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Page added on April 22, 2016
Fusion Reactor Still in Works
All today’s nuclear power plants make energy by thge splitting of uranium atoms — which creates a lot of useful heat but also a lot of dangerous and deadly nuclear waste. The opposite process — fusion — also creates heat but with hardly any pesky radiation. The problem is that fusion is way more difficult to achieve. Scientists from 35 nations, including United States, Russia and China, are painstakingly trying to solve the problem — to create technology that could power the world for thousands of years.
Scientists have long known that fusing atoms of two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, releases huge amounts of energy and very little radiation. But doing so requires the kind of heat and pressure found in our sun, though focused on a much, much smaller point, — about the size of a person’s smaller pocket change.
Modern technology says it is very difficult but not impossible to achieve. Powerful lasers would provide pressure and heat while huge magnets would keep the little sun levitating in the middle of a special chamber.
Fusion, It is projected, will yield up to 10 times more energy than it uses.
Started in 1985, a project in Southern France called ITER is slowly plodding along with plans for a working fusion reactor. It’s been plagued by politics, and by organizational and funding difficulties.
But its new director general, French physicist and chemist Dr. Bernard Bigot, said the reactor is finally on its way to being built.
“For example the first delivery of what we call the cryostat piece is coming from India, okay. In the U.S., General Atomics has been able for example to deliver the first set of the central solenoid,” said Bigot.
The Congressional committee that approves U.S. participation in the project has seesawed on its support. In 1998 it withdrew from the project, only to rejoin the effort in 2005 and then drastically reduce the funding in 2008. Bigot came to the U.S. to try to persuade it to stay on.
“The U.S. is now wondering if it is worth to move on, okay, forward with project for the next coming years or maybe to step down. And so it was quite important to show them that despite the fact they just have the sharing of 9%, okay, project is moving on and it’s worth for them to stay in,” said Bigot.
Bigot added that if the new schedule is endorsed by seven core members, including the U.S., China and Russia, the assembly of the reactor could be finished by 2025, with first experiments starting in 2028.
Ultimately the reactor will cost billions of dollars to build, but if it works, the results will be literally priceless.
13 Comments on "Fusion Reactor Still in Works"
Dredd on Fri, 22nd Apr 2016 3:25 pm
It’s in the mail …
Anonymous on Fri, 22nd Apr 2016 4:59 pm
Yea the results will be priceless, lol. As in so expensive no one could afford to actually build a (working) functional commercial fusion reactor. IF such a thing ever proved possible.
Assume:
-5-10x cost of a current ‘fission’ reactor.(current ~ 10 billion USD
-10 years+construction time.(fission) Much longer for a ‘fuser’.
-Adjust for inflation out to year….I donno, 2100?
Then calculate final cost for (one) fuser. Priceless? You bet it will be…
Cost overruns, construction delays, and material bottlenecks not included.
You could substitute say, trivial low cost interstellar travel for ‘fusion’, and article would read pretty much the same.
peakyeast on Fri, 22nd Apr 2016 5:23 pm
The safety around such a construction have to be way more comprehensive than todays nuclear power plants.
Especially since the world is not getting more peaceful and loving in the foreseeable future – quite the contrary and since that electricity seems to be the way everything should be powered in the future.
Imagine: An enemy will just need to eliminate a tiny part of one target and an entire nation could be without power.
makati1 on Fri, 22nd Apr 2016 5:36 pm
April 2016 – “Fusion Reactor Still in Works”
April 2046 – “Fusion Reactor Still in Works”
Nuff said.
onlooker on Fri, 22nd Apr 2016 5:47 pm
Maybe one of the last human survivors should leave some indelible marker somewhere with that as our parting words. “Fusion Reactor still in works”
Steve Barbershores on Fri, 22nd Apr 2016 8:43 pm
peak oil news and message boards.
Hmmm!
No author.
No real content
Typos that wouldn’t make it past a rudimentary spell check
Broken sentence structure in several paragraphs
This looks like a message board post from someone with a first language other than English, and a computer without spell check.
Just some dude’s opinion.
Why did I just read this?
Why did it show up on Yahoo news?
Sigh!
Go Speed Racer on Fri, 22nd Apr 2016 10:32 pm
Look at the insane amounts of copper being used up in that design. You cant use up enough resources to be visible from outer space, for one little ole lousy power station.
Get real, burn up pallets and trees and add some garbage and run a steam engine, it was known to work 100 years ago, and at least its economical and will produce power, unlike ITER.
Davy on Sat, 23rd Apr 2016 4:39 am
Better yet Speeder, we should mandate that all high rise buildings install micro water generators and they be installed in the sewer pipes leading to the ground. Of course they will have to be adapted to handle turds or we could have brown outs…
John Frey on Sat, 23rd Apr 2016 6:55 am
Lockheed already has it. It’s done.
Kenz300 on Sat, 23rd Apr 2016 8:37 am
Wind and solar can provide all the energy the world needs………….
It is time to begin shutting down the oldest nuclear power plants. Then the problem of how to deal with and store all the nuclear waste FOREVER has to be figured out.
Nuclear energy is poisoning the planet…………
5 Years After Fukushima, ‘No End in Sight’ to Ecological Fallout
http://ecowatch.com/2016/03/05/5-years-after-fukushima/
Fukushima Should Have Served as Wake-Up Call for U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission
http://ecowatch.com/2016/03/10/fukushima-wake-up-call-nrc/
7 Top NRC Experts Break Ranks to Warn of Critical Danger at Aging Nuke Plants
http://ecowatch.com/2016/03/09/nrc-experts-warn-dangers-nuclear/
jjhman on Sat, 23rd Apr 2016 3:03 pm
Ha:
Between 1974 and 1977 I worked on the fusion program at General Atomics (then known as Gulf General Atomic)our biggest concern in my department then was the 14 Mev neutrons spewing out of the reaction and destroying everything surrounding the reaction.
After all of these years they haven’t even solved the “known” problems to establish a stable reaction. I seriously doubt they will have solved the “unknown” problems that will crop up when or IF they ever establish a stable reaction.
This is just the classic case of trying to get out of the mess you caused by using the same mind-set that got you in the mess in the first place.
James Gerard on Sun, 24th Apr 2016 1:40 am
” assembly of the reactor COULD BE finished by 2025, with first experiments starting in 2028…” (Emphasis added)
“Could be” and “up to”, along with various other “may’s” and “might’s” don’t add up to much confidence, nor do the requirements for the thing to work.
Look at General Fusion for a fusion design that is attracting some serious financing from the Canadian Government – in the range of $12 million, not billions – a design that uses far simpler concepts and way, way less copper – and it looks like it might work.
But whether or not it works, there is another technology that does work, at far less cost than any other fission reactor. This is the MSR (Molten Salt Reactor, first built and operated at Oak Ridge in the 1960’s. The test reactor (See MSRE – Molten Salt Reactor Experiment) ran successfully for 20,000 hours, and established that the design works well.
These reactors, including the LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) version of the MSR, can be built to any scale from one excellent for ocean vessels or smaller villages or towns to multiple larger installations for large cities. They are completely fail-safe, to the point of being “Walk-Away-Safe”.
At any sign of problems, such as overheating, they automatically go into cold shutdown – no auxiliary power or operator intervention needed.
They can simply and easily use present stockpiles of nuclear “waste” – “spent” (still containing ~95% of the original potential energy) fuel rods, plutonium, other actinides, as fuel, eliminating the storage problem. The MSR obtains nearly 100% of the available energy from the fuel, including the fertile isotopes (U238, Thorium). Once some of these reactors are started with an initial charge of fissile fuel, they generate enough extra fuel to start the next generation of reactors.
They cannot melt down, explode, or distribute radioactive material into the environment. The liquid fuel, if spilled, just falls on the floor and hardens into a greenish glassy solid.
They do not lend themselves to weapons production, which is partly why they were dropped when the PWR (Pressurized Water Reactor) reactor was chosen for development.
The only potential power source that comes close to beating the MSR is fusion. See General Fusion for a company that may have a practical fusion plan. But even if their fascinating design actually works, we would still need a fleet of MSR to burn up all the huge stockpile of nuclear waste we have accumulated.
Also see thorconpower dot com for a company that is ready to manufacture MSR plants right now.
Read “Super Fuel – Thorium: The Green Energy Source For The Future” by Richard Martin.
See timothymaloney dot net for excellent graphic explanations of the Thorium and MSR fuel cycles and reactor designs, plus several related articles of great importance.
Go Speed Racer on Sun, 24th Apr 2016 2:00 am
Awesome Davy,
Sewer generated electric power uses falling turds…. Butt it could cause brown outs. Rotflmao.