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Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

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201–210 of 240 posts

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#201
post #32

Once we achieve sustainable fusion, will it be possible to "share" the energy with everyone else to create more independent fusions? Kinda like keeping the candle burning so as to light more candles because matches are too costly. Now, I don't expect politics to allow sharing of fusion energy to help other countries.

> I don't expect politics to allow sharing of fusion energy to help other countries.

You are very wrong. ITER is a $20B international collaboration to construct an energy positive fusion reactor. The participants, including China the underwriter of the experiment detailed in this thread's article, are very much sharing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#202

Fusion was, and for the foreseeable future will be, a boondoggle. In the US it was a cold-war-era arms race program intended to scare the USSR and have them overextend, and now the Chinese are using it for propaganda and scientific Keyensianism. The fact is, fusion generates neutron radiation that destroys the reaction vessel, making it an unviable technology. Nobody takes it seriously as a source of energy, aside fr…

In MIT's ARC design, the reactor is designed so you can easily open it up and replace the inner vessel. The vessel is 3D-printed and replaced once a year. Surrounding the inner vessel is a molten salt mixture which breeds more fuel from lithium but is otherwise unaffected by neutron radiation.

This is a regular tokamak design, with a high chance of success since we understand tokamaks very well at this point. Various startups have more speculative designs that deal with the issue in other ways.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#203
post #90

Can someone comment on what kind of economic effect that working fusion reactor technology would have? I hear sometimes contradictory hear-say on the lines of "unlimited energy", "reactor would have to be fed constantly".

I'm not sure that it would have a profound effect at all. Fission is very power dense as well and fission fuel cost is not the primary driver of overall costs in existing nuclear designs.

Fusion might end up looking a lot like fission, but hopefully with a lower perceived safety risk and thus more public acceptance.

Granted, modern fission designs aren't actually unsafe, but that doesn't matter for PR purposes.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#204
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that neutron activated equipment needs to be disposed of, but I guess that’s easier to do than cleaning up a fission reactor.

I read in another thread that the radiation in that dissipates in about 30 years, vastly preferable to the tens of thousands of years of nuclear fission waste. I don't know how strong the radiation is either, whether it's more or less dangerous than fission waste.

The way radioactivity works, the faster a substance decays, the more dangerous it is. Something being slightly radioactive for ten thousand years is much better than some searing-hot exotic isotope sitting around for 40.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except Wikipedia seems to put the barrier significantly higher, at 100 keV: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_fusion#Tempera...

The Wiki entry also mentioned "two effects that lower the actual temperature needed", one being average kinetic energy and the other quantum tunneling "if [nuclei] have nearly enough energy." The term "nearly" isn't precisely defined though.

Quantum tunneling effects are generally (maybe always?) exponentially unlikely, in the sense that the probability of tunneling will decay exponentially with the discrepancy between energy-available and energy-required.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#206
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there is almost certainly somebody that read the number and thought about Fahrenheit.

Do scientists use farenheit? Genuine question

Kind of a tangent, but I still firmly believe that for Earth weather conditions, Fahrenheit is a more intuitive scale. 0 is a really, really, really cold day and 100 is a really, really, really hot day. 50 degrees is neither especially warm nor especially chilly, 70 degrees is warm, 30 degrees is chilly, 20 and below are truly cold, 80 and above are truly hot, and if you go into negative numbers or above 100 degrees than you're in the "extremes".

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#207
post #24
post #14

100M seems insanely high, beyond what anything man made would be able to contain. Is it extremely short lived? Or over a very small area? Very interesting.

It is incredibly high. We hold it in not by any material, but by magnetic fields. Plasma has the handy feature of being magnetic. The Tokamak[1] design used in ITER and this example uses a whole heap of magnets to hold this plasma in a doughnut-shaped area. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokamak

> The Tokamak[1] design used in ITER and this example uses a whole heap of magnets to hold this plasma in a doughnut-shaped area.

The technical term for a "doughnut-shaped area" is "torus"; "tokamak" is an abbreviation for the Russian for, "toroidal chamber with magnetic coils".

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#208
post #104
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like previous predictions that the introduction of fission power plants would result in electricity 'too cheap to meter', I suspect the same will happen for fusion. Even if the fuel is nearly free, you still have to build and maintain the power plant, the grid etc., neither which is cheap. But yes, the first ones to 'crack' the problem will have a head start in the commercial fusion power plant market, but I don…

From what i've read[0] it will remove about a third of the cost (probably less). About a third of energy cost goes on fuel (now almost 0), a third on the grid, and a third on the station (now probably more). Whilst a 20-30% reduction in energy cost would be great. The really important change is that it is much more scalable and easy to get. You don't need to dig up coal, or drill for oil. All of which can be limited.…

Even though the cost of energy is divided by thirds, fusion still generates so much more power that the sheer scale can overpower lots and lots of bottlenecks.

For instance, it is chemically possible to combine water (either atmospheric or from a normal water source) with atmospheric CO2 to chemically synthesize hydrocarbons. It just takes energy. So you could have a single, absolutely massive fusion plant next to an atmospheric fuel refinery and use the hydrocarbons for fuel storage and distribution. You could do likewise with hydrogen and oxygen if you wanted to make fuel cells or rockets. And this would probably be cheaper than refining fossil fuels. You could actually run OPEC out of business this way, make the electric car obsolete, make airlines carbon-neutral, etc., etc.

Climate change? Just extract the atmospheric CO2 using cheap fusion energy and turn it into an easily sequestrable form. Nitrogen fertilizers? You can make those from the air too. Drought? Use fusion power to run desalination plants. Arable land becomes a non-issue with fusion because vertical farming becomes easy. Every city could just grow whatever they needed in exactly the right climate conditions in a set of enclosed vertical farms, though they might not need to because energy will be so cheap that there's no problem shipping the stuff from Honduras anyway.

Computation scales with power, too. More power, more computation, except computation produces heat, which you need even more power to chill.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the plasma "escapes" the confinement and contacts anything (ie. the walls of the Tokamak) it rapidly cools down to temperatures below where fusion can happen. Sounds relieving. I used to think that «if the plasma "escapes" the confinement and contacts anything (ie. the walls of the Tokamak) it rapidly…» disintegrates everything around or, when the power is huge enough, causes an apocalypse…

TFA claims the stored energy is 300kj, which is roughly equivalent to the energy you get out of eating one apple.

This is not a very useful comparison. You can say that there is less energy in a stick of dynamite than a chocolate chip cookie, and yet, that stick of dynamite should still be handled carefully.

Re: Chinese Tokamak reaches over 100M degrees

#210
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do scientists use farenheit? Genuine question

Kind of a tangent, but I still firmly believe that for Earth weather conditions, Fahrenheit is a more intuitive scale. 0 is a really, really, really cold day and 100 is a really, really, really hot day. 50 degrees is neither especially warm nor especially chilly, 70 degrees is warm, 30 degrees is chilly, 20 and below are truly cold, 80 and above are truly hot, and if you go into negative numbers or above 100 degrees…

Cold and warm are relative. 0 for freezing / snowing and 100 for boiling gives you a much more understandable range. Honestly, US metrics don’t make any kind of sense anymore...
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