Something New in Fusion Research

Here's some additional links that deal with this stellarator development.

http://www.iter.org/newsline/172/680

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/fed/stelnews/pdf/US_Compact_StellaratorDoc.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X

Ed Weldon

Hi Ed,

Do you think this has real promise? No.

By the wiki link to Wendelstein 7-X I see: "The purpose of Wendelstein 7-X is to evaluate the main components of a future fusion reactor built using stellarator technology, even if Wendelstein 7-X itself is not an economical fusion power plant."

Sounds like all the other fusion business to me... not an economical power plant.

And then they reveal under "Current Status" that there's been an eight year extension on the delivery date - originally 2006, now 2014.

How soon will it be to produce the first working reactor...... never is my bet. Will any governments be willing to fast track these projects..... none, for certain. Impossible! They only have promise as long as they are not completed....

I notice on the Stellerator wiki that other attempts also fell victim to non-completion issues due to high costs. These are physics experiments, afaict, and dressing them up as a "future power plant" is plainly, a boondoggle. What they all have in common is an endless extension on the completion date - upon which it would be proven whether they work or not as a power source. Meanwhile the promise of power generation is spun out to justify the expense, along with the caveat that if it doesn't work itself, it will tell us how to build the next one....

Will we ever have economically viable fusion reactors... I don't know. But it doesn't look like these are them!

ITER is an international project to design, build, and operate a Tokamak magnetic fusion experiment. I say "experiment" because when I joined the U.S. magnetic fusion as a middle-aged engineer in 1975, the machine '2 generations' ahead of the one I was working on was supposed to be the first of its kind power reactor, or the "demo", which is short for "demonstration power reactor". Now, ITER is supposed to be the machine one generation before "demo". That's one major advancement in magnetic fusion in 46 years. Would any of you out there care to speculate on when magnetic fusion finally turns on the switch on the "Demo". "Gluck auf oder lots of luck".

Ed Dalder

For the foreseeable future deuterium and tritium will be in plentiful supply, deuterium being the "hydrogen' in heavy water moderators and heat transport systems in Canadas CANDU reactors and tritium being a nuisance byproduct of reactor operation. Should we ever get to have real commercial fusion power plants then both materials are relatively easily available in the seas and lakes of the world.

I am still voting for LENR processes to be the first real fusion process to be used commercially. If the November demo of the 1 Mwatt E-CAT is successful, it could (should?) kill the research in hot fusion power generation. Here is a link with current status:

http://freeenergytruth.blogspot.com/

I would bet that the Rossi-Focardi process will prove to be a complete dud, if not a hoax. Their "scientific" methodology is just as bad as the Pons-Fleischmann fiasco. BTW, there is no such element as "nickle"; even this gaffe gives a clue.

Thank you for your comments. You are right that "nickle" is not an element; but "nickel" is. From Wikipedia:

Nickel ( /ˈnɪkəl/) is a chemical element with the chemical symbol Ni and atomic number 28. It is a silvery-white lustrous metal with a slight golden tinge. Nickel belongs to the transition metals and is hard and ductile. Pure nickel shows a significant chemical activity, though larger pieces of the metal are slow to react with air at ambient conditions due to the formation of a protective oxide surface. However, nickel is reactive with oxygen to the extent thatnative nickel is rare on Earth's surface, and is mostly confined to the interiors of larger nickel iron meteorites which were protected from oxidation in space. Such native nickel is always found on Earth alloyed with iron, in keeping with the element's origin as a major end-product of the nucleosynthesisprocess, along with iron, in supernovas. An iron-nickel alloy is thought to compose the Earth's core.

Sorry about my poor spelling. EE's are not known for their spelling accuracy!

As for the Rossi-Focardi process, you are in concert with dozens of other scientist who think it is a hoax. Just for your information, the Pons-Fleischman experiment has been successfully demonstrated dozens of times in the last 20 years. It CAN (and has) generate(d) more energy than has to be supplied, but probably not enough to ever become a power source for us. Other LENR processes probably will some decade.

I do not agree that the Pons-Fleischmann experiment has been successfully demonstrated dozens of times. On the contrary, there have been a few reports of successful replication, most of them later recanted as measurement errors and the like.

At an elementary level, one has to wonder how a LENR (low energy nuclear reaction) can produce high amounts of energy, unless scaled up to massively expensive facilities. But then, true believers are largely impervious to basic arithmetic.

I do not mean to rule out all such research a priori. It may be that such chemical forces as catalysis or crystallization have enough energy to compress fusionable particles enough actually to fuse, but even so, there seems to be an extraordinary amount of fumbling and failure, and subsequently retracted reports. No cigar yet.

Forget free energy, modern fairy tale may be nice like SciFi.

The last generation "fusion-reactor" was JET the Joint European Torus.

It had burnt for 5 seconds or so, ITER is scheduled to burn for 5 minutes only.

Burnt means it has generated more heat energy than put in as electrical energy.

Now nobody anymore is allowed to open the torus as it is highly radioactive from neutron irradiation.

There are some very ugly elements as Cobalt that should never be near a high neutron flux.

This generates high intensity long lasting hard radiation as from transuranium elements that are produced too at a lower rate from elements near uranium in proton count.

So the material for the torus is heavily debated: alloy and purity and Japan will get an own material research institute to solve this question. (By ITER community - ridiculous but real).

A multi G$ question deserves a multi G$ institute!

The problem shall be circumvented by use of pure materials 10^-6 is not enough!

And by using an inner liquid blanket from metallic Lithium 6, that is split into Tritium and Helium4 at neutron irradiation. Lithium7 is not so effective so there has to be a Li6 enriched liquid blanket.

This is not sufficient to generate enough Tritium so a liquid Li-Pb blanket was discussed, the lead responsible for more Tritium production.

But this will be pumped by the electromagnetic plasma excitation so acts as a damping that nobody wants.

The blanket is needed also to protect the plasma tube from intense neutron radiation.

So "modern" concepts discuss a ceramic from Li and Pb. Oxide or else and will thus be not liquid.

But with non-molten blanket materials there will be much more - today unsolved - difficulties in extracting the heat energy.

With these difficulties solved by ITER a first "commercial" reactor is estimated to exist in 2050!

This gap can be bridged by Uranium and Thorium reactors without problems also with oil and coal.

But if this gap will be limited is unknown, maybe we have at 2500 new problems to solve.

If we could put all money that is going into military fusion research (NIF and similar other equipment outside the US) then there may be a faster success.

As the money that flows into ITER is peanuts if compared to todays bank and state and crisis wasting money it would be worth while but unobtainable.

RHABE

Sounds like we are still a long way from making fusion a serious part of plans to handle climate change let alone seeing it putting power into the grid in any significant amount.

Btw, I studied the link in reply#5 to the E-cat cold fusion thing and came away with the feeling that it still isn't real. Good sales pitch and possibly a money maker for some. But reality? I haven't seen it yet.

This cold fusion stuff reminds me of something I read about in the newspapers some 30 years ago about some guy with a tenuous connection to UC Berkeley who was promoting an IC engine that ran on nothing but a secret fluid in the cylinders and produced net horsepower. He invited reporters to a demonstration where a 4 cylinder Volvo engine was sitting on a closed in wooden stand and appeared to be running on nothing but air. This new "answer" to the gasoline shortages of the time (late 1970's petroleum crisis) needed only an influx of investment to become available to everyone. This was all duly featured in the newspapers and on TV by mostly clueless media types. One obviously cynical observer of the demo remarked that the area one floor down below where the engine was performing was not available for inspection.

Still laughing about this one. Any thing really new out there? ....... Ed Weldon

There's a pretty good breakdown of the current fusion situation and realistic timetables (20 to 50 years for a maybe plant) in Popular Mechanics.

The one that really tickles me though, is the NIF. They joyfully report the massive amount of energy input in megajoules. The amount of energy consumed is raaather a lot, and the annual consumption figure must be pretty high.

Best of all, they talk about seawater as a source of cheap fuel, but then they gold plate it before nuking! ROFL.

Is Fusion Power Finally For Real? - The Future of Nuclear Fusion - Popular Mechanics

NIF has a similar counterpart in France,

and I would expect also one in any of the other states with advanced nuclear weapons.

The speed of money raising and the decision to build NIF with LLNL is a clear hint of military use.

My feeling: as nuclear explosions are now banned they want to have a tool to investigate into the very early microseconds of nuclear explosions. Non-symmetric compression shock-waves will terminate very early the phase of high temperature.

This is possible by implosion of these tiny spheres filled with Tritium by concentrating vast amounts of laser-radiation or laser induced x-rays. This in turn generates the nuclear reaction by ultrahigh density and temperature - for a very short time.

In NIF there is no means to collect the fusion energy - so how to et energy out?

I never heard about re-usability of the small light concentrating chamber - a high precision mirror-assembly that concentrates the incoming rays onto the sphere.

RHABE

I guess it's obvious enough that the high intensity burst of energy is more applicable to military uses (or simply to high energy physics research) than it is to energy production.

The technology involved in the attempt to control and manipulate plasmas is challenging enough, but the design of a feasible energy capture mechanism is even more difficult, and I don't see any evidence that a promising design is being developed for this purpose.

Therefore there is BIG irony, in the claim they are developing 'fusion power' for 'clean energy', giving a "green" face to this research which by all accounts will be consuming vast amounts of energy for decades without making any progress on this road...