (for obvious reasons).
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anuetronic
Typo; it should say "aneutronic".
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I wish I had mod points. This paper summarizes all the hype and bad research in one big gish gallop.
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In an actual application, you'll need to capture almost every neutron emitted by the fusion reaction to breed tritium; otherwise you'll run out of reactor fuel.
You'll also want to make the parts behind the breeding blanket replaceable - those chunks of metal will be the radioactive waste
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because the fast neutrons eventually destroy every known material used as the plasma-facing "first" wall. That's something the ITER fanboys are not telling you (for obvious reasons).
That's weird, I've been aware for a decade or more now that ITER is working on assorted possible first-wall technologies and the JET in Culham, England is being repurposed as a wall material testbed. Maybe they didn't tell you but they've been telling everyone else.
The walls are going to be sacrificial, needing to be replaced
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(And for those of you who think LENR is a myth: https://www.lenr-forum.com/for... [lenr-forum.com] )
So if I link to a pdf of some slides claiming an observation of flying pigs does that mean that pigs can fly? Show me a peer reviewed article in a _respected_ journal and I'll be interested.
The trouble with LENR is we can see it work,
If that were the case then we would have a working way to extract energy from it by now. The problem is that only some, "special" people can see it work and nobody else can. The most likely explanation for this is that those "special" people are not doing their experiment correctly especially since there has been a lon
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Adrian Ashfield is a shill for Rossi, and the author of that paper is NOT who it is claimed to be.
Hence, "SCAM!" The E-Cat is a: unproven LENR technology and in fact b: proven to be a fraud, as are all blackbox demonstrations throughout history.
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Hydrogen is not fissile [nrc.gov]
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Spending $20,000,000,000,000 (and counting...) on pointless war in the Middle East instead of energy research is really working out well for the USA.
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It's not all pointless. The nutjobs need to be dealt with. Look at Syria. The only one doing anything is Russia and they are doing it only for their own good and causing shitloads more suffering. Can't say what US has done is a mark of excellent, but it's all better than what Russia is ever capable of.
Considering our policies and actions of the last 50+ years led to what is happening in Syria, I'm going with the grandparent post and say it was pointless.
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"It's not all pointless. The nutjobs need to be dealt with"
Sorry, but the 2nd Iraq "war" was utterly pointless. It cost lives and money for what - to remove one psychopath under bogus pretenses who at least held the region together, and allow him to be replaced with 10s of thousands of psychopaths who have created anarchy in the whole region and europe. Way to go USA!
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There's a difference between not being able to exactly predict the future and being willfully purblind in a moronic effort to get back at someone after 9/11 regardless of whether they were responsible. George W Bush was an arrogant fool and a liar.
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Keep in mind this is China's news, the same ones who tell us Taiwan/Hong Kong/Tibet/South sea islands is belonged to China, nothing bad ever happen on Tiananmen square, there is no corruption in China (except a few to make example of, the rest of the world is polluted as bad as China (lol no) and countless other lies about their country to surpress to people/save face.
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There are a lot of posts about how we can't trust China, but for any one who has followed fusion work, this should be no surprise. EAST has been one of the major research tokamaks in the world, and results like this are incremental results that were expected to come about. What is more interesting is how cheap EAST and some other Chinese fusion research facilities are, like KTX which I am more familiar with and has been both cheap and fast. Yet they still contribute new results and share info at conferences, so it is not like they are just a lagging copy of other countries.
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You seem to not be aware that fusion research is an open and collaborative project between all nations. We share data, equipment, tokamak run-time, and scientists. Your partisan suspicion is understandable for someone not in the know, but it's totally wrong. The fusion scientific community is well aware of what is going on at EAST (and all other major collaborative facilities), when the machine turns on, when it turns off, when there is a leak, when a diagnostic malfunctions, and when things go well.
At DIII-D (USA), we have built a "remote control room" for EAST and KSTAR so that researchers in US can operate EAST on the third shift when our colleagues in China are sleeping. Control parameters will be transferred to Hefei over the internet and diagnostics will be fed back to the monitors in almost real time.
BTW, I am a fusion research scientist based in US, but I do do some work on EAST as well as other machines.
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did they use a thermometer from alibaba.com?
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That's a slashdot record!
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Cool? Relatively easy: the temperature is high, but the density is very low so the total amount of energy is still manageble. The density being so low is the reason the temperature has to be so high anyway, the center of the sun is much cooler but the density there is much higher.