Fusion power: Part of a plasma chamber from an earlier prototype of the planned fusion reactor.
ENEA
Italian-Russian reactor could be the first to reach a major milestone.
In a few years, an experimental nuclear fusion reactor near Moscow could be the first to yield a self-sustaining fusion reaction. If the Italian-Russian project is successful, it would be a key milestone for fusion power.
The proposed reactor is based on a design developed by Bruno Coppi, a professor of physics at MIT, and principal investigator on the reactor project with Italy's National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment. Three similar reactors based on the same design have already been built at MIT. Italian and Russian physicists plan to meet on May 24 to chart a course for the new reactor, called Ignitor, in the first such meeting since the two countries agreed to join forces on the project in April.
Ignitor is a tokamak reactor, a doughnut-shaped device that uses powerful magnetic fields to produce fusion by squeezing superheated plasma of hydrogen isotopes. As an electric current and high-frequency radio waves pass through the plasma, heating it to extreme temperatures, the surrounding electromagnetic field confines the plasma under high pressure. The combined pressure and heat causes the hydrogen nuclei to fuse together to form helium in a process that releases tremendous amounts of heat. In a fully functional fusion reactor, this heat would be used to power an electricity-generating turbine.
A much larger, far more complex tokamak fusion reactor--the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)--is planned for construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, France. ITER, which will be completed in 2019 and ready for full-scale testing in 2026, will be closer to a functioning fusion generator but will not produce a self-sustaining fusion reaction. Ignitor will be a sixth the size of ITER and will test the conditions needed to produce a self-sustaining reaction.
"Ignitor will give us a quick look at how burning plasma behaves, and that could inform how we proceed with ITER and other reactors," says Roscoe White, a distinguished research fellow at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.
But Ignitor will only test one key aspect of fusion. "It will give us information that is important, but it won't give us all the information we need and certainly doesn't replace ITER," Steven Cowley, director of the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, U.K. "It's a demonstration that you can create ignition, but it's not really a pathway to a reactor."
Unlike ITER, Ignitor doesn't include many of the components that a real reactor would require. For example one crucial missing part is the "breeder blanket," which contains lithium and sits inside the reactor's magnetic coils, providing a continuous supply of tritium--one of two isotopes fused in the reaction. Ignitor's design is so compact that there is no room for a test blanket inside its coils.
Another limitation of Ignitor is the fact that its high electromagnetic field causes a significant reduction in the conductivity of most superconducting materials. To get around this, Ignitor relies primarily on conventional copper coils to create its magnetic field. But these coils can only operate for short bursts before they overheat. As a result, Ignitor can only sustain ignition for bursts of four seconds. ITER, which relies on superconducting coils and also draws on a significantly larger volume of plasma, is designed to maintain its peak output for 400 seconds.
The test of a new lining that can take the heat of fusion could be crucial for a planned reactor in France.
The maker of nuclear power plants is promoting a process to use the waste as fuel.
Tests prove the feasibility of using nuclear reactors to provide electricity on the moon and Mars.
There was an alternate method for magnetic fusion that was abandon in the 1980 due to budget cuts. Mirror fusion produces streams of charged particles that could be used to create electricity and bypass a thermal cycle. Also keep in mind that ITER, which is projected to cost ~ $2 billion, must be as large as it is. The scientists/engineers are relying on extrapolation to deal with the main problem in magnetic fusion, plasma turbulence. Is this really a cost effective form of nuclear power?
"ITER, which will be completed in 2019 and ready for full-scale testing in 2026, will be closer to a functioning fusion generator but will not produce a self-sustaining fusion reaction"
As far as I know, this is wrong. ITER was in fact designed to achieve - among other goals - exactly this. See ITER.org => The Science => Progress in Fusion.
Hi bmn,
You raise a good point. ITER was originally designed to be a self sustaining reactor but plans were scaled back in the '90s due to financial constraints. The current plan is for the the reactor to produce 10 times more thermal energy than is put into the reactor to heat the plasma. This goes well beyond the "plasma energy breakeven point" that is mentioned in the link you point to. A self-sustaining reaction, however, is one that goes even further; it doesn't require any thermal input to sustain the reaction.
More on the 1990s decision to scale back can be found here;
http://www.iter.org/newsline/Pages/112/1565.aspx
So in short: ITER will reach break-even, but not ignition (meaning a fully fusion-heated reaction). Interesting, I didn't know that!
For the interested reader:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_energy_gain_factor
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawson_criterion
Ignitor is pushing for a Q of 3-4, just barely touching ignition. It is a proof of concept, designed to study burning plasmas while still maintaining a high degree of heating control.
ITER is shooting for Q > 10, and aims at looking more into tritium retention, longer pulses, and blanket engineering.
A distant thunder on the surface of the sun
Unheard by ears, unseen by eyes,
Echoes, reverberates on a gargantuam drum
The solar flare escapes,
Vortex swirls, gas jets roar.......
if we pretend to seriously replicate the fusion process of sol in our solar system, we need to compensate for the sound factor,,,
why is sound important? sound waves.....
sound waves are part of the naturally occurring fusion process, they play a role in nature, why waste a perfectly fine tokamak or two or three on certain aspects of a concept staring at us, shining us on? as Johnny Lennon used to say "and we all shine on" should i continue?
there is a good chance waves are significant players in maintaining sol's energy inside the heliosphere, if we look at ourselves from beyond that boundary, our sun is just another star, and as supernova 1987A pointed out, there is a strong probability that stars are linked and intertwined; our fueled furnace hot fusion vessel rational methodology seems somewhat archaic, until the day arrives when we factor into our fusion reactor vessel an equation where every detected variable occurring in nature is accounted for, including the solar sound factor, we are setting ourselves up for frustrating disappointments....
I keep hearing how graphene has many times the conductivity of copper. So why doesn't someone work on a way to develop bulk graphene materials having the higher conductivity? Then they could use this to make a tokamak that could work for longer periods than the short bursts copper is restricted to.
I am glad to contribute all my technical property to USA
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when it finally comes into commercial production long after many of those reading this will be dead, maybe around 2070.
Fusion won't be relevant to today's power crunches so we need to develop other sources.
It is laughable that it will be 'too cheap to meter' what with incredibly expensive complex plants that (most likely since it is still 'vaporware') will be needed to produce it.
Fusion is and has been 'a few hundred billion short of a sixpack'. And by those who jump on bandwagons without thinking it thru, it has been '20 years in the future' for the last 50 years.
With the hundreds of billions of dollars already spend on research and development, far from being 'too cheap to meter', it is a govt subsidized boondoggle, with the meter hitting 'infinite cost per watt' since hundreds of billions have been spent with ZERO ELECTrICITY PRODUCED.
And as the neutron type reaction most likely to go into production first makes the structure it is produced in radioactive, the containment structure will have to be handled like other radioactive waste when the plant is demolished after its 30 year or so lifespan.
finally, as the above poster mentioned, only 1/5 of the energy gets channeled to produce electricity it sounds incredibly wasteful. Should we care? We probably have reasonably unlimited fuel in form of deuterium.
However having vast amounts of heat (4/5 of the fuel converted to waste heat) at plants around the globe will change the local climate. Not that fusion will be around any time soon for this to be a problem.
Conceptually, no way of a tokamak-like fusion reactor be self-sustaining in producing fusion energy, and also no way of it get rid of the rare tritium. On the other hand, the aneutronic nuclear fusion reactor was conceptually well-designed to produce a net gain of energy fusing p-B11, helium-3, and p-L6.
Agreed. Aneutronic Fusion Reactors actually have a chance of being economically feasible. These big research projects like ITER are ridiculous, will never provide a fusion solution, but are considered "good science". I expect to see cold fusion solve our energy needs before ITER. Seriously.
What about the fuel input? Sounds like this system needs a steady stream of lithium to produce tritium. Lithium is a highly depletable resource so I am told. Or where does the D-T come from? Is it produced somewhere else first? If so where? I'm not picturing the fuel flow based on the article. Could the D-T be manufactured from sea water?
is a myth
There is LOTS of lithium but because needs have been low plants have not been built to extract it as the market is not there. Lithium is present in some salt flats. Including Boliva which has a revolution every year.
A new plant is likely to cost quite a bit. BUt so do most plants of any magnitude. (to put in perspective a greenfield phosphorus plant for fertilizer would cost 2.2 billion)
To run a 2GW electric plant for 1 year, the plant would burn up ~400 grams of lithium, this is nothing. You have to realize the incredible energy densities that you get with fusion.
Deuterium can be extracted from the oceans and fission power plants.
The development of a central power device "too cheap to meter" continues the social hierarchy of the "haves" and "have mores" of Bush fame. This structure guarantees a financial flow from the many to the few and continues to frustrate innovation. (see 'Low Gas Prices')
Nocera's 'PE' 'Personal Energy' concept is the appropriate future form. With everyone given an fair chance, it 'could' produce a meritocracy.
Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors were developed in the 1960s but abandoned because they were no good for making bombs. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWUeBSoEnRk
LFTRs use cheap non-enriched thorium. Are inherently safe and self-regulating, produce no long term radio-active waste. What's not to like? We should be putting our money into LFTRs not Fusion. See also http://energyfromthorium.com/
LFTRs are great and all, but thorium in a 1000 year time frame is still a limited resource, and you still have to deal with the radioactive waste.
Fusion has a fuel supply that is on the order of tens of thousands of years for D-T, and almost indefinite for D-D. Another benefit is that no long lived radioactive waste is produced. The only radioactive material left at decommission is activated materials. With smart engineering choices, these would decay away within 100 years rather than 100,000 years.
A lot of people like the idea of fusion because we can all see a giant feasibility demonstration in the sky that has been sustaining itself for approximately forever.
Suppose we magically transported a tiny piece of the sun into a laboratory, and somehow kept it confined and suspended in the center a tiny vacuum chamber.
First, what would be required to keep it confined? Second, why would we expect to get energy out of the reaction in any form other than energetic photons?
Re: Basic questions about the sun
It is a different process, and the confinement scheme is vastly different, gravitational in the sun. See this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis
Re: Basic questions about the sun
Thanks for the link. It seems that reaching ignition conditions is the hardest part for any of these nuclear reactions, so I understand why people are excited about the National Ignition Facility. But, without the gravitational confinement of the sun, I am skeptical of attempts to sustain an equilibrium reaction on Earth.
Re: Basic questions about the sun
wikie wookie factsheets present a historiagraphy of legacy aspects thought to be seminal in a fission producing process.... containment vessels based on this knowledge base to date, duds...what role peeps play in the solar realm of things is of interest, like spunksteamers seem to intimate Nicolas Tesla made an interesting observation a while ago "If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.
``I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor.''
and furthermore
"There is no subject more captivating, more worthy of study, than nature. To understand this great mechanism, to discover the forces which are active, and the lams which govern them, is the highest aim of the intellect of man.
Nature has stored up in the universe infinite energy. The eternal recipient and transmitter of this infinite energy is .....one of the most important goals of modern scientific research"....
we peer at the heavens thru Hubble, Spitzer, Herschel, as we look at ourselves on molecular levels.......stars at night shine in daylight also, something is happening here 24/7, peeps may be just another straw. Tokamak augmented furnaces burn bread, yield brightness inhibiting our conceptualization of starstuff in our nexus; burnt bread is not as nutritious, and does not attract as many bees as raisins under the sun
Re: Basic questions about the sun
our sun is not exactly static, check out: http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/Helioseismology.shtml
giving too much credit to gravity, and the yet to be discovered graviton is not science, its a cop out decreasing our margin of error, in our attempt to achieve sustainable renewable energy, it behooves us to gain as much understanding of what's out there, how it works, how do we copycat nature to our advantage?
taming nature, going forward, prospering where no man has been is of immense interest to many, some multitaskers, like cautious chameleons look around, do their best to keep out of melting pots or jumping into plasmas hotter than fire..
and when our sun decides to give up its ghost your skepticism, the genuinely applied scientific curiosity of the best minds of our kind, will all supernova if we don't figure out what's up and move on....
in confidence you should know, i'm also looking for naturally occurring particles that wreak havoc when colliding with our DNA/RNA helix, awakening dormant traits in genes that have been behaving well prior to this "theorized traumatic environmental event", throwing living equilibriums off balance...in the quest for fusion, peripheral knowledge discovered along the way may also pan out if we are semi decent gleaners of transparent efforts made by our forebears that delivered us here....
Re: Basic questions about the sun
What if not having the sun's gravity simply means that we cannot make equilibrium reactions? That still leaves room for non-equilibrium reactions. Maybe the answer is a cyclical engine driven by small nuclear explosions?
Re: Basic questions about the sun
It's amazing how asking a few questions and proposing one alternative direction for research got me a 1-star rating in this forum.
Re: Basic questions about the sun
Just an idea, but when teleportation is developed wouldn't it be a simple matter to teleport plasma from the sun into a containment field and utilize the energy released from it for power along with powering a continuous teleport stream to resupply the containment field?
I too think were using Jetson tech to create a Fred Flintstone approach,We put so much into these reactors just to boil water another possible power source, magnetism & electricity, why aren't we doing more experiments to figure out the connection between the two,Why not just reinvent the turbines, we been useing the same techniques since we discovered electricity.How about a plasma turbine,Stars and black holes are examples of this, the matter spins and gets heated up creating some of the strongest magnetic fields known to man.example solar flares, jets that fly in opposite directions in relation to the black hole,all powered by strong magnetic fields,or even simpler liquid metal spinning in a huge bowl, the Earth's field, Jupiter,we seem to stick more with what works even if it doesn't work very well, Instead we spend trillions on how to boil water,Even radioactivity if everything in nature has a opposite why not find the combination of one isotope decaying while the other absorbs, almost like gold plating,we need to find the cathode& anode version of crystals and radioactive materials.
you're getting close blitz, you still missing the point...so to the back of the classroom you go, wear the cone hat, a good source of inspiration....one of the concepts that Tesla was working on, which freaked out Westinghouse and JP Morgan, was a wireless router that would transmit electricity, unlike today's broadband which permeates the skateboard generation's ipod, ipad..had he succeeded, all those meters that were providing an immense source of reliable wealth and uplifting lifestyle at the turn of the 19th century would have been jeopardized....
our understanding of dark matter, antimatter is too absent to dwell on in practical terms, but waves oscillating in our daily lives, are starting to emerge as items of interest, be it in the realm of navigation, or energy transmission or whatever
Wireless Electricity Impractical
It didn't threaten any monopolies. That is just whacko conspiracy talk.
like wireless signalling where the signal spreads out and is very weak but can be amplified greatly,
wireless electricity spreads out just the same. It has to be transmitted in every direction to be used in one direction which means it would be incredibly silly and wasteful.
Could it nowadays be transmitted in just one direction? Even directional micro-cell towers don't go in just one direction, they go in an arc portion of a circle. So they still waste lots of signal, it's just that not much signal needs to get thru for a cell phone to amplify it. Electricity doesn't travel in a soliton wave so it spreads out and disperses the further away you are.
About the only alternative that is slightly similar would be to transmit the electric energy as microwaves. This was demonstrated on a discovery show where they transmitted microwaves and reconverted back to electricity 60 miles between mountain tops of two Hawaiian islands.
However this was intended to demonstrate practical conversion of microwaves from orbiting satellite power collectors to earth thru 60 miles of atmosphere, not for transmission of small amounts of electricity to replace 110 volt wires, where it would be incredibly expensive and wasteful.
And while the signal COULD be amplified, you would NEED ELECTRICITY TO AMPLIFY it with. Which kind of defeats the purpose of wireless electricity. (dehydrated water, just add water).
Smart people just sometimes get hung up on wrong ideas sometimes. Doesn't mean he wasn't a brilliant person. Even Einstein goofed at times.
Re: Wireless Electric Intuition
Ah yes erb, earning one's scholarly keep "by the sweat of thy brow" as George Bernard Shaw was fond of jesticulating....some thoughtfullness is apparent, so as not to be wandering aimlessly in a valley of darkest matter, take a look at "naturally occurring disasters" during Nikki's lifetime....consult and convince the Siberian natural resource authorities of your good intentions, then consider the following:
apparatus checklist...solar powered TV set, Igtor apparatchik, a compass...
direction: turn on TV set, on channel with lots of static, connect it to tokamak (full capacity not recommended), and a compass, look for nanovoltage spikes....experimentation far less costly than deuterium, and other cone shaped contaminant type fuels....
what could this experimentation tell us if, as Dylan Thomas would have us believe "a worm says time wears away"
hope this helps....
Re: Wireless Electric Intuition
"squeezing uber hot hydrogen isotope plasma surrounded by an electromagnetic field" so that the highly pressurized confinement fuse together hydrogen nuclei forming helium ...is not a bad idea.
IGNITOR may give us a glimpse at how burning plasma behaves......look at how wonderfully complex the process occurrs in nature
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/wind_dynamics.shtml
certainly an electrician would look at the scenario and be interested in measuring the Electric Magnetism coming into and going out of the sun while a physicist wouldn't be able to sleep well until some measure was devised to count the number of cosmic rays, battered photons doing likewise in a solar oscellating cycle.
Both groups would be lying if they told you they're not interested in finding out the role incoming energy played in the hearthbeat fusion mechanism powering our wonderful stellar companion.
Is this the kind of blanket we would like to wrap around IGNITOR?
you betcha....well, unless other, observable, more expansive phenomenon is out there evading contemporary senses and technology. Devising experimentation parameters with fewest nasty leftovers being a better virtue than business as usual, utility people are in harmony here. Heron flies on.
Of course comments from ecclesiastical clergy, moral ethical specialists are welcome as long as they are accompanied by a psychiatrist, palm reader or certified, identifiable investment advisor.
Sermons from pulpits along coastal Gulf of Mexico these days encourage brave Ulysses to step up in the field of renewable energy, this is no time for timidity to rise center stage in heaven or earth.
Wireless wise, Tesla, using a conical air-core coil generated 1M volts in 1894, the following year after rocking and rolling at the epicenter of an earthquake only a few miles in circumference, and shortly thereafter burning down his lab, cooled it with wireless experimentation for a spell; resumed 1900-03, his financial backers pulled out the rug as they thought they were financing a worldwide radio transmitter...since that time wireless electric transmission R&D has been at a shameless standstill....
I'm all for R&D but it has to be balanced when the taxpayers are paying for it.
And I guess my point is that this particular R&D is both incredibly expensive and not vaguely near production.
To justify it, as in much govt spending these days, there has been a disconnect between those funding it who seem to think there is a Mysti-Magical-Money-Fairy who goes POOF in a cloud of greasy orange smoke and creates hundreds of billions to fund it all without taking it away from anyone or other things that could be more pressing.
Plus at times very intelligent people tend to think that super-complicated very-high tech gizmos are justified for their own sake.
Reminds me of one of the 'Humanoids' sci-fi stories where the robots take over a remote outpost of humanity, kind of like the robots in Chicago in iRobot movie, to 'help keep us from our selves and danger', and one very bright researcher has been brainwashed by the robots that continued rearranging of a complicated 3-d grid of small colored balls solves sophisticated sub-atomic research problems.. Perhaps research like this could be termed a kind of intellectual masturbation.
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paulfmeyer
18 Comments
Steampunk
I have been hearing about fusion reactors since I was in Kindergarten in 1969 - it was in a NASA filmstrip sponsored by GE. 40 years later and literally, we appear to be in the same place. Are we really going to use hydrogen atoms in fusion reactors to heat water into steam for electricty generation? If we're going to go through all that alchemy, can't we find a better way to harness the energy besides steam?
Reply
kearns
30 Comments
Re: Steampunk
Amen to that. We do seem to always default to the using the most advanced power sources to simply boil water and rotate a turbine in order to produce electricity, thereby losing enormous amounts of energy in the process. If we can transduct large amounts of power in order to create sun-like conditions inside the fusion chamber, then why can't we do the reverse and modulate the reaction to produce electromagnetic waves that directly produce electricity without the boiling water phase? The steam phase seems rather silly.
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spad12
58 Comments
Re: Steampunk
4/5 of the energy released in a fusion reaction is imparted to a neutron. You get the energy from the neutron by slowing it down and heating up materials in the process.
only 1/5 of the energy from fusion can actually be used to heat the plasma, this is one of the things that makes it so difficult. You can't just convert the thermal energy in the plasma into electricity, you have to use a thermal cycle of some kind.
In reality future fusion reactors will likely use helium as a working fluid, and operate at very high wall temperatures. Helium is better than water in the event of a leak, and operating at high wall temperatures increases thermal cycle efficiency and reduces tritium retention.
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falstaff
274 Comments
Re: Steampunk
4/5 of the energy released in a fusion reaction is imparted to a neutron....
For some fusion reactions, like D-D and D-T, not all. Not P-B11 for instance.
Reply
theradicalmoderate
48 Comments
Re: Steampunk
The problem is that the form of fusion with the lowest ignition temperature and highest power density, which fuses deuterium and tritium, carries away the bulk of its energy as neutrons. Because neutrons are neutrally charged, they can't be steered, nor can they have their energy extracted as they move through an electric field. Their energy can only be captured by having them slam into stuff, which in turn makes the stuff get hot. Ergo, steam works mighty fine as an energy extraction method.
There are fusion reactions which are largely aneutronic and carry away most of their energy as charged particles. One of the most interesting of these involves fusing a proton with Boron-11, which produces 3 Helium-4 nuclei. Because the fusion products are all charged particles, you can use "direct conversion", where you steer and decelerate them against a positive voltage, which in turn generates a high-energy current.
The problem with the p-B11 reaction, however, is that it requires a much higher temperature (10x) and produces a much lower power density (.0005x) than the D-T reaction. All is not lost, however: There are fusion strategies that don't rely on thermal plasmas. (See "inertial electrostatic confinement", "polywell", and "dense plasma focus" as a few examples.) These are all considered to be long shots right now, but you never can tell...
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enantiomer2000
66 Comments
Re: Steampunk
"These are all considered to be long shots right now, but you never can tell..."
It is ironic that the "long shots" are some of the approaches that will give us yes or no answers in the shortest time (Focus Fusion in 1-2 years for instance), while the attempts like ITER claim that they won't be up and running for another 50 years and will cost 1000-10000 of times the annual budget of the "long shots". Of course whenever you get a project that big, most of the money is wasted in bureaucracy.
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sculptor
19 Comments
Re: Steampunk
They may be long shots but they are much cheaper than ITER and potentially yield far superior fusion technology. The way I see it, the expected gain is therefore much greater than ITER therefore they should be a high priority.
Reply
spad12
58 Comments
Re: Steampunk
I don't think you realize how long the long shots are. Many many many fusion long shots have been developed and failed. Tokamaks continue to show a lot of promise, and the best chance at being a commercial reactor. Yes there are things that might be better, but for the time being, Tokamaks represent the best chance for man made fusion.
Also, due to several plasma physics phenomena, and economics, the bigger you build the reactor the better it performs.
True other approaches might be cheaper, but eventually you are going to waste a ton of money on approaches that probably aren't going to work rather than buckle down and spend the money on the project that is most likely to succeed. This short sighted thinking is why many people think wind and solar are really really cheap, when in reality they are only thinking of the small cost of building a single unit and not of the cost of building a farm with the equivalent output of a full sized power plant.
Reply
theradicalmoderate
48 Comments
Re: Steampunk
What you're saying is true for magnetic confinement--there have been a zillion configurations proposed, and tokamaks appear to be the most stable (although the jury's still out on the field-reversed configuration work going on, which I guess you'd have to classify as magnetic confinement).
The problem is that we pretty much know that the tokamak is going to be a dry hole. We'll learn lots more about plasma stability and some nifty physics will come out of it. Nifty physics is very important, and I wholeheartedly support such research. But let's not kid ourselves about the possibility of ITER--or any other tokamak--becoming a viable energy development project. The scaling that you mention is a bug, not a feature: Nobody wants to invest in multi-gigawatt reactors. The risk-to-return profile is too wacky. Beyond that you've got the tritium breeding problem to crack, to say nothing of the problems created by highly neutronic reactions.
ITER will cost tens of billions of dollars. In contrast, you can investigate an awful lot of non-MCF ideas for tens-to-hundreds of millions of dollars. It would seem to be a reasonable tradeoff to devote 5% of what we're putting into ITER et al. into some of these alternative approaches. They too would yield a lot of interesting physics and one of them just might point the way toward something that will work.
Fusion research has been so tightly focused on tokamaks for so long that a big chunk of the research community has developed tunnel vision. I agree that the odds of one of the alternative approaches working are pretty low, but I suspect that the odds of one of those approaches sparking the idea that actually will work are pretty decent.
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dkohn
49 Comments
Re: Steampunk
Exactly how unlikely are Polywell fusion and Dense Plasma Focus Fusion? I have seen a lot of interesting info about these ideas but I wonder what the down side is. Are we likely to find out soon one way or the other?
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