Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

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G. Keenan
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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by G. Keenan »

Joe Shlabotnik wrote:
February 11 22, 2:56 pm
:wink:
Superorganism wrote:
February 11 22, 2:25 pm
This sounds a little dangerous.
That's what I'm thinking. One the one hand, much cheaper ubiquitous energy with no toxic pollution as a byproduct. WOW.

On the other hand, what happens if one of these baby's blows? It sounds like it might make Chernobyl look like a flesh wound.
What could go wrong with a floating ball of plasma 10 times hotter than the sun?

I'm amazed we can even engineer metals to withstand that. For now these reactions are small and brief. How would you engineer something that can handle those temperatures for bigger, longer fusion reactions?

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Joe Shlabotnik
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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by Joe Shlabotnik »

G. Keenan wrote:
February 11 22, 3:33 pm
Joe Shlabotnik wrote:
February 11 22, 2:56 pm
:wink:
Superorganism wrote:
February 11 22, 2:25 pm
This sounds a little dangerous.
That's what I'm thinking. One the one hand, much cheaper ubiquitous energy with no toxic pollution as a byproduct. WOW.

On the other hand, what happens if one of these baby's blows? It sounds like it might make Chernobyl look like a flesh wound.
What could go wrong with a floating ball of plasma 10 times hotter than the sun?

I'm amazed we can even engineer metals to withstand that. For now these reactions are small and brief. How would you engineer something that can handle those temperatures for bigger, longer fusion reactions?
Or maybe you engineer big ass batteries that can handle beaucoup terrajoules over a matter of seconds. Fire up the fusion reactor for seconds/minutes and take the energy from the mega batteries.

Arthur Dent
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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by Arthur Dent »

AWvsCBsteeeerike3 wrote:
February 11 22, 1:44 pm
I'd think you'd end up with a condensed timeframe for design/construction once lessons are learned in the first couple iterations, but that's no guarantee.
In fact, we’ve already done the first couple iterations of tokamaks for the 50s through 70s, and instead of condensing the timeframe, they’ve expanding it, revealing the problem to be way harder than hoped. Progress had ground to a near halt as the projects seemed to need to move to mega project scale just as the end of the Cold War dried up a lot of interest in mega projects.

Nonetheless, it’s nice to see a return of interest and investment to grand dreams like this, supersonic travel, space flight, and so on.

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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by Arthur Dent »

G. Keenan wrote:
February 11 22, 3:33 pm
Joe Shlabotnik wrote:
February 11 22, 2:56 pm
:wink:
Superorganism wrote:
February 11 22, 2:25 pm
This sounds a little dangerous.
That's what I'm thinking. One the one hand, much cheaper ubiquitous energy with no toxic pollution as a byproduct. WOW.

On the other hand, what happens if one of these baby's blows? It sounds like it might make Chernobyl look like a flesh wound.
What could go wrong with a floating ball of plasma 10 times hotter than the sun?

I'm amazed we can even engineer metals to withstand that. For now these reactions are small and brief. How would you engineer something that can handle those temperatures for bigger, longer fusion reactions?
That’s just the problem: you can’t. Nowhere close. The idea is to create a torus filled with this plasma that is contained not by barriers of physical material but with extremely intense magnetic fields that are supposed to keep all the particles flowing in a kind of spiral path around the loop never contacting the walls which are separated from the hot plasma by a region of vacuum (i.e. empty space).

But this is really hard to do much less sustain, and the plasma will often get unstable, escape the magnetic confinement and plow into the actual physical walls. The temperature is unimaginably high, but the plasma density is ultra low, so I don’t know that massive explosion is the issue as much as severe damage (melting a hole, etc) to all the incredibly expensive equipment arranged around the torus.

AWvsCBsteeeerike3
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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

Arthur Dent wrote:
February 11 22, 4:20 pm
AWvsCBsteeeerike3 wrote:
February 11 22, 1:44 pm
I'd think you'd end up with a condensed timeframe for design/construction once lessons are learned in the first couple iterations, but that's no guarantee.
In fact, we’ve already done the first couple iterations of tokamaks for the 50s through 70s, and instead of condensing the timeframe, they’ve expanding it, revealing the problem to be way harder than hoped. Progress had ground to a near halt as the projects seemed to need to move to mega project scale just as the end of the Cold War dried up a lot of interest in mega projects.

Nonetheless, it’s nice to see a return of interest and investment to grand dreams like this, supersonic travel, space flight, and so on.
Ha well yeah if the lesson learned is ‘we don’t know how to do it’ that’s going to add a bit of time to the next iteration.

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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

Arthur Dent wrote:
February 11 22, 4:54 pm
G. Keenan wrote:
February 11 22, 3:33 pm


What could go wrong with a floating ball of plasma 10 times hotter than the sun?

I'm amazed we can even engineer metals to withstand that. For now these reactions are small and brief. How would you engineer something that can handle those temperatures for bigger, longer fusion reactions?
That’s just the problem: you can’t. Nowhere close. The idea is to create a torus filled with this plasma that is contained not by barriers of physical material but with extremely intense magnetic fields that are supposed to keep all the particles flowing in a kind of spiral path around the loop never contacting the walls which are separated from the hot plasma by a region of vacuum (i.e. empty space).

But this is really hard to do much less sustain, and the plasma will often get unstable, escape the magnetic confinement and plow into the actual physical walls. The temperature is unimaginably high, but the plasma density is ultra low, so I don’t know that massive explosion is the issue as much as severe damage (melting a hole, etc) to all the incredibly expensive equipment arranged around the torus.
@Superorganism @Joe Shlabotnik

Exactly. I'm pretty far out of my element here, but as you note, it's incredibly difficult to fuse atoms and requires large amounts of energy to create the perfect scenario in which it can happen. If something goes wrong, like the plasma playing bumper cars with the walls, the reaction just stops. And, the molecules they're dealing with in fusion are deuterium (hydrogen with an extra neutron, occurs naturally in abundance, is not radioactive), tritium (hydrogen with two extra neutrons, is not abundant but can be made somewhat easily, releases radioactive beta rays), and helium that results from the previous two molecules fusing which I don't believe is radioactive.

So getting a runaway reaction similar to what happened at Chernobyl is chemically impossible. And, not impossible like well in the worst case scenario we hit the red button that stops everything, but impossible in the sense that the basic setup isn't dealing with molecules that would ever react in the first place.

Still, yeah, 100M degree plasma can probably do some damage. And, the release of tritium into your drinking reservoir in large doses would not be ideal. Of course, the same can be said for spent nuclear fuel created in the fission reactors. And, really, the same can be said for any number of byproducts released during the burning of petro or coal that gets released into the air everyday at plants all around the world, a lot of which don't even have to get into water to hurt you.

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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by TGantz »

I don't know if it has been asked, but what kind of thermometer can read heat that is supposedly the level of the sun?

Weber digital meat thermometer?

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AdmiralKird
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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by AdmiralKird »

I always ask the chef to prepare my Ribeye as pure carbon.

AWvsCBsteeeerike3
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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by AWvsCBsteeeerike3 »

lulz @AdmiralKird and @TGantz

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BottenFieldofDreams
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Re: Nuclear Fusion closer to becoming a reality?

Post by BottenFieldofDreams »

Conversely, instead of containing the plasma, you could focus more on establishing a government that will control the narrative and gaslight citizens and foreign spectators. Worked for a while with Chernobyl. I know just the guy for this...

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