Helium 3
Need some scoop ships to mine Jupiter then don't we.
Fusion boffins crack shreddy eddy plasma puzzle
Physicists in the US are patting themselves on the back today as they prepare to announce that they've got a grip on a knotty problem troubling anyone designing working nuclear fusion powerplants - which could solve pretty much all of the human race's problems, but have proved very difficult to actually achieve. The idea of a …
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Friday 11th November 2011 16:02 GMT Max Sang
Calder Hall
Britain's nuclear power stations' primary function was to produce the fissile materials for our nuclear weapons. The 'too cheap to meter' propaganda was exactly that - propaganda. Unfortunately nuclear power has been badly tainted by this secret agenda; if our reactors had been designed exclusively for the safe generation of power from the start, we might be in a bit less of a mess now. Less anti-nuke hysteria and more advanced tech would go a long way to mitigating our energy/CO2 pickle.
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Friday 11th November 2011 17:21 GMT bholder
petrol?
The comment about the "cheapest way to make petrol" is irksome - if we can control fusion, we don't need petrol / gas at all, we would need to go straight to all-electric or perhaps hydrogen / fuel cell technology to power vehicles. Using fusion energy to create replicas of fossil fuels is just stupid - they'd still be wasteful, dirty, and polluting, and adding unnecessary conversions just wastes energy (even with cheap fusion energy, the laws of thermodynamics still apply).
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Saturday 12th November 2011 17:16 GMT Tomato42
Batteries have pitiful energy density, are bloody heavy and unlike gasoline, don't take 2 minutes to fill up. Gasoline is much better energy storage device.
Because you generate it from gases, it will also be much cleaner (no sulphur for one thing) and you just recycle the CO2 already in air, not introduce new one.
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Friday 11th November 2011 17:25 GMT Ben 50
Why does it need to be Cheeeeap?
In return for limiting mankind's damage to its natural environment I'm prepared to pay many hundreds of % more for my electricity, and my food. If that means I can't afford to fly as much, or buy so many fancy gadgets and other luxuries, so be it. It's worth it.
Maybe then I'll actually have the time I wish I had to get to know my neighbors better :-D
Always aiming for better, cheaper, faster really isn't the way forward anymore. The side-effects are horrible.
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Sunday 13th November 2011 23:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why the downvotes?
I hope it's not because of some anti-environmentalist attitude.
I'd prefer to think it's because of an understanding that cheap, abundant (as in will easily last for the rest of human life on earth) energy would actually allow us to reduce our other resource consumption due to the ability to recycle and synthesize.
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Friday 11th November 2011 19:30 GMT Critical Mass
Hi All,
This has been the dream for decades, hasn't it? An endless supply of nearly free energy that would jump start our sagging world economies, get us away from polluting energy resources and improve the lives of the poor around the world....right? It's hard to imagine how nuclear fusion could be anything but a good thing.
I'm amazed by the short sightedness of seemingly intelligent people today. Yes, the list of positive things that inexpensive energy could do for the world is long indeed, but if you put a bit more thought into the repercussions of super cheap fuel, things don't look so bright....especially with seven billion people doing all manner of things at hyper speeds. Houses could be MUCH biger......lower heating, cooling, lighting bills. Cost of manufacturing and transporting manufactured goods would plunge. People could afford much larger families and so on and so forth . All of this would begin burning up finite resources at alarming rates and likely trigger more regional wars over dwindling resources. If we could magically supply the world with cheap fusion reactor generated fuel starting tomorrow, I don't think you would recognize our planet ten years from now. There would be nothing left of it.
Don't get me wrong, I think nuclear fusion is a good thing. I just don't think it's a good thing when it is fueling 7 billion people. Expensive energy isn't the problem. It's actually the only thing stopping us from completely destroying this poor planet. Virtually every super serious problem the world is facing is driven by our exploding population......climate change, pollution, deforestation, plant and animal extinction, lack of fresh water, the threats to all sea life, wars over resources, pandemic disease.....you name it. What is the up side to more and more people. The world population has tripled in my life time and I'm only 59.
There is a solution. Use human greed to attack the problem. Replace ALL taxes worldwide with an Environmental Resource tax or impact tax. People who lead more sustainable lives and have small families or no children pay little or no taxes. Just imagine our world if we went back to one billion people......the oceans and forests restored and once again filled with food and other resources, abundant energy resources. Do I think the world is ready for this idea? No, not by a long shot. It takes us decades of discussion to resolve big problems, but we have to start the discussion first and that hasn't happened yet. We are always looking for funding and some new technology to solve our problems. This requires no money and no new technology. I know.....you can't stop progress, but you can redefine it. I think we need new definitions for "quality of life" and "high standard of living". Planet Earth is the gem of the universe and we are destroying it.
The Fix is so Simple
Charley
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Friday 11th November 2011 21:44 GMT Chris Miller
Utter rubbish
Most of the people responsible for population growth are too poor to pay taxes. They tend to have large families because:
(a) they lack access to reliable contraception;
(b) they are dependent on their children to provide for them in old age; and
(c) childhood mortality rates are still too high.
Fix those problems by improving their financial circumstances and (as we have proven innumerable times) birth rates will naturally reduce. Although world population may have tripled in our lifetimes (we share a birth year), the geometric rate of increase has reduced significantly over that period, precisely because some of these problems have been tackled for some people.
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Monday 14th November 2011 02:52 GMT Graham Dawson
Brudine, whilst the correlation is not absolute, the majority of countries with a high average of children born per woman are third world, generally african and central asian.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html
Next time, look before mouthing off.
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Friday 11th November 2011 19:47 GMT Erwin Hofmann
... well, wel, well ... and this "good news" does not make you suspicious at all ... coming just about a couple of days after Andrea Rossi E-Cat "cold fusion" machine flushed the headlines of the worlds media ... must be a scary place, building a multi billion dollar research facility, to be outsmart by a simple physical principle ... I'm not quit convinced (both ways) but imagine that ...
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Friday 11th November 2011 19:47 GMT Zarrakan
STOP BURNING STUFF! USE SOLAR POWER!
If you own solar panels you are producing your own electricity by harnessing the power of the sun. If you sell that electricity back to your local power company you are engaging in a transaction no different from what your local fast food restaurant does. You make the electric cheeseburger with your solar panel stove, they pay you for it, and then the electric company stuffs it in it's fat face and eats it. Payment for services rendered!
Harnessing the power of the sun does not make you a socialist, commie, homosexual, or any other closet bogeyman that stupid people are so afraid of. It makes you an intelligent human being that's able to understand that if you can legally get something for free then why pay for it? If you can make money by legally getting something for free, and then selling it then why not do it? Anything less is stupid.
Put solar panels that create NO WASTE, and produce CLEAN ENERGY on your house. You will NEVER have an electric bill again, and if you produce enough energy you can charge it back to the grid, and GIVE the electric company a bill.
Most states will allow you to make up to $1000 a month or more charging electricity back to your local electric company. That's a $12,000 a year direct income that coupled with savings from not having an electric bill would net you around $15000+ yearly.
We should give all the middle/poor class people solar panels so they can charge electricity back to their local electric companies. Give them electric cars too so that they never have to pay for gas, and make sure those cars have solar panels on them so they are always charging. The financial offset alone would dramatically help our economy.
Of course stupid people would rather you stay dependent on FILTHY energy sources like oil, and nuclear power. Solar power would upset the plans of stupid people to murder the middle/poor classes.
Cheap solar depends on what you buy, and what you are willing to do to use it.
They have private installation companies, and they even have one that's partnered with Lowes.
Businesses/stores get a bulk solar discount which they (hopefully) pass on to you, but they tack on the price of labor.
Doing it yourself saves you that cost, and it's really not that hard, but that does mean you have to do it yourself, and depending on your level of skill that can be worse than the extra cost.
Get these two things:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-TLD100-Thermal-Detector/dp/B001LMTW2S
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Decker-EM100B-Energy-Monitor/dp/B001ELJKLE
Find your ac/heat leaks, and seal them up. Then change out all your light bulbs inside/outside your house with LEDs. Preferably 1 watt, and white, but you can usually get better discounts with non-white colors. You can double up in areas that need more light.
After that use the energy monitor to get a general idea about how much electricity you are using on a regular basis, and consult your electric bills. This will give you some idea about what you need as a minimum system for your home.
You will notice power spikes when certain appliances are switched on (water heater, washer, dryer, etc), but you’re looking for what the “always on” KwH is like.
Shop around once you have that information. You will want a system that generates .5 to 1.0 KwH more than what you actually need, and you will also want to address what your nightly power consumption is by having enough stored battery power.
By doing all of the above, I have discovered that I can run my house completely on this 5 Kwh system
http://www.amazon.com/Grape-Solar-GS-2300-KIT-Residential-Grid-Tied/dp/B0049SPBL2
It’s $10K without installation, and batteries, but if I had this in place it would pay for itself in 3 years because I would not have an electric bill.
PLEASE DO NOT FORGET: Whatever system you get, make sure you put a grounded lightning rod near your solar installation that is 4 feet taller than it.
What I have described is for an off-grid solar system. Call your power company for details about on-grid solar systems if you are interested in being compensated for any excesses electricity.
Subscribe to, and watch this guy:
http://www.youtube.com/user/solarcabin
Buy his book too. =)
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Friday 11th November 2011 21:44 GMT Richard 12
Such a shame to see someone so taken in by the hype
A 5kW PV system can only generate that 5kW in perfect conditions - that is, direct strong sunlight on a cloudless day with the panels in perfect physical and electrical condition.
In all situations the PV cells start to get dirty and dusty (within days) and degrade (over several years), so there are no 5kW installations that generate 5kW regularly.
In Europe and most of the USA and Canada, we have clouds, rain and snow, and short days with long nights.
In a real life you will never get anything like 5kW mean daytime power output from a 5kW nominal installation.
You may wish to do some research into the actual, real-life output of such a system - not just when first installed, but several years down the line.
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Friday 11th November 2011 23:31 GMT Tom Maddox
I'm generally pro-solar, but . . .
"Put solar panels that create NO WASTE, and produce CLEAN ENERGY on your house. You will NEVER have an electric bill again, and if you produce enough energy you can charge it back to the grid, and GIVE the electric company a bill."
Fortunately for me, the solar panel fairy will just deliver these at no cost, and they certainly consume no energy or rare earths during manufacture, nor does their manufacture create toxic wastes. Also, like everyone on earth, I live in a place where the sun constantly shines throughout the year, especially cold winter months, without interference from clouds, fog, or building shadow AND have sufficiently exposed square footage to generate enough electricity!
"Most states will allow you to make up to $1000 a month or more charging electricity back to your local electric company. That's a $12,000 a year direct income that coupled with savings from not having an electric bill would net you around $15000+ yearly."
Well, this certainly seems sustainable. I'm certain that the power companies and governments will be very willing to maintain these subsidies indefinitely.
"We should give all the middle/poor class people solar panels so they can charge electricity back to their local electric companies. Give them electric cars too so that they never have to pay for gas, and make sure those cars have solar panels on them so they are always charging. The financial offset alone would dramatically help our economy."
I would be interested to see your specific calculations on these figures. I suspect I'll be waiting a while.
The problem is not that solar power is bad idea; there are many places on Earth where it makes a great deal of sense. The problem is that it is not feasible for all cases, and it certainly is not without its drawbacks. Your flavor of one-dimensional ranting screed does not help the cause.
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Friday 11th November 2011 23:32 GMT Peter2
The fundamental problem with what your suggesting is that you expect the government to buy everybody solar panels, and you expect to get paid 4+ times more than the generation rate a real power plant is paid for putting energy into the grid between ~10AM-~4PM, which offsets the power that you then actually have to buy in the evening when your at home and wanting to use power.
The problems with this approach is twofold. Firstly, tax works by everybody chipping in a little bit, and the resulting huge sum is then used for essentials that require everybody to pay for them, like policing, healthcare and the military.
When you start wanting to give everybody more than they are paying in then the wheels come off of the system because we can't afford to pay everybody more than they are putting in.
Secondly, as a results of these schemes power bills are having to go up a lot over what they would otherwise be at because everybody else has to subsidise you. This means that those covering the cost of these green schemes are worse off and the people who can't afford the higher bills (ie, the old age pensioners) are going to have to go without heating this winter. Newspapers are warning rising power bills will result in OAP's freezing to death.
Personally, I think that's a travesty in the 21st century. However, I am SURE that the solar brigade are going to calmly accept they caused the situation, accept responsibility and allow their schemes to come to an early end in the interest of making sure that the worst off in society aren't having to freeze while the solar brigade keep their heaters on (subsidised by those actually paying the higher bills, obviously). I mean, what sort of tosser would create that situation and then stand around with a holier than thou attitude blaming energy companies for being greedy and putting the bills up?
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Saturday 12th November 2011 17:16 GMT Tomato42
In real life you'll be struggling to get 10% of rated energy output averaged over a year because of rain, clouds, snow, etc..
Add to that we don't have a energy storage system with efficiency exceeding 50-60% and in the end you'll get about 5% of energy from your panels. So you'll need "a bit more" panels that can fit on your roof to be self-sustainable.
Then add ageing of both panels and batteries...
While I have to agree that fossil are filthy and are killing more people we are comfortable to admit, nuclear is safer than coconuts (as in kills less people).
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Monday 14th November 2011 12:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
TL; DR (most of it)
Got bored after the suggestion that Solar panels are free.
Also, I am "middle/poor class" and live in a flat, like a lot of people in this country, a building which I don't own (like many people in the 'middle/poor class') and which (even if i wanted to) I would not be able to attach solar panels to.
All well and good if you live in a lovely large house (that you own), and can afford the initial outlay, and get the planning permission to get them installed in the first place.
The people who could really use the "around $15000+ yearly." would never be able to afford to get a system like this in place.
Oh, and we use "£" round here........
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Friday 11th November 2011 23:32 GMT John Smith 19
I await the rich harveset of plaasma physics PhDs from this research.
As I do *every* year.
It's relatively easy to get inside most forms of alternative energy and work out their cost structure. However as this is still in R&D that's not so possible.
Does *any* one have any clear idea of how *far* the state of the art is from where it is predicted to need to be to achieve this goal?
BTW the fact that a significantly more efficient mode has taken 2-3 *decades* to get some in depth research done on it suggests that there is a distinct lack of cooperation between the various research groups involved. In contrast some of the *key* breakthroughs in biology and biochemistry were made by multiple groups meeting and agreeing a "divide and conquer" strategy which does not seem to happen in plasma physics.
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Saturday 12th November 2011 17:21 GMT BDub
No it ain't
"This is the process which powers the sun,..."
Well - No it ain't. Fusion? Yes. Magnetic confinement fusion/tokamak/ITER,etc.? - No.
The sun is 'powered' by graviational and inertial electrostatic confinement - which are the naturally-occuring processes. Maybe there are some eddy currents and such that make little tokamaks floating around in the sun's outer layers, but that's not the primary process.
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Sunday 13th November 2011 23:03 GMT Chris Miller
A bit harsh
the tokamaks are needed to reproduce the conditions inside the sun (since shovelling 10^30kg of hydrogen together is a bit beyond current technology levels), where fusion is undoubtedly taking place. The real difference is that stars like the sun fuse plain vanilla hydrogen into helium, whereas we're using deuterium and tritium.
Fusing ordinary hydrogen is possible, but very, very inefficient. You can overcome the Coulomb repulsion to force two protons together, but (luckily for us*) 2He isn't stable, so you have to rely on (oversimplifying somewhat) one of the protons beta decaying to a neutron during the very brief period that 2He holds together. This happens so infrequently that an average hydrogen nucleus can hang around in the sun's core for a billion years before being fused into deuterium, but once this has been achieved the fusion process continues to 4He relatively quickly.
* By one of the weird anthropic coincidences, the strong nuclear force is just too weak (relative to electromagnetism) to hold two protons together without any neutrons. If it were a few percent stronger, the diproton would be stable and nuclear reactions in stars would run to completion in a few million years, giving (presumably) insufficient time for complex lifeforms to develop. Look up 'diproton disaster' if you'd like more info.
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Saturday 12th November 2011 17:23 GMT pdt
The type of fusion currently being developed is not the panacea suggested in this article. This fuel cycle requires tritium which is derived from lithium. Lithium supplies are much more limited than deuterium supplies. Also, lithium is useful for other purposes, so turning our lithium reserves into helium might not be the best idea. While other fuel cycles exist, they are much more difficult attain.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#D-T_fuel_cycle
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Monday 21st November 2011 22:36 GMT Charles 9
Other alternatives.
There are also plenty of potential sources of lithium around (and having Lithium is not just good for getting Tritium, but it helps contain the radioactivity). While most of the easy deposits are in places like China, Bolivia, and Chile, there are a number of known untapped resources as well. There just hasn't been enough economic incentive to start digging around to try to get them out of various brines or to try to extract lithium from seawater. Another thing to note is that, apart from quantities used to control radioactivity, the amount of lithium that would need to be converted to tritium to power a D-T reaction is actually comparatively small, since if the ITER test works to spec, it would only take about 16kg of total fusible mass to continually produce 500MW thermal for a whole year (ballpark estimate).
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Sunday 13th November 2011 23:01 GMT Mallorn
General Fusion
If you are interested in fusion research you should have a look at General Fusion - a company based in Vancouver. They are developing a different type of reactor which uses a spinning ball of lead which is symmetrically compressed by steam pistons to compress injected plasma toroids to the point of fusion. A lot of the neutrons generated are trapped by the molten lead which is laced with lithium to breed tritium fuel.
No idea whether the technology will work well enough to let them succeed but the basic physics principles look sensible (to a physicist, but not a plasma physicist).
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Sunday 13th November 2011 23:03 GMT John Smith 19
fusion is the perfect energy source for *big* energy companies.
*Huge* barriers to entry mean that *only* the big boys can play. No trouble with any "micro-generation" nonsense forcing them to lower prices (competition I think it's called).
No hardware in foreign parts to fall into the hands of any grubby locals who think they should be paid more for "their" raw materials.
Actually there's only *two* problems with fusion as ideal energy source.
1) It doesn't work.
2) It doesn't have a fuel supply originating from a group of unstable political regimes who make tracking price of commodity against output so difficult it's impossible to work out how much profit they are making. In contrast Deuterium and Tritium production costs are available.
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Sunday 13th November 2011 23:06 GMT Paul Johnston
Pardon
"We found that the turbulent eddies on the surface of the plasma produced surface flows that eventually grow large enough to shred the eddies, turning off the turbulence," says Schmitz. "Much like the population of predators and prey find a balance in the wild, we find that the plasma flow and the plasma turbulence reach an equilibrium in the tokamak plasma."
Err ?
I thought the whole point of Lotka–Volterra equations were their ability to generate totally unstable outcomes.
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Sunday 20th November 2011 17:23 GMT Charles 9
Actually, patents shouldn't apply.
Since IIRC the ITER is STATE-funded. As in directly funded by a number of sovereign states. There are a few things that are not subject to patents, and government-funded projects usually count among the exceptions. Products of the state usually fall into their own category (with its own rules on use) or become public domain (usually the case in the US).
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Monday 14th November 2011 09:15 GMT jab701
Not sure about this
"The usual means of doing this is to confine a superhot plasma of appropriate light nuclei under massive heat and pressure inside a doughnut-shaped vessel using magnetic fields to suspend the plasma and prevent it destroying the structure. Sadly, so far these doughnut "tokamaks" have always required more power to run than they can generate."
I sat through a seminar while I was doing my postgraduate degree at uni, we had a guy from JET coming down and talking to us for 3 hours. The question of the hot plasma destroying the reactor came up.
The fact of the matter is that the thermal mass of the plasma is low despite it being very hot. The actual problem is that if the plasma touches the walls of the reaction vessel it will cool down and the reaction will stop. A single proton hot proton touching a lump of metal will not heat the metal up very much, the proton will just cool down.
Also the reason for building a bigger reactor is that it is easier to contain the plasma in a larger space.
I second point is they tend not to use tritium right now because they want to go inside the reactor vessel to inspect it after the experiments. High energy neutrons can be captured by the walls of the reaction vessel and create radioactive isotopes making it dangerous to then go inside and inspect it. They tend to only use deutrium which doesnt release as much energy.
I do remember they said that the amount of lithium in a laptop battery would power the UK for a year or something ridiculous like that. It was impressive....the commercial timelime they layed out in this seminar was 2030 - 2050 for power being generated by these reactions powering the national grid. We are still a long way off!
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Monday 14th November 2011 10:13 GMT Fenton
Polical fall out
Should fusion become a reality at the vast scales we'd love to achieve it will create and absolute nightmare polically around the world.
The middle east will loose its income becoming even more unstable than it already is.
Those countries without the technology will not be able to compete thus becoming unstable.
I hope to god that if we can get it to work the patents will not be inforced allowing everybody to use the technology and not create an even worse two tier world.
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
