> It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. This made me laugh. How much more British can you get?
Yes but how many football fields can that throw a beer can?!
African or European beer cans?
Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
601–610 of 827 posts
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#602> It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. This made me laugh. How much more British can you get?
was it British Teapot Units all along?
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also quite a helpful metric. Most British people are aware that the national grid used to spend a lot of time making sure they had the power available to draw during the commercial breaks of mass-media TV events (series finales, half time in a cup match etc) purely for the nation boiling water with electric kettles en masse. Great intersection of hard science (energy necessary to boil water + extremely efficient…
Makes you wonder if the US idea of using just 110 volts isn't better... not from an individual viewpoint (slower to boil water) but from the grid perspective.
No, it’s absolutely not.
They consume a lot of power on average as far as I remember.
They have just more transmissions loss at a lower voltage and I guess that it would be a pain to use a normal induction cooktop with 9-10KW at 110V.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#604In extension to this news and the press conference, one thing I am super excited about, is the private SPARC project and the MIT-spinoff Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). If you don't know about it already, I would highly recommend checking it out (e.g. by searching YouTube for "MIT Sparc Fusion Reactor" for some fairly accessible videos on the theory behind why they should achieve fusion way faster than the current…
> Theory dictates that with stronger magnets, the reactor can be scaled down (with the square/cube, can't remember exactly), and thus cost and time to develop OTOH, in a tokamak, the plasma volume (and potential energy output) scales quadratically with the torus' aspect ratio (ratio of major to minus radius), so I'm not sure that tokamak-based fusion really is particularly suitable to miniaturization.
Miniaturization has never been realistic with tritium fusion anyway due to neutron production - you need several metres of material to stop them, otherwise your reactor is just kicking off radioactive oxygen into the atmosphere.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#605Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah! But we need to go nuclear [fission] in the mean time... I can't imagine any other way that wouldn't devastate the environment excessively at the same time (e.g. river dams are bad IMHO).
Flamanville 3 in France was started in 2007 and is due to be launched in 2022. It's the first of its generation (in France at least) so the delays and cost overruns are not unexpected. Even so, if more are to be built they will not come into service until the mid 2030's at the earliest. I don't think we can wait that long.
Well yeah, I think we should industrialize it, make nuclear fission reactors serial. I don't think what we're doing is sufficient either.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
I kinda like that all but a couple outlets in my house can't kill me. Also, I boil my water on an induction stove plugged into 50 amps at 220 volts. I'm not waiting around, to put it mildly.
110v can easily kill you. It's a little harder to get a good solid connection through your body and into the ground than 220v. But it certainly can and does happen.
Amps kill, not volts. Hence high voltage low amp Tesla coil spark shows.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#607Darn, I found the article quite underwhelming. It may be a major breakthrough relative to past accomplishments in the field but it’s far from commercial viability.
Yes, but every step forward on this path is thrilling. If we crack carbon capture at scale, and unleash fusion, it would change the game for the survival of our species.
To change the game for the survival of our species (if protecting a species that destroyed 75% of ecosystems as of today is really sth wanted anyway) we might want to protect the other species as well since we rely on them almost entirely for anything relevant to survival. Also I am not sure having ten times more energy would do any good.
IPBES reports as well as the literature in relevant conservation journals are recommended readings.
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it amazing that the will to politicize everything can't really stop at nothing.
(The will to politicise is precisely what got us Brexit.)
The opposing side of the one you seem to be identified with would probably say the same thing, but related to joining the EU in the first place.
If I may perhaps suggest, perhaps, just maybe, it could be worthwhile for you to stop seeing politics in everything and focus on something other than politics, like these scientists are doing?
They don't care about EU, Brexit, who the hell is the British PM. Whatever. They just want to build a smart, sustainable and cheap way for humanity to harness energy from our universe. That's super cool. Imagine if they remained in their homes tweeting about Brexit all day long? We'd be burning fossil fuels forever until we kill ourselves out of smoke...
I don't know, just maybe it would be interesting, who knows...
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wendelstein 7-X is for plasma science, it is not intended to fuse anything.
> though this experimental reactor will not produce electricity, it is used to evaluate the main components of a future fusion power plant
And you can evaluate fusion reactor components without fusing anything. Or are you disagreeing because I summarized it with the term plasma science? In that case, I was not really happy with the term either but could not come up with anything better. My point however is that Wendelstein 7-X is not intended to fuse anything, not to precisely describe the nature and goals of the experiments.
Google translation of the beginning of the Strahlenschutzaspekte (radiation protection concerns) section from the German Wikipedia article [1]. There will only be a tiny bit of accidental fusion.
Wendelstein 7-X only examines plasmas made of hydrogen (H) or deuterium (D), so it does not use a mixture of deuterium and tritium, as is necessary for later fusion reactors. The omission of this reduces the release of neutrons and enables access to the facility and the surrounding instruments immediately after the end of each experiment. This facilitates modifications for subsequent experiments. During operation, however, access to the torus hall is generally not possible for safety reasons (danger of voltage flashovers, stored energy in the magnetic fields).
Hydrogen is provided as the working gas for normal operation. In addition, experiments with deuterium are to be carried out in order to extrapolate the properties of a plasma mixture of deuterium and tritium. Fusion reactions between deuterium nuclei, in which neutrons are released, can occur to a small extent. To shield them, the torus hall is surrounded by a 1.8 m thick wall made of borated concrete.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendelstein_7-X#Strahlenschutz...
Re: Major breakthrough on nuclear fusion energy
#610Darn, I found the article quite underwhelming. It may be a major breakthrough relative to past accomplishments in the field but it’s far from commercial viability.
Yes, but every step forward on this path is thrilling. If we crack carbon capture at scale, and unleash fusion, it would change the game for the survival of our species.
Negative. If we want to "change the game for the survival of our species" that would be fission, a super-mature and proven technology that is already widely deployed.
As far as "carbon sequestration" - that is just a tree. No R&D required.