Jump to content
Join the Unexplained Mysteries community today! It's free and setting up an account only takes a moment.
- Sign In or Create Account -

World's largest nuclear fusion project begins


Eldorado

Recommended Posts

"The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase.

"After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" required for fusion power.

"The £18.2bn (€20bn; $23.5bn) facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France."

Full report at the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53573294

  • Like 4
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Good. I hope it works, we need this.

I'm waiting for the moron squad to say it's as dangerous as current nuclear power, disrupts the flat earth, proves climate change is a myth, somehow causes autism like vaccines, and is the mark of the beast.

  • Like 1
  • Haha 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Wow! 23 billion dollars is a lot to invest into something never to have been shown to practical. 

I do hope it works though.

  • Like 5
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 hours ago, DieChecker said:

I do hope it works though

On small scales, yes it works, barely stable, what they're banking on is that stability improves on the bigger scale. 

The repercussions from the consequences though... 

~

  • Like 3
  • Haha 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Seems like a lot of money; it is a gamble that pays off big if they accomplish it. Maybe worth the risk. Putting things into perspective, Jeff BEzos' net worth is up over 60 billion this year so far.

  • Like 2
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Seti42 said:

Good. I hope it works, we need this.

I'm waiting for the moron squad to say it's as dangerous as current nuclear power, disrupts the flat earth, proves climate change is a myth, somehow causes autism like vaccines, and is the mark of the beast.

Your comment only shows how condescending and narrow-minded you are.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

While it is a lot of money, it's money well spend if it leads to a practical fusion reactor. 

When thinking about the cost remember that it is divided beween the EU, US, Russia, China, India, Japan and South Korea. So spend over more than a decade and split between the countries I mentioned, the actual cost per year doesn't seem like that much for a potential game changing technology.

  • Like 5
Link to comment
Share on other sites

11 hours ago, DieChecker said:

Wow! 23 billion dollars is a lot to invest into something never to have been shown to practical. 

I do hope it works though.

It's very practical. It's how the sun works. Temperature is the problem isn't it? We just can't get there to kick it off. If they have a promising avenue there, and as they are talking about super heated plasma, which sounds like there's enough promise of that considering the investment, it seems plausible.

Can't wait to see how this turns out. Low waste energy. This could change the world.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

23 hours ago, Eldorado said:

"The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase.

"After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" required for fusion power.

"The £18.2bn (€20bn; $23.5bn) facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France."

Full report at the BBC: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53573294

Fusion powered power plants will bring many benefits to society.

Much cheaper electricity, fewer power plants, and they will be able to provide our energy needs for the next several centuries. There is endangered fuel source, hydrogen is in abundance on our planet in the form of water.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

20 hours ago, seanjo said:

My Dad was a maintenance manager at JET, the Joint European Taurus at Culham laboratories in the late 80's and early 90's. 30 years ago, they achieved brief (micro-seconds) fusion, but it doesn't seem to have moved on since then.

JET was very usefull for testing various technologies.

The problem with nuclear fusion is that its damned difficult to confine the plasma. The best solution seems to be magnets. A good comparison is that it's comparable to try to contain jelly using rubber band. The damned thing allways find a way to escape. The solution: More and bigger rubber bands. The solution in ITER: Bigger and stronger magnets. 

  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Two suns in the sunset...

Quote

[00.07:33]

~

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hydrogen bombs are much more powerful so I hope the contractors are not cutting corners.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, TripGun said:

Hydrogen bombs are much more powerful so I hope the contractors are not cutting corners.

A working fusion reactor will never contain more than a few grams of fuel, not nearly enough for an explosion. Likewise a fusion reactor can't meltdown because of the small amount of fuel and you simply have to turn off the magnetic field to stop the reaction anyway. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

5 minutes ago, Noteverythingisaconspiracy said:

A working fusion reactor will never contain more than a few grams of fuel, not nearly enough for an explosion. Likewise a fusion reactor can't meltdown because of the small amount of fuel and you simply have to turn off the magnetic field to stop the reaction anyway. 

Only a few grams are present in the reaction but plenty is on site if it were to get out of hand. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

9 minutes ago, TripGun said:

Only a few grams are present in the reaction but plenty is on site if it were to get out of hand. 

Not really. One of the fuels is tritium and that have to be made by the reactor itself. This is done by surrounding the reactor with lithium, some of which will turn into tritium when hit by neutrons from the fusion process. This tritium is then fed into the reactor as soon as it is available, so very little will ever be on site at any time and most of it will be in the lithium surrounding the reactor, not in it. As I allready wrote you can stop the reaction very quickly simply by stopping the fuel supply or turning of the magnets. Its important to remember that fusion reactors are very different from the fission reactors we have today. 

Edited by Noteverythingisaconspiracy
  • Like 3
Link to comment
Share on other sites

46 minutes ago, Noteverythingisaconspiracy said:

JET was very usefull for testing various technologies.

The problem with nuclear fusion is that its damned difficult to confine the plasma. The best solution seems to be magnets. A good comparison is that it's comparable to try to contain jelly using rubber band. The damned thing allways find a way to escape. The solution: More and bigger rubber bands. The solution in ITER: Bigger and stronger magnets. 

I thought achieving ignition was the biggest hurdle? 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, psyche101 said:

I thought achieving ignition was the biggest hurdle? 

Today the biggest hurdle is how to confine the plasma so the reaction keeps going. As @seanjo wrote earlier JET achieved ignition (1991), but it was never able to sustain the reaction. The current record is 100 seconds, held by the German reactor Wendelstein 7-X. They hope to achive 30 minutes by 2021. https://www.ipp.mpg.de/w7x

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 minute ago, Noteverythingisaconspiracy said:

Not really. One of the fuels is tritium and that have to be made by the reactor itself. This is done by surrounding the reactor with lithium, some of which will turn into tritium when hit by neutrons from the fusion process. This tritium is then fed into the reactor as soon as it is available, so very little will ever be on site at any time and most of it will be in the lithium surrounding the reactor, not in it. As I allready wrote you can stop the reaction very quickly simply by stopping the fuel supply or turning of the magnets. Its important to remember that fusion reactors are very different from the fission reactors we have today. 

I understand it is better controlled for a shutdown. It is still relying on a man-made fuel source (deuterium-tritium) because we don't have the gravity of the sun to complete the process naturally and it will run eight times hotter than the sun for the reaction to sustain. But because we are using tritium (probably from nuclear waste from fission reactions we already have) it will need to be stored somewhere and not to mention to possibilities of the reaction being misused to create plutonium 239 very easily. I just don't like it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

10 minutes ago, seanjo said:

Nuclear power is very safe, it's just disastrous on the very few occasions something goes wrong. The French get 70% of their electrical power from nuclear.

Safe? I beg to differ. What about all the waste, namely spent fuel rods? There are now so many, they are running out of places to put them and the very first one is just as dangerous as the last. You bet it's disastrous. A single meltdown can affect miles and miles of plants, animals and people. Not to mention that which drifts with the wind and water.

I don't like it and can't wait for fusion to replace it. Of course, unless fusion is a profitable, "something" will suppress it.

As for the expense being laid out here being a risk. They must know something they're not sharing. i think they may have had a major breakthrough that's being kept under wraps. Thankfully, this isn't happening in the US, or it would be squashed. The advent of fusion, more specifically cold fusion (holy grail) would mean that the average person could build a mini power plant right in their own garage. Big oil will do everything they can to stop this progress.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

18 minutes ago, seanjo said:

I don't think fusion/fission works like that.

Its superconducting electromagnets arranged into a hollow Torus (which is similar to a donut in shape).

With such magnets they have no resistance meaning they lose their charge very slowly. It means they can be charged up over weeks and months to create an incredibly strong magnetic field inside the Torus. Magnetic fields can repel if a plasma has the same charge on its atoms.

So they take a gas, they heat it until it loses its electrons using lasers, and this turns it into a plasma. A plasma chosen because it has the same pole charge as the magnetic field inside the Torus. It gets injected into the Torus and the magnetic field compresses it to a very thing ring going around the centre of the Torus.

The compression of plasma atoms against each other triggers nuclear fusion. It raises the temperature of the plasma to about 120 million C (far hotter than the sun). That then is leaked off to heat water boilers that produce steam and turn turbines for electricity.

The amount of plasma inside the Torus at any one time is very low, we are talking milli-grams. The used plasma (the fused stuff) has turned from hydrogen atoms into helium. It isn`t radioactive either.

No radioactive isotopes are produced inside a fusion reactor, some gamma is released but that doesnt make it through the walls of the Torus.

Edited by Cookie Monster
  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Quote

The compression of plasma atoms against each other triggers nuclear fusion. It raises the temperature of the plasma to about 120 million C (far hotter than the sun). That then is leaked off to heat water boilers that produce steam and turn turbines for electricity.

Fast neutrons from the fusion reaction heats a lithium breeding blanket surrounding the reactor, which in turn heats water to produce steam. Its this breeder blanket that also makes the tritum fuel.

reacteur_gb.gif

Quote

No radioactive isotopes are produced inside a fusion reactor, some gamma is released but that doesnt make it through the walls of the Torus.

Fast neutrons from the fusion reaction will produce some radioactive material from neutron activation, but choosing the right construction materials should minimize that and the amount of radioactive materials and the level of radioactivity will be much less than fission. So a fusion reactor will produce radioactive waste, but much less than fusion and the waste will not be in usefull for making nuclear weapons, unlike fission reactors. The IMMIF will adress this problem: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fusion_Materials_Irradiation_Facility

There are fusion processes that doesn't produce any radioactivity, but unfortunately they are far more difficult than the D-T process.

 

Edited by Noteverythingisaconspiracy
  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I don't know why it has to be so complicated... 

Quote
sea waves power generation from www.sciencenewsforstudents.org
 
30 May 2019 · Not all coastal areas work for generating wave power. The shape of the land beneath the sea changes the ...
 
~
 

Why should there be a need to revamp everything, just make do with what works best where, the technology is there for everything to everywhere from solar, to wind, to sea, to rivers... 

No need for reinventing mouse traps. 

~

Link to comment
Share on other sites

15 minutes ago, third_eye said:

I don't know why it has to be so complicated... 

Why should there be a need to revamp everything, just make do with what works best where, the technology is there for everything to everywhere from solar, to wind, to sea, to rivers... 

No need for reinventing mouse traps. 

~

As I see it we should aim to develop as many clean technologies as we can, that way we won't become dependent on a single technology. The dependence of fossil fuels is why we are in the situation we are in now.

In my country we use wind power on a large scale and it works fine for us, but it may not be the case for everyone. Diversification is the key.

To put the cost of ITER into context, its going to cost about the same as the Hinckley C nuclear power plant in the UK. A potentially revolutionary technology at the cost of two fission reactors. Investing in fusion power is an investment in the future and as such its worth the cost in my opinion.

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Cookie Monster said:

Its superconducting electromagnets arranged into a hollow Torus (which is similar to a donut in shape).

With such magnets they have no resistance meaning they lose their charge very slowly. It means they can be charged up over weeks and months to create an incredibly strong magnetic field inside the Torus. Magnetic fields can repel if a plasma has the same charge on its atoms.

So they take a gas, they heat it until it loses its electrons using lasers, and this turns it into a plasma. A plasma chosen because it has the same pole charge as the magnetic field inside the Torus. It gets injected into the Torus and the magnetic field compresses it to a very thing ring going around the centre of the Torus.

The compression of plasma atoms against each other triggers nuclear fusion. It raises the temperature of the plasma to about 120 million C (far hotter than the sun). That then is leaked off to heat water boilers that produce steam and turn turbines for electricity.

The amount of plasma inside the Torus at any one time is very low, we are talking milli-grams. The used plasma (the fused stuff) has turned from hydrogen atoms into helium. It isn`t radioactive either.

No radioactive isotopes are produced inside a fusion reactor, some gamma is released but that doesnt make it through the walls of the Torus.

If they were not burning neutron-rich isotopes then there would be no radiation but they are (because its Earth and not the Sun) using tritium. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Noteverythingisaconspiracy said:

Investing in fusion power is an investment in the future and as such its worth the cost in my opinion.

I guess it's a matter of timing for me, we've hardly exhausted all options or even nearly anywhere close to maximizing what technological advancements available currently. 

All this just sounds a bit too much of coddling the big corps with big money fanciful fantasies at times like what we're going through now. 

~

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.