Posted on 12/09/2020 8:17:49 AM PST by BenLurkin
A 10-year plan presented last week to the federal Fusion Energy Sciences Advisory Committee... calls for the Department of Energy (DOE), the main sponsor of U.S. fusion research, to prepare to build a prototype power plant in the 2040s that would produce carbon-free electricity by harnessing the nuclear process that powers the Sun.
The plan formalizes a goal set out 2 years ago by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine and embraced in a March report from a 15-month-long fusion community planning process. It also represents a subtle but crucial shift from the basic research that officials in DOE’s Office of Science have favored. “The community urgently wants to move forward with fusion on a time scale that can impact climate change,” says Troy Carter, a fusion physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who chaired the planning committee. “We have to get started.”
Fusion scientists and DOE officials strived to avoid the sort of meltdown they suffered during their last planning exercise. Six years ago, the fractious community was already reeling from budget cuts that forced DOE’s Fusion Energy Sciences (FES) program to shutter one of three major experiments. Then, the associate director for FES decided to write the plan himself, with limited input. Many researchers rejected the road map.
The plan that emerged does not call for a crash effort to build the prototype power plant. During the next decade, fusion researchers around the world will likely have their hands full completing and running ITER, the international fusion reactor under construction in southern France. ITER, a huge doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak, aims to show in the late 2030s that fusion can produce more energy than goes into heating and squeezing the plasma.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
If we add this massive amount of fusion energy to the earths system, will the temperature of the earths ecosphere and atmosphere eventually rise? Wouldn’t it be like turning up the heat from the sun? Are we finite or what?
Where’s Kevmo, and the Andrea Rossi e-Cat?...
Decade late and dollar short? The Chinese are probably light years ahead of the world for developing fusion reactors.
So does that mean they’re making progress?
Yes, I think so.
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