France Runs Fusion Reactor For Record 22 Minutes (newatlas.com) 163
France has upped the ante in the quest for fusion power by maintaining a plasma reaction for over 22 minutes -- a new record. From a report: The milestone was reached on February 12 at the Commissariat a lenergie atomique et aux energies alternatives (CEA) WEST Tokamak reactor.
Achieving the dream of commercial fusion power is the Holy Grail of engineering and has been for 80 years. With a single gram of hydrogen isotopes yielding the energy equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal, a practical fusion reactor would hold the promise of unlimited, clean energy for humanity until the end of time.
Small wonder that billions have been invested by both government and industry in the quest to make fusion power a reality. However, while fusion is relatively easy to achieve in the heart of the sun or in a hydrogen bomb, creating a practical reactor that produces more energy than is put into it is another matter entirely.
Achieving the dream of commercial fusion power is the Holy Grail of engineering and has been for 80 years. With a single gram of hydrogen isotopes yielding the energy equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal, a practical fusion reactor would hold the promise of unlimited, clean energy for humanity until the end of time.
Small wonder that billions have been invested by both government and industry in the quest to make fusion power a reality. However, while fusion is relatively easy to achieve in the heart of the sun or in a hydrogen bomb, creating a practical reactor that produces more energy than is put into it is another matter entirely.
Not energy gain (Score:4, Informative)
This is 11 minutes of sustaining a fusion reaction that took more energy to confine than could be extracted from the reaction itself. We won't have proven energy gain from magnetic confinement fusion until ITER is built, but Trump will likely cancel it since Musk hates it.
Re:Not energy gain (Score:5, Informative)
I think Trump cannot cancel ITER or better said, ITER would survive withdrawal of the USA, with the following arguments:
1) ITER already has experience to manage a withdrawal of USA, during period 1998-2003
2) The USA fund 9% of ITER, which is lots but not enough to cause a collapse.
(Source: Wikipedia)
Not fusion reaction [Re:Not energy gain] (Score:5, Informative)
No fusion. The article is extremely lacking in details, but what the press release says is that they sustained a plasma for 22 minutes. Not a fusion reaction.
https://www.cea.fr/english/Pag... [www.cea.fr]
To actually produce a fusion reaction, they would need to feed it with deuterium and tritium, not hydrogen.
quote from the press release:“WEST has achieved a new key technological milestone by maintaining hydrogen plasma for more than twenty minutes through the injection of 2 MW of heating power."
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Re:Not fusion reaction [Re:Not energy gain] (Score:5, Funny)
My plasma cutter can easily run longer than 22 minutes.
That's nothing. I've got a fluorescent lightbulb that can sustain a plasma for years.
Not at the 2 MW level, though.
Re: Not fusion reaction [Re:Not energy gain] (Score:3)
That's nothing. I've got a fluorescent lightbulb that can sustain a plasma for years.
Not at the 2 MW level, though.
What if you built a Beowulf cluster of those?
Disappointing (Score:2)
>but what the press release says is that they sustained a plasma for
>22 minutes. Not a fusion reaction.
how disappointing.
I came here for the jokes about the French surrendering, and it turns out the it was the plasma that surrendered.
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During the last la Presidenta administration, la Presidenta told the Navy that they were going to use steam powered catapults to launch their planes....from a nuclear powered ship. His reason: you have to be Einstein to understand nuclear power. What a knob.
Re:Not energy gain (Score:5, Insightful)
He also whined about using magnets for elevators rather than John Deere tractors. His explanation was if you put a magnet in water, it stops working [newsweek.com].
"Think of it, magnets," Trump said. "Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that's the end of the magnets. Why didn't they use John Deere? Why didn't they bring in the John Deere people? Do you like John Deere? I like John Deere."
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Totes no magnets in a Deere, nope, nope, nope.
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"Think of it, magnets," Trump said. "Now all I know about magnets is this, give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that's the end of the magnets. Why didn't they use John Deere? Why didn't they bring in the John Deere people? Do you like John Deere? I like John Deere."
This has got to be code of some kind. Something like the lingo in Oceans 11, only less refined.
Re: Not energy gain (Score:2)
Re:Not energy gain (Score:5, Informative)
We won't have proven energy gain from magnetic confinement fusion until ITER is built, but Trump will likely cancel it since Musk hates it.
ITER [wikipedia.org] is an international project with 11 participating nations plus the EU. The US is one of the participating nations, at least for now. Trump/Musk could pull the US out, but that doesn't mean ITER would be cancelled.
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How would Trump cancel something being built in Europe by an international body?
Don't you think the other international partners might continue on and tell the US to get fucked if they're successful and we come knocking asking for inclusion again?
At least, that's what they should do. I'm fine with out political dipshits feeling the pain of their own stupid decisions.
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stupid lack of an edit button - should have been "I'm fine with our political dipshits feeling the pain..."
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How would Trump cancel something being built in Europe by an international body?
JDAM [wikipedia.org], probably.
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What makes you think ITER will be the first to reach that milestone?
Re:Not energy gain (Score:4, Interesting)
This is 11 minutes of sustaining a fusion reaction that took more energy to confine than could be extracted from the reaction itself. We won't have proven energy gain from magnetic confinement fusion until ITER is built, but Trump will likely cancel it since Musk hates it.
These experiments just keep plasma fed rather than burning it. Once you go there your entire experiment becomes too radioactive and you lose ability to tinker and learn from your experiment without extreme costs. ITER is important in that it will eventually actually burn plasma. This experience will be invaluable for subsequent commercial reactors after ITER.
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So? This is not a power plant. This is a plasma-physics experiment aimed at learning how to confine plasma reliably. And it is a resounding success. Your "argument" is without merit and without insight.
Also, Trump cannot "cancel" ITER. No insight on your side there either. What Trump can maybe do is that the US will not be in the group of countries that gets the benefits of the ITER results. Maybe. That is still a few decades in the future.
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Think of all the coal miner's grandkids this will put out of work. Cancel it, dig dig dig!
Still (Score:3)
Still decades away. [space.com]
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Yes. So? All tech we have today was "decades away" at some point.
Odd comment (Score:2)
This is an odd comment; of course it is. The sun and hydrogen bombs are not concerned with human safety, they just go boom and it's good. A reactor has bigger things to worry about.
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The sun and hydrogen bombs are not concerned with human safety, they just go boom and it's good. A reactor has bigger things to worry about.
Just to clarify: a fusion reactor is not a "bomb." Even if all of the fuseable material that is inside the reactor at any given moment were to fuse all at once (a physical impossibility) the worst that would happen is the reactor would be destroyed, and the reactor building damaged. But again, that can't happen.
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Yep. Because unlike most fission designs, a fusion plant cannot have thermal runaway.
Any real experts here? (Score:5, Interesting)
We all know the cliches about fusion power always being decades away, and that no advance is a real advance. But I’d really like to understand whether these sorts of advances are meaningful or meaningless. I wish there were someone on Slashdot with enough expertise to offer some informed insight. is there?
Incremental Change (Score:5, Interesting)
This result is about maintaining a fusing plasma for a long period of time, which is great. However, you also need to have a high enough reaction rate that you are generating a lot more power than you are putting into it - so-called breakthrough - which has been achieved but not for anything like this length of time. Then you also need to be able to inject fuel and extract heat - again there are ways to do this but it seems that they were not part of this experiment.
Basically it is a fiendishly hard problem to solve because of all these variables. Progress has definitely been made: 30 years ago we could not get any of the variables into the range needed for a commerical reactor, even individually, and now we can manage with several but only one at a time. In the absence of any real breakthroughs - rather than incremental steps like this news - I do not see any prospect of useful fusion reactors in the near future. However, as the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention and with global warming there is a pressing need for on-demand power sources that do not generate carbon so I'd not rule out someone with a brilliant idea popping up...but without that unpredictable spark of genius, if we remain limited to incremental changes I doubt many people reading this post today will live long enough to see commercial fusion power although I'd love to be wrong.
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Thanks, that’s really helpful to understand. I will be pleased at this advance, but not excited, then.
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Am an applied mathematician and have a strong interest in the non-linear dynamics of plasma that make a sustained plasma reaction that creates a self-sustaining process of fusion. To be clear, am not an expert. I just try and learn as much as I can on the subject.
So, first, one of the primary problems is that the physics of friction in a fusion reactor is poorly understand. An enormous amount of computational power is used to model the plasma friction coefficient. A good place to start, if you're interested
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Thanks so much
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They are meaningful. But the whole timeline is long and has always been long. We are maybe at 50-100 years to a working industrialized plant now. We were at 100-150 years 50 years go. Nobody actually involved ever claimed "soon" so far. That was only the deranged press implying nonsense.
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This was a much more helpful answer than your other answer.
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By meaningful vs meaningless, I mean “a material step towards nuclear fusion that delivers industrial power in the next couple of decades”. Sorry if that wasn’t clear
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Nuclear fusion will not deliver industrial power in the next "couple of decades". Just as the first wireless transmission was not going to deliver personal mobile phones in a "couple of decades". The timeline is and has always been longer. But it will get there and this is another step on the way. Real scientists can play the long game and understand why it is worthwhile playing.
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There are no guarantees we will get there, which is partly why I asked the question. Plus it’s not like this is something we’ve just started on; we’re 80 years in. And our needs as a species are quite urgent, so the difference between one, three, five and fifteen decades is quite significant, hence my question.
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I see. No, fusion will not prevent climate change. No chance. It may play an important role in survival in the later stages though. And, realistically, the research done is pretty cheap.
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Penicillin was orders of magnitude more difficult to make, on par with the atomic bomb. But none of that has any relevance to the question I asked. What I want to know is not about vague analogies, but about whether experts with informed views are thinking “yup, that was the real deal and you can see the path from this to industrial power in the coming years” or “very nice, but we still don’t really have a path forward”
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Re:Any real experts here? (Score:5, Interesting)
I literally studied the industrialisation of penicillin as part of my third year course on the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge, and I’m telling you that you are completely and utterly wrong about what it took to industralise its production. Penicillin was not industrialised by Florey & Chain and their team in Oxford; they only ever produced enough to treat a few patients, hence the notorious P-Patrol. Industrialisation took place in the US, and was a monumental effort involving both government agencies and the private sector. There were complex science and engineering challenges at absolutely every stage, from finding the right strain to increasing the yields, to isolation, to extraction, to assaying. This article describes some of the history.
https://www.acs.org/education/... [acs.org]
unlimited? (Score:4, Interesting)
The problem with unlimited is usage. The used energy is largely given off as HEAT and for electronics, it's all heat. The limit to energy use is how much excess heat you can deal with.
Neutrons [Re:unlimited?] (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with unlimited is usage. The used energy is largely given off as HEAT ...
Worse. Most of the energy is given off in the form of energetic neutrons. You have to absorb them something to turn them into heat.
And when you absorb neutrons into stuff, it tends to get radioactive. (although if you absorb them into lithium, the radioactive part tends to be tritium, which is fuel).
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Waste heat has completely negligible effects on the climate, also we're massively reducing waste heat all the time - switching from incandescent lights to LEDs, and switching from ICE vehicles that turn around 60% of the energy in the fuel into waste heat to EVs that turn under 10% of the electricity in the battery into waste heat. There's no shortage of headroom for more waste heat production.
The only area where we're doing worse on waste heat is computing, where the least useful functions are now the bigg
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Ignore that part. That is just some stupid "journalist" writing bullshit.
viable energy production from fusion (Score:3, Funny)
Re:viable energy production from fusion (Score:5, Funny)
"is still 20 years away--just like 50 years ago."
Actually its 8.3 light minutes away, just like 4.5 billion years ago.
At least we get 2 years of glory (Score:2)
The 4 Great Inventions will all kick in at the same time in 2039: fusion, flying cars, dish-washing robots, and 0.8c starships.
Then in 2041 the robots will take over and burn all humans for fuel.
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There are better sources of fuel than humans, and the robots will know it.
Perhaps, as Steve Wozniak has suggested, the robots will keep us as pets.
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Only that it never was 20 years away by the statements of the actual experts. It was always longer.
plasma reaction? (Score:2)
so actual fusion events for 22 minutes?
The article isn't really clear about that small detail. Actual fusion events for 22 minutes, even if the net energy was still less than Q is an impressive feat. Just holding temperature is nice but mostly "meh"
Could someone who knows more about the details chime in on this please?
actually 1337 seconds (Score:2)
Because they want to be Leet.
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I'd say ha, but i posted this well before you did. I feel like this is no longer news for nerds.
Stellarators seem the future (Score:2)
Stellarator reactors are far simpler to construct. I believe computing power will eventually catch up to the hard job of taming their flow.
But if a tokamak produced a practical power plant, then investors would probably fund heavier stellarator R&D (in addition to tokamaks).
I couldn't find any stellarator-centric stocks, but I would like to snag some before any fusion reactor hits the bigtime.
I correctly predicted the solar boom, but unfortunately my stocks were US companies, which China swamped via gov
Fusion "Success" Stories are Frustrating (Score:2)
Researchers can't sustain fusion for long periods (hours to days) and fusion reactions have only seen net energy gains for ultra short periods. Those "gains" are very modest on a percentage basis and measured very generously.
The science isn't close to sorted out. Once it is, engineering challenges of scaling and economics still loom large over fusion power and may take further decades to address fusion power is deployed displaces other generation sources, especially those using fossil fuels.
Clean, unlimit
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Resources would be better allocated to scaling up things that work now and at known and reasonable cost:
There is absolutely no reason both things can't be done at the same time. The money spent on fusion research is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things. The ultimate vision should be energy that is available in abundance and almost too cheap to meter, rather than just "reasonable".
Tell me you have no clue (Score:2)
Achieving the dream of commercial fusion power is the Holy Grail of engineering and has been for 80 years. With a single gram of hydrogen isotopes yielding the energy equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal, a practical fusion reactor would hold the promise of unlimited, clean energy for humanity until the end of time."
I suppose this writer knows where the infinite supply of tritium is that allows a fusion reactor to provide unlimited clean energy until the universe suffers
Clean energy? (Score:2)
My understanding is that fusion will not give us clean energy. While it's true that the fusion products aren't long-lived radioactive products, fusing hydrogen gives off neutrons, which being neutral, are not contained by the magnetic bottle. So they zoom out and hit the reactor walls, gradually turning them radioactive.
Any scientists confirm?
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Fission reactors are used the same way. The old Fort St. Vrain commercial
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My understanding is that fusion will not give us clean energy. While it's true that the fusion products aren't long-lived radioactive products, fusing hydrogen gives off neutrons, which being neutral, are not contained by the magnetic bottle. So they zoom out and hit the reactor walls, gradually turning them radioactive.
From what I remember the difference with a fusion reactor once it goes out of service it just needs to sit somewhere for a century before it becomes safe enough to be sold off as scrap. With fusion reactors there is no high level waste which is a massive advantage over fission plants.
For the layman. (Score:2)
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"What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?" -- Soren Kierkegaard
Re:For the layman. (Score:4, Informative)
Do any of these recent announcement amount to anything? Are we close or are we still 50 years away?
PBS Space Time recently covered it: https://youtu.be/nAJN1CrJsVE?t... [youtu.be]
The tl;dr is that we're substantially closer than in days past in that we know generally how to do it and are largely on a materials limitation at this point. I don't personally believe we're 50 years away. The last problem is just finding the right composites or combination of layered materials -- I couldn't imagine that taking that long. Lithium coated tungsten has been showing promise. But I'm not a physicist either, so shrug
Doesn't matter (Score:2)
Re:Burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the swam (Score:5, Funny)
to boil water, without, well, melting it
And you got that wrong, too.
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to boil water, without, well, melting it
And you got that wrong, too.
The referent for "it" in the phrase "melting it" is "the reactor," clear from the previous sentence.
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The problem is that the design of the experimental reactors is such that there's no way, even in principle, to get the resultant heat energy out of the reactor in any useful form able to boil water, without, well, melting it.
Are you sure the problem isn’t more you assuming we have no other potential medium other than H2O to temper heat energy?
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I assume whats meant here is that the way fission, and presumably fusion, reactors work is they heat water up to incredible temperatures producing high quantities of pressurized steam which in turn turns a turbine.
In a way its similar to how coal fired reactors work. Heat the water, the steam turns the wheel. the wheel makes electricity, rinse and repeat. Just with a dramatically higher energy density in the fuel.
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Re:Burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the swam (Score:5, Funny)
At one time I had hopes.
Now I have h-o-p-e-s.
(In other words, my hopes were dashed. Or I now have dashed hopes.)
([included for the humor impared])
Re: Burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the swa (Score:2)
Really? Wrap water pipes around or inside the donut. Hard with magnets but not impossible.
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And if it were that easy, it would already have been solved. It is not.
Re: Burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the sw (Score:2)
Why would they have solved this problem yet if they could? Theyâ(TM)ve had no need to because they couldnâ(TM)t even sustain a reaction long enough to utilise the heat.
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I see no problem. We need experimental designs to figure out HOW to build a commercially viable reactor. But maybe they should have listened to you and gone on to build one from the get-go. You seem like you know the lay of the land, why don't you tell them how to build it. I'm sure they'll listen to you.
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Re:Burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the swam (Score:5, Informative)
Right. As I have been given to understand, the problem is not even just getting your trillion-dollar reactor to run longer than 22 minutes without melting itself.
You're off by several orders of magnitude. A quick Google search reveals that the total amount of money spent in decades of fusion research adds up to 6 or 7 billion dollars.
The problem is that the design of the experimental reactors is such that there's no way, even in principle, to get the resultant heat energy out of the reactor in any useful form able to boil water, without, well, melting it.
Well, you're just wrong. See here [wikipedia.org] for several ways to capture the energy from the fusion process.
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Re:Burned down, fell over, THEN sank into the swam (Score:5, Informative)
What do you think about the argument that a fusion plant will cost at least the same amount of money as a fission plant to build and operate, so other than the PR issue, there would not really be that huge of a benefit to fusion if everybody just adopted fission now.
I think that argument ignores the much higher safety of fusion reactors, the lack of high-level waste, and the plentiful amount of fusion fuel that can be extracted from sea water.
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Are you confusing economic efficiency with engineering efficiency, and artificially constraining the money supply to force a sub-optimal choice?
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That's always been the weirdest Internet objection to fusion. Of all the actual technical problems, the crazies are like "OMG, you can't get energy out of hot stuff!!!"
Steam turbines are beginner industrial revolution stuff.
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It is even more stupid: The criticism is essentially that the experimental plasma physics device is not designed as a power plant. Anybody making that argument has not even a basic clue how engineering research works.
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And why would that be a problem? You obviously need to experiment before you can design a working system. The less you know, the more you need to experiment. Your criticism just shows that you are clueless how engineering works.
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The question, which of course no one can answer, is when the problems to achieving sustained fusion for a month, with positive captured energy, with steady fueling to keep the reaction going, a
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Do you realize that derivatives are at least ten times "the GDP of the entire earth", so there's actually a lot more money than real goods can account for?
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Derivatives are about capturing future value of goods and services, so obviously there's more of them than just goods currently.
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If we could answer that question, we would have done it already.
It's like making lithium air batteries work. If we knew when they're going to be ready, we'd set up entire electrified economy for them. Everything from new kinds of motors for aircraft and new types of aircraft to novel orbital stations to cars to ships to housing. But we don't. We don't even know if we can make it.
But we do know that these are things for which potential is so immense, that we should try. Even if we ourselves never get to sit
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Near term I have more hope for Thorium reactors.
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That indicates a certain level of desperation, does it not?
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Nah, Trump is a business man, he knows his stuff. Better pump up more sweet dinosaur juice than investing more money in the bottomless fusion pit. It is not gonna happen. It was going to be ready ten years ago, now it will be ten more years. It is a waste of money. France is just stupid to keep pouring money in. They are idiots. They drink too much wine.
I may need therapy...
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But deuterium and tritium fusion throws a fast neutron that will radioactivate any materials nearby and result in high-level waste anyways.
D-T reactors can activate the structural materials of the reactor, but this is not high-level waste. It decays in 50 to 100 years, much faster than waste from fission reactors.
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And if you play your cards right, a lot of it is tritium, which you want.
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Don't worry, they'll protest one these as well as soon as its ready. (Just 50 years away now!)
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" But, you know, Europe can build things too."
No, we cannot. Not with prohibitively high energy costs, ever increasing poverty and migrants who are net negative to society and economy. The energy is outsourced to US and the Gulf and manufacturing is going to US and China. The emissions are therefore, increasing since these states have much more dirty manufacturing.
Here, if you a person that is willing to account for physics, chemistry, material science, economy, finance and common sense, listen to this:
http [youtube.com]
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No, really. It was 1337 seconds. And nobody fucking noticed. You guys aren't nerds at all.
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This needs advances in material sciences, plasma physics, microwave generators and some others. No, the US Navy would not have been able to do that. This is a world-scale and century-scale project. Still very much worthwhile.