What is its maximum performance?
Great that it set the record, but the requirement is a lot more than that, no?
Time for a bigger newer machine.
US reactor breaks fusion record – then runs out of cash and shuts down
In a tale that tells you all you need to know about the parlous state of American science, a fusion reactor has broken plasma-handling records in the last few days before losing its funding. The Alcator C-Mod tokamak nuclear fusion reactor, run for the past 23 years by MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, managed to contain …
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Wednesday 19th October 2016 16:46 GMT bombastic bob
Re: What is its maximum performance?
"No the answer is much much bigger"
And, you so wittily point out the core of the problem here: Fusion *RESEARCH* is being paid for. NOT Fusion reactor designs that make electric power and make money for investors.
Just pointing THAT out, too...
(you get what you pay for)
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 15:53 GMT Rich 11
Re: What is its maximum performance?
Great that it set the record, but the requirement is a lot more than that, no?
Not that much, at least in one sense. A pressure of 2.05 bar is most of the way there, since a self-sustaining reaction is possible at somewhere between 3 and 10 bar (depending upon design). Whether they'd reached their design limits or not, I don't know.
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Monday 17th October 2016 22:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why spend billions?
I don't know. The favored method (favored by me in my daydreams) of extracting energy from a politician is burning at the stake, and I don't think those are the kind of temperatures they're looking for. But - experiment by all means. Can we donate some of the USA variety for the cause? They have proven to be exceptionally productive gas emitters.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 14:38 GMT h4rm0ny
Re: Why spend billions?
Better approach is to attach the politicians to a pulley and crank and then place them near to sum of money, preferably in a plain brown envelope. You can then extract energy from the continuous attraction of the politician towards the cash. N.b. Use Tory or New Labour politicians for greatest efficacy. Under no circumstances uses UKIP members as they degrade the money pile through a process known as Brexitation.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 15:55 GMT Rich 11
Re: Why spend billions?
They have proven to be exceptionally productive gas emitters.
It's the gas which is part of the problem in using them for fuel. They're net CO2 emitters. They'd have to be scrubbed after combustion and -- just to be on the safe side -- beforehand too, preferably with a wire brush and caustic soda.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 08:49 GMT Doctor_Wibble
Paper-Fuelled Power Station, was Re: Why spend billions?
The only reason they don't just burn the money directly and generate power off that is because this way looks more impressive and has lots of jobs involved.
Also, this is a cunning way of making sure you have something ready to explode in the man-made black hole if the people at CERN break the terms of their contracts and succeed.
The locations of these projects are not by accident - a sufficient land mass and body of water separates them, without being suspiciously close to exact opposite sides of the world. Check the map, you know it's true.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 22:31 GMT PNGuinn
Re: Why spend billions?
"High densities of hot plasmas more than sufficient to generate sustainable fusion reactions are achieved almost daily in parliaments and other government circles. May as well put all this hot air to good use for once no?"
Yes, that'd likely work very successfully, but I can think of at least 2 unsolvable drawbacks:
1. What can you do to prevent some totally random event causing a major energy spike and such a vast destructive thermal runaway ...
2. What do you do about the inevitable vast quantities of toxic waste the process would produce?
On the other hand, looking on the bright side, 1. might solve another of humanity's more intractable problems. Let's go for it.
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Monday 17th October 2016 20:55 GMT Nolveys
The (ITER) facility will now cost over $15bn and won't be operational until the next decade...
What a waste of money, they should reallocate it to cover almost a whole percentage point of the F-35 project costs. Or use it to cover 0.01% of the money the US has shoveled into the banking sector.
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Monday 17th October 2016 21:43 GMT elDog
If the F35 could fly reliably,
We could drop a few billion$ on whatever landmass we want to conquer. Unfortunately, we'll probably have to use B29/52s and heavy metal reactors.
I guess this is a total non-sequitor, but it certainly seems stooooopid that the richest country currently on earth can't get behind true research, LHC, ITER, cancer, genome, global warming. They all have an Issa's chance of a snowball in hell.
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Monday 17th October 2016 23:13 GMT Crazy Operations Guy
"richest country currently on earth can't get behind true research"
What are you on about? China is throwing billions into Fusion research as both part of ITER as well as home-grown CFETR tokamak. Then there are all the various fission-power research projects, not to mention being the largest contributor to the field of clean-technologies. China is also home to the greatest number of super-computers (Including #1 and #2). China also has the highest STEM scores in the world across the board. R&D spending is growing faster than any other country and will be greater in both terms of raw spending and even percentage of GDP of any nation in the world by 2022.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 11:53 GMT cray74
Re: "richest country currently on earth can't get behind true research"
What are you on about? China is ...
...not the richest country on Earth and won't be until the late 2020s, barring a correction in its economy.
China does, however, have a wiser R&D investment strategy than the richest country on Earth.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 22:03 GMT Bronek Kozicki
Re: "richest country currently on earth can't get behind true research"
China does, however, have a wiser R&D investment strategy than the richest country on Earth.
Indeed. Although given the volume of treasure notes held by Chinese it is quite possible that one and the other are the same. Not really sure either way ...
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 12:22 GMT cray74
Re: What a waste of money
actual money backed by ... solid amounts of refined uranium for example.
There are several problems with money backed by uranium, gold, or something else tangible.
First, most candidate substances are subject to market supply and demand just like paper money. Look at gold and uranium prices over the past 20 years. They bounce all over the place, which is not what you want for a stable monetary system. You could try to fix the value of the underlying commodity, but that just leads to opportunities for abuse by other nations. Venezuela is offering a gruesome case study of price fixing and monetary controls.
Second, pegging money to a substance with a restricted supply is a perfect recipe for triggering depressions due to monetary shortages. It's hard for a thriving economy to grow when you don't have enough money to represent that growth because you can't find enough shiny or radioactive minerals in the ground.
Which leads to the third point: the candidate substances are divorced from the majority of the economy. You're asking the market to accept that some shiny, radioactive, or other rare substance to be a metaphor for the sweat, labor, skill, and effort of people in a global economy increasingly dominated by the service industry, just like fiat paper or digital monies do. The difference is that a gold- or uranium-backed money supply isn't controllable in an economic crisis. There might not be enough of it, there might be too much, or the underlying substance might be devalued by a market crash or technological change (e.g., tree huggers outlaw nuclear plants).
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 07:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 120 years away?
Well commercial fusion power is likely 5 to 25 years after an experimental reactor succeeds. That experimental reactor may succeed in generating sustainable power tomorrow or ten thousand years from now.
On the other hand the reward of achieving fusion power are so unimaginably astronomical (it means an end to scarcity as with practically limitless energy you can do wild things at an atomic and sub atomic level) that it's well worth pouring hundreds of billions into every year on the off chance that that year is the year someone cracks it.
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Monday 17th October 2016 21:59 GMT streaky
ITER..
There are advances being made that make ITER look like a bit of a silly investment. Argument behind ITER is you had to go big because of the technologies at the time, but the technologies have moved on since ITER was outline-designed and the project hasn't really changed in scope to accommodate. There are various alternative projects that look sensible taking into account of those advances. ARC at MIT is one of them. Still not sure it's a good idea to kill ITER though, it wasn't a commercial demonstrator anyway and will still fill various gaps in knowledge; it might be too late to pull the plug now and it's still not clear that we even should so it will live on.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 11:51 GMT Filippo
Re: ITER..
Interesting. Nevertheless, the key thing to understand about basic research is that you do not know what comes out of it. Anything that's not patently stupid, and ITER, is worth pursuing; it might be pointless, but it might also be the only way to do something amazing, and you can't know until you try. Even the stuff that's patently stupid is at least worth the effort of debunking. Always remember that there was a time *electricity* was considered a useless novelty.
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Monday 17th October 2016 22:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
Dead End
TOKAMAC and the MIT approach to fusion have pretty much proven to be a dead end.
MIT has had their incremental press releases periodically throughout the years, but they really are pretty much where they were at the beginning.
Perhaps ITER will be more successful, but bar a major discovery not currently on the agenda - I have my doubts.
*I always think you should have a major discovery on the agenda: "And a miracle occurs at this point in the process."
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Wednesday 19th October 2016 04:50 GMT streaky
Re: Dead End
Barring an unforeseen breakthrough, I doubt continuing to go down that path will ever yield anything besides more incremental improvements.
It's supposed to yield what it's supposed to yield. Fusion is a thing. Fusion reactors are a thing. Making fusion reactors produce more energy than they consume is a difficult thing. It's supposed to be there to narrow down designs for the demonstration commercial reactor which is in early designs phase.
It's like people that say ISS isn't a thing despite it constantly changing our understanding of everything from medicine to space flight to nutrition in a way we couldn't possibly ever hope to replicate without the existence of the ISS.
Fusion hasn't even really been a long time coming in terms of timeline and actual engineering science.
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Wednesday 19th October 2016 09:29 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: @Etatdame
Please tell me that is not a thing.
As happens one of our best new products is a unit for providing people with a warm clean bum after a visit to the toilet while also complying with the water regulations. So no paper is required. We haven't put a dryer on it yet, but you can always do a handstand above the Dyson Air Blade...
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Monday 17th October 2016 23:33 GMT JeffyPoooh
They should go away and invent a better concept...
There must be a more-clever way to do fusion. Sooner or later somebody will invent it, and then it'll be commercialized and production-ready within a year or two.
Although I'm all in favour of Science and R&D, fusion projects are so damn slow that fusion probably has zero promise of addressing the CO2 quick enough to have any relevance.
I'd put the fusion pot on the back burner on simmer. At least until somebody has a brighter idea.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 11:20 GMT cambsukguy
Re: They should go away and invent a better concept...
Fusion *is* on the back burner, simmering.
15 Billion spent over a long period is not even simmering really, it is a tiny percentage of the GDP of the countries involved for instance, and that figure is for the whole build, many years.
Given that much of the actual spend is returned as economic activity, it is even cheaper. Since France has an unemployment issue, economic activity matters even more.
If we knew, really, really knew, that climate change on its current path would cook us in the next century, to the point of the few left over all being underground dwellers, we would probably build enough Nuclear power stations (with a one-off CO2 hit) to remove almost-all succeeding CO2 emissions, including cars, in the next decade and then spend everything feasibly possible trying to make fusion work.
But we don't know (really, really know) do we? So, switch on that ordinary light bulb they still allow to be sold, leave your desktop running, just in case, and drive to the local Tesco, because walking takes 10 minutes.
And leave the simmering fusion work to maybe get lucky and even possibly teach us a thing or two about something (probably magnetic fields and fusion).
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 13:58 GMT Toltec
Re: They should go away and invent a better concept...
"drive to the local Tesco, because walking takes 10 minutes"
51 minutes according to Google maps, it is also my closest large supermarket and I live in SE London not the countryside. Not to mention it would take at least three trips a week.
Of course I could have stuff delivered, but I doubt they would do so on foot.
Other than that I agree, though we don't need to know if CC is real as it is irrelevant we should be building the Gen IV plants asap anyway.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 12:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: They should go away and invent a better concept...
> Although I'm all in favour of Science and R&D, fusion projects are so damn slow that fusion probably has zero promise of addressing the CO2 quick enough to have any relevance.
Plus there are all those pesky high-energy neutrons which will come flooding out of the reactor, which nobody wants to talk about.
If I remember rightly, when JET managed to fire up for one minute, it left the vessel so radioactive that nobody could go back inside it for a week.
(seaches)
Oh yes, in wikipedia:
"After a series of D-T tests at JET, the vacuum vessel was sufficiently radioactive that remote handling was required for the year following the tests."
Elsewhere it suggests one way of dealing with the neutrons is to capture them in neutron blankets to produce material for use in fission reactors or bombs - nice.
Under "waste management", there is some hand-waving. It says that a fusion reactor at decommissioning time will likely have as much radioactive material as a comparable fission reactor, but most of it will decay within 500 years. So that's OK then.
"Safe", "clean" and "cheap" are not words I would associate with nuclear fusion. These seem to be fundamental limitations, independent of the engineering difficulties of making it work in the first place.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 00:00 GMT Jan 0
Quotation from the article: "the high pressures required for burning plasma"
It seems that Riccardo Betti is unable to distinguish physics from chemistry. As he's the "the Robert L McCrory Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Rochester", maybe that's also relevant to the parlous state of US science?
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 01:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Quotation from the article: "the high pressures required for burning plasma"
Mr Betti is"Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Physics and Astronomy" so I guess he can burn plasma and burn it at any temperature he damn well pleases.
Or maybe he was differentiating between burning plasma and the other kind.
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Wednesday 19th October 2016 12:57 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Hey, we have to keep funding the wars...
Here's something to ponder. The US has spent the equivalent on fusion research since its inception in the early 50s as just 72 days of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.*
Makes you wonder if we'd already have fusion by now if a whole war's worth was spent on the problem.
* - http://focusfusion.org/index.php/site/reframe/wasteful/
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 01:21 GMT harmjschoonhoven
We should not forget
the Huemul Project an Argentine effort to develop a fusion power device known as the Thermotron which also supposedly failed by lack of funds.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 07:32 GMT Anonymous Blowhard
Re: We should not forget
The "Thermotron" failed due to a surplus of fraud, not a lack of funds...
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 11:48 GMT I ain't Spartacus
Re: We should not forget
Theres always that eCat thing... The one that lives in a shipping container
full of AA batteriesthat nobody is allowed to open when they "test" it.I'm sure that uses fusion. And cold fusion too, which is the best kind.
Or perhaps it's powered by Schrodinger radiation? Which is of course why it can't be opened, as it disappears when you open the box. Which is when you find that the cat is neither alive nor dead, but in a state known as "bloody annoyed".
Personally I don't believe in trying to control exotic matter with magnetic fields. I prefer the honest reassurance of tinfoil to protect my head.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 21:52 GMT Adam 1
Re: We should not forget
> Theres always that eCat thing... The one that lives in a shipping container full of AA batteries that nobody is allowed to open when they "test" it.
I'm sure that uses fusion.
Not quite. It's a bit hard to explain, but in essence you have what looks like a miniature wind turbine, except attached to each blade is an array of cats, arranged in such a way that some of them always have their feet up in the air. The feline self righting principle then takes over causing the turbine to spin at very high velocity. Most of the box is simply sound proofing (very high rpm) and the inverters to produce AC and various step up transformers (largely off the shelf stuff).
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 09:31 GMT Afernie
Re: Can I introduce you...
"Can I introduce you... to Flieschman and Pons? They seem to have the whole fusion thing nicely sewn up..."
Well, if Lockheed Martin's 10-year plan to produce a working commercial cold fusion reactor succeeds 8 years from now, I guess we'll find out if that's true or not.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 10:35 GMT Anonymous Coward
Why would the USA shoot itself in the foot like that anyway?
If you've spent the better part of the last 3 decades destabilising countries so you could get at their oil reserves why would you fund a technology that would render all your efforts moot? Who wants clean sustainable and cheap(eventually) energy anyway?? After all, you cant control the masses when they don't rely on you anymore
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 22:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Why would the USA shoot itself in the foot like that anyway?
"If you've spent the better part of the last 3 decades destabilising countries"
I think it's a little unfair that you don't recognize the enormous strides we've taken in destabilizing our own country.
Not like we're singling anyone out.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 12:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
The EU isn't happy
> The EU isn't happy about this, nor are other partners, since it means funds have to be diverted from other fusion projects to make up the shortfall.
How wonderful for useless managers everywhere: not only can you screw-up your own project, you can screw-over those of your competitors as well.
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Tuesday 18th October 2016 16:55 GMT Michael Sanders
NO. To most of your comments. Yes to only a few.
Come on you Reg hacks. Not one mention of the Lockheed magnetic bottle? The fact is nobody at Lockheed just openly speaks about a little fusion project they're working on. It's obvious they've had it working for years. It's already working better than the tokamac which is such a flawed concept it might never work. Why would you fund MIT when Lockheed is about to roll a fusion reactor out on the back of a truck.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
