Hotter than the Sun: JET – Earth’s biggest fusion reactor, in Culham I’m in a room that, in normal circumstances, is not fit for human habitation. It features a number of big red buttons surrounded by illuminated yellow rings – just in case. “Push button to switch off Jet. Press only in case of extreme emergency,” the signs read, informatively. This is the Torus Hall, a 40,000m3 space the size …
“Nothing,” says Cave-Ayland. “You’re too big an impurity.”
Ouch... Given its scope for reminding people of their place in the universe, if this whole fusion power business doesn't work out as planned, they could always adapt the designs into the first prototype Total Perspective Vortex instead.
@Korev
Given that they benefit from EU funding too, and that we can't afford to do this on our own either, I imagine that what they're up to is:
a) cursing the idiocy of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, JRM, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn et al, and anyone who voted for Brexit and…
b) trying to find a way out. A friendly science park attached to, for example, Paris Sciences et Lettres? École Polytechnique? Technische Universität München? Universität Heidelberg? Or maybe my alma mater, Fachhochschule Wedel? ;-)
and c) carrying on regardless in the meantime.
If we'd spent one tenth of the amount of money that goes into fusion research, we'd have small, intrinsically safe fission reactors all up and running years ago.
A bit more and we'd have radionuclide junk-eating reactors to take care of the long-lived fission products.
Furthermore, fusion is not "clean" - the huge neutron flux makes the walls of the containment chamber intensely radioactive and they degrade, needing replacement. So there is still the problem of disposing of long-lived radionuclides . . .
Right back where we started - and in the meantime we continue to use our dwindling stock of fossil fuels that wreck the ozone layer, pollute our lungs and could be used far more profitably as chemical feedstock than just being burned. And in efforts to reduce this we pollute the countryside with acres of windfarms whose generators require scarce rare-earths, the mining and refining of which generate even more pollution.
Fusion is a well understood process (though there aren't many nuclear engineers left) and can be made safer than a fossil-fuel plant. Ask the US Navy (not the Russians!) how many of their nuclear-powered vessels have had accidents or containment issues. They operate 100 or so reactors and logged over 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operation while traveling over 130 million miles, enough to circle the earth 3,200 times.
Fusion my ass . . .
Mac
Furthermore, fusion is not "clean" - the huge neutron flux makes the walls of the containment chamber intensely radioactive and they degrade, needing replacement.
That was noted in the article. The point made was that fusion is cleaner than fission since the radioisotopes produced have significantly shorter half-lives than the transuranic wastes of fission reactors.
So there is still the problem of disposing of long-lived radionuclides . . .
Define "long-lived." Do you mean some tens of thousands of years like typical pressurized water fission reactors waste stream, or do you mean tens of years (reaching safety in 100 years) like the planned ITER plasma-facing panels and diverter materials?
It's funny that ITER is going to have about 100 times the neutron flux at its interior walls as common PWRs, but will generate less radioactive waste, and it'll be shorter lived. Funny, but useful.
Right back where we started - and in the meantime we continue to use our dwindling stock of fossil fuels that wreck the ozone layer,
Fossil fuels aren't much involved in ozone layer damage, unlike now-banned CFCs. And the ozone layer is on track for recovery by 2075-2100AD thanks to that CFC ban.
"If we'd spent one tenth of the amount of money that goes into fusion research, we'd have small, intrinsically safe fission reactors all up and running years ago. A bit more and we'd have radionuclide junk-eating reactors to take care of the long-lived fission products."
Even if you are right (and i have doubts about you figures ), we still have the issue of the need to get and refine uranium for the reactor. That fuel has a dual purpose and remains a claer and present danger
Furthermore, fusion is not "clean" - the huge neutron flux makes the walls of the containment chamber intensely radioactive and they degrade, needing replacement. So there is still the problem of disposing of long-lived radionuclides . . .
No, but the waste is confined to the vessel itself and relatively easy to deal with. Most of the issues with fission reactors come from an escape of nuclear material into the atmosphere after some accident, which cannot happen in fusion since it is inherently unstable. Not only that but the half life of a fusion reactor is about 1/2 that of a fission one, and that itself could be reduced further through careful choice of material
Right back where we started - and in the meantime we continue to use our dwindling stock of fossil fuels that wreck the ozone layer, pollute our lungs and could be used far more profitably as chemical feedstock than just being burned. And in efforts to reduce this we pollute the countryside with acres of windfarms whose generators require scarce rare-earths, the mining and refining of which generate even more pollution.
True, US spent £1Billion on Nuclear research while oil subsidies cost $400 bill (by the way rare earths are not that rare and uranium mining has its own issues)
Fusion is a well understood process (though there aren't many nuclear engineers left) and can be made safer than a fossil-fuel plant. Ask the US Navy (not the Russians!) how many of their nuclear-powered vessels have had accidents or containment issues. They operate 100 or so reactors and logged over 5,400 reactor years of accident-free operation while traveling over 130 million miles, enough to circle the earth 3,200 times.
True the US navy has a fantastic record with fission reactors, but these are relatively small self contained devices. Scaling them up increases the risks and dangers. Not that I am anti nuclear, but it is risky to extrapolate. The biggest issue is the fuel and how it is obtained and refined. Fusion uses tritium and deuterium, which is easy to store handle and has little weapon value (Ok I know H bombs use it too, but it is useless without the initiator)
If any of this has any internet-facing parts anywhere then it's a clusterfuck of epic proportions waiting to happen.
Like what, damaging millions of dollars of expensive research hardware? You don't actually think a fusion reactor is going to store up enough energy to make a nice bang, do you?
Magnetic confinement fusion reactors don't use magnetic fields to protect the walls (and nearby communities) from the plasma they contain. Rather, the magnetic fields protect the plasma from being quenched by the comparatively super-cold walls of the reactor.
Look at ITER: it's planned 840 cubic meters of plasma volume will only contain 2 to 3 grams of plasma at time. After all, plasma that's 100 million kelvin will occupy a very large volume for a given pressure and mass.
Now, consider the energy contained in 2-3 grams of hydrogen at 100 million kelvin: it's not a lot of Joules comparable to the heat capacity of the tungsten plasma-facing panels enclosing an 840 cubic meter donut. If some l33t haxx0rs get in through the internet and collapse the containment fields in ITER (let alone the smaller JET), then all they achieve is a bit of scuffing of the inner walls and a prompt shutdown of fusion reactions. Imagine evaporating a few grams of tungsten: to a first approximation, you'll immediately cut the temperature of the plasma in half by doubling its mass with the tungsten. Fusion reactions will cease, and you'll only have the latent heat of the plasma (measured in a modest number of megajoules) to warm up a heavy structure meant to soak that sort of heat.
You're not going to rival Chernobyl with ITER or JET, let alone imitate a hydrogen bomb.
In fact the CAMAC standard was designed by people with a clue. It spec's features from board up to "crate" (24 boards, basically 1 level of a whole rack) up to a rack and beyond.
Critically it also includes specs on the power system.
Factoid. The #1 cause of problems on the NASA "Lessons learned"system is about power faults. $Bn space projects delayed or over budget because someone was able to insert a board into a system before it was powered up (massive starting transients), or because the power system was wrongly designed in the first place.
It's old, but it gets the job done.
You don't know much about the history of the WWW, or CERN, do you?
This post has been deleted by its author
...it's called a H-Bomb, we just haven't found a way to slow down time.
Yes, we did. You just need some mass to soak the heat from a fusion explosion, which leads to the PACER fusion reactor concept. Magnetic containment is for nerds. Real fusion reactors use concrete and steel walls. ;)
The final PACER reactor concept was: make a big cave, preferably in hard granite; pre-stress the rock with gigantic rock bolts; line the cave with ludicrous amounts of concrete and 4 meters of steel; and partially fill the cave with molten salts to about 30 meters depth. Begin circulating the salts into giant waterfall curtains to protect the walls. Drop in a fusion bomb, detonate. Circulate super-heated molten salt through steam generators, which drive dynamos. Repeat with another fusion bomb every 45 minutes.
Fusion bombs release a lot of energy, but it is a limited and calculable amount of energy. Muffle the bomb with enough mass and the mass will be heated to manageable, useful temperatures, and then you can extract the bomb's released energy in convenient time frames with conventional power generation hardware.
I am not an expert unlike most of the posters here, but, like many politicians, I would robustly support the proposition where the interior is lined with solar cells, so that any bits of light energy are harvested economically. I would also suggest putting a couple of wind turbines in the Tofumak so that any fluttering gases can be used to help sustain the electromagnetic fields.
Alperian, I'm not sure if Tofumak is a typo or not but I think a Tofumak that could fuse tofu into the 'F' plan diet would provide everyone with a healthy diet while solving energy needs with a human derived bio fuel that recycles carbon. Just need to sort out a means of collecting the bio fuel .
Alperian,
We'd all love to have materials that could be used to make solar panels with the ability to withstand the expected radiation levels inside a fusion core. AFAIK, no one has discovered the right materials yet.
You'll have to describe how you envision wind turbines functioning inside a fusion reactor core. I can't think of any way to make the extra effort worth the trouble.
Fusion is MUCH cleaner than fission in reactors, because we can't get it to work for anything a real person would call "time".
When we make explosions with it we still can't get it to work very well, but then it is much dirtier than fission on account of all the energy it does release tossing the results of the fission-stage reactions and irradiation products over a much wider area.
I wish scientists would stop pretending a working fusion reactor is here or "just around the corner". We've been turning that corner for over fifty years with no joy.
The only person to figure out working fusion reactors is still the Great Green Arkleseizure, who stuck one about 8 and a half light minutes away just to rub it in.
> I wish scientists would stop pretending a working fusion reactor is here or "just around the corner".
You will have a very hard time to find any scientist pretending this. Indeed "Just 20 years in the future, for another 70 years." (or some variation of this) is what pretty much every scientist working in the field will agree to.
Things may sound a bit more optimistic in grant proposals, but that's another matter.
Oh GumpenKraut, I was there for most of the hysterical "almost there" of the seventies. There were no mentions of the corner being 70 years in duration then. That is something that came along in the mid to late eighties (at least publicly; academics might have been saying it to each other behind closed doors, safely out of the hearing of anyone connected with the funding bodies, since the idea began).
In fact, the most vocal public speaker on the subject in-the-know-and-in-the-trenches didn't believe Tokamak tech could *ever* deliver the goods and said so in Omni, while people cared and were watching.
But that was in the heady days of science, before the word "retcon" had been coined and popular science journalists didn't try and con us that there were already "working" nuclear fusion reactors every three months or so.
So we're going to retire all our fusion reactors and sit around waiting for the holy grail of fusion power to come along because we are so scared of fusion power . . .might be a long wait.
We don't even have an experimental fusion reactor that will sustain fusion for more than two "shots" per hour, let alone run continuously or generate more power than it takes to keep it going.
And we are able to generate that much power from, guess what, fission reactors !
The technology is here right now to have safe fission - viable fusion reactors are still "blue sky" stuff, though I'm sure we will get there........eventually.
The fuel may be cheap, but the expense of building and maintaining a power contributing fusion reactor is likely to be way beyond one country - right now we have to have multinational consortia.
Building a small, safe fission reactor is an order of magnitude cheaper and easier, making (relatively) cheap power available even to smaller countries.
Nobody is thinking rationally anymore - everyone is so terrified of fusion power and the possibility of weaponizing it that all sense going down the plughole. Never mind that our finite fossil fuels have killed tens of thousands more than all the fission accidents that have ever happened all added together.
How about a little common sense here?
Mac (you'll be lucky . . .)
Hey Nonny Nonny Mouse,
Correct ..... in another couple of Decades we will be 'Real close now'. :)
Joking aside, I think it is worth chasing for another few decades, particularly if there are spin off technologies on the way as some form of pay back.
I like 'Impossible Science' projects as they have a habit of surfacing 'interesting/useful things' on the way which find uses that were never planned or expected.
You never know it might actually work ...... one day !!! :)
It’s serious science, but not too serious to exclude visitors. Culham is open to pre-booked visitors, holding open evenings in addition to a school programme.
I'd still be a bit weary if a somewhat obese foreign gentleman with a distinct hairdo comes visiting with an entourage of uniformed men holding notebooks and pens
some of the tiles inside the torus
Bloody horrible graphite/fibre mix that was a complete pita to machine.
Took over machining the facing plates on the diverters at the bottom too, previous guy to me kept asking for more material because he had'nt been supplied with enough in the first place.
Turned out he was altering the stock delivery cards and hiding the plates he was scrapping..
Ahhh the joys of making nuclear stuff... see icon
PS we found all the 'lost' plates behind the tooling cabinets when we decided to move everything around one day :)
Sounds like some kind of Reinforced Carbon Carbon. Like the nose of the Shuttle (or really high performance brake pads for aircraft).
Might have more in common with ablative heat shields designed for high energy entry, like Jupiter or Venus.
The article said they switched to a Beryllium/tungsten alloy during one of the upgrades.
Which I predict was also a PITA to machine as Be is brittle and highly toxic if airborn.
So, is it "Dr" Cockroach?
I used to love playing around with cryogenic liquids and whatnot as a teenager at the Culham labs, courtesy of a family friend who ran the crystallography department at JET, and getting to see inside the torus just before they started using tritium (with a group of Swedish students who provided champagne and a jazz gig as a thank you).
3 questions, if any of the Culham crew are reading?
1) Is MAST an evolution of the START concept?
2) Is Alan Sykes still around? If so tell him Mark, Herbert's young friend / the work experience student he helped inspire, is now making a living as a full time professional nerd. Thank you for helping get me started with that Fortran code.
3) Was MAST designed in the Machine Man (think I've got the name of the pub right)?
Heck, anyone can make plasma with a pin, a test tube, some string and a cork.
1) Prick artery with pin
2) Direct spurting blood into test tube
3) cork tube
4) Apply band-aid to wound
5) Well you should have bought some when you went for milk on Sunday
6) Use some of the string for a tourniquet
7) Tie the rest to the test tube and whirl it round your head really fast
8) Uncork and sip delicious plasma
No need for grants from GE or neodymium magnets and liquid helium.
While no doubt a good way to explain your job to the folks back home, stars also involve quite a lot of mass, and thus quite a lot of gravitational concentration of mass, in order to establish the conditions for thermonuclear energy generation. Right now, at least, a somewhat more difficult engineering problem.
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