Posted on 07/14/2021 7:55:22 PM PDT by dynachrome
Hundreds of times every month, a British scientist sitting in a high-tech control room in an industrial park in the Thames Valley near Didcot clicks his computer mouse.
Each time he does so, a high-energy beam of subatomic particles is fired into a dark, swirling cloud of superheated hydrogen gas, known as a plasma, contained within a spherical steel tank about 6 ft in diameter.
The plasma immediately sparks and glows and at that point has just become the hottest place in the solar system, hotter even than the core of the sun — that is to say, more than 15 million degrees Centigrade.
Only a system of immensely powerful electromagnets prevents the vessel containing the plasma from being vaporised instantly.
The scientist, who works for the high-tech start-up Tokamak Energy, is part of a team of world-leading experts trying to recreate nuclear fusion, the process that makes stars burn — for the fusion of two atoms of hydrogen to make one of helium, releases vast quantities of energy.
Harnessing fusion on a commercial scale has been the energy technology sector's holy grail since the 1930s.
Now, that goal is no longer sci-fi fantasy but fast approaching science fact. And the good news is that Tokamak, a British company, is a world leader in the race to develop a commercially viable fusion device that will revolutionise the energy-generation sector.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Scoldilocks?
Yes.
Paging Mary shelly.
What could possibly go wrong?
And what happens when reactor contentment fails at 100,000,000 C? They better build it in the “stick”.
You don't "turn off" fusion once it gets going. It stops when if runs out of fuel at the right temp and pressure.
A “man-made” sun . . .
“He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision” (Psalms 2:4).
Apparently the missing anti-matter been under our noses the whole time.
Like dividing by zero, politics plus anything equals lies. They aren't really building a little sun, but a man-made supernova. The nerd party is over once the first fusion reactor goes boom, scattering "slightly" radioactive metal over a large area.
The Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the early universe. But today, everything we see from the smallest life forms on Earth to the largest stellar objects is made almost entirely of matter. Comparatively, there is not much antimatter to be found. Something must have happened to tip the balance. One of the greatest challenges in physics is to figure out what happened to the antimatter, or why we see an asymmetry between matter and antimatter.
Antimatter particles share the same mass as their matter counterparts, but qualities such as electric charge are opposite. The positively charged positron, for example, is the antiparticle to the negatively charged electron. Matter and antimatter particles are always produced as a pair and, if they come in contact, annihilate one another, leaving behind pure energy. During the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang, the hot and dense universe was buzzing with particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of existence. If matter and antimatter are created and destroyed together, it seems the universe should contain nothing but leftover energy.
Nevertheless, a tiny portion of matter – about one particle per billion – managed to survive. This is what we see today. In the past few decades, particle-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter. Physicists are keen to discover the reasons why. Researchers have observed spontaneous transformations between particles and their antiparticles, occurring millions of times per second before they decay. Some unknown entity intervening in this process in the early universe could have caused these “oscillating” particles to decay as matter more often than they decayed as antimatter.
Consider a coin spinning on a table. It can land on its heads or its tails, but it cannot be defined as “heads” or “tails” until it stops spinning and falls to one side. A coin has a 50-50 chance of landing on its head or its tail, so if enough coins are spun in exactly the same way, half should land on heads and the other half on tails. In the same way, half of the oscillating particles in the early universe should have decayed as matter and the other half as antimatter.
However, if a special kind of marble rolled across a table of spinning coins and caused every coin it hit to land on its head, it would disrupt the whole system. There would be more heads than tails. In the same way, some unknown mechanism could have interfered with the oscillating particles to cause a slight majority of them to decay as matter. Physicists may find hints as to what this process might be by studying the subtle differences in the behaviour of matter and antimatter particles created in high-energy proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. Studying this imbalance could help scientists paint a clearer picture of why our universe is matter-filled.
https://home.cern/science/physics/matter-antimatter-asymmetry-problem
No, if the magnetic field is shut down, the reaction stops.
Headlines are usually full of hype and exaggertion, and this is no exception. This is not a man-made Sun. “That could power our planet” is ridiculous.
The real Sun is 93 million miles away. Creating a sun here on Earth would destroy the planet.
That’s always been the top show stopper. Even if the magnetically contained plasma can be sustained, how on earth will useable work be extracted?
“Only a system of immensely powerful electromagnets prevents the vessel containing the plasma from being vaporised instantly.”
What powers the electromagnets?
No, it just fizzles out because the fusion reactions stop happening. Pretty much the opposite of a fission reactor meltdown.
How typical of the Daily Mail to fail to mention that the Tokamak is a 1950s Russian invention.
You’ll still need coal & natural gas for long chain organic molecules for plastics, etc.
There is nothing that functions as a perpetual motion (endless energy) device.
And so:
“Only a system of immensely powerful electromagnets prevents the vessel containing the plasma from being vaporised instantly.”
And (1) what powers those immensely powerful electromagnets, and (b) how much power will go into powering immensely powerful electromagnets for a large commercial grade fusion device??? After supplying the power for its own immensely powerful electromagnets, just to keep the plasma it creates contained, how much leftover electric power will it deliver?
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