Posted on 09/08/2021 1:54:37 PM PDT by LibWhacker
It does look like the days of making fun of the never ending quest for fusion energy are coming to an end, thank the Lord!
Update: the experiment suffered an unanticipated setback when the janitor, Leon McCarthy, thought he would tidy up the workroom and his vacuum cleaner was sucked into the magnet.
I always believed magnetism was the key to space travel. If someone could figure out how to displace the magnetic field and attract the craft it could be moved without destroying the propulsion medium. Unfortunately I’m not smart enough to figure something like that out .. maybe someday someone will.
It’s been 30 years since I studied nuclear physics but as I recall the purpose of the high strength magnets are to suspend a ball of superheated plasma within a strong magnetic field at the center of a superconducting toroidal electromagnet, mostly because, you know, it’s superheated and if it touched anything bad stuff would happen. So use magnetic fields to suspend it floating. Cool.
But the energy it took to actually heat the plasma up and power the magnets was so much that it has never been worth it. What has fundamentally changed? Stronger electromagnets = good. Do they require less power?
Any one here with more than my high school physics class, care to explain the scope of the improvement? Are we going from 2 x10^-5 tesla (average earth magnetic field) to .... what?
Is this a little improvement or a huge leap forward? The article seems to position it as a huge leap but I did not see any numbers that I can understand.
Same old song & dance...
Music the same...
Words the same...
Different musicians...
Heard it all at Princeton 56-years ago...
Possibly - or maybe not...
*******FUSION ENERGY*******
Just around the corner since 1951!
(...and if it ever DOES become economically feasible, expect the environmentalists to ban it a year later... ;^)
Stronger electromagnets = good. Do they require less power?
The relationship isn’t linear, it is roughly x^3.
Here’s a cute video on magnetic fields and desktop plasma which might be interesting. Most of it is probably old hat to you, but there are some more recent things included.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2QaTyDJDEI
“On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of *20 tesla*...”
“But the new high-temperature superconductor material, made in the form of a flat, ribbon-like tape, makes it possible to achieve a higher magnetic field in a smaller device, equaling the performance that would be achieved in an apparatus 40 times larger in volume using conventional low-temperature superconducting magnets.”
Or conversely, the apparatus could be less than 1/40th the size, with commensurately less heat to bleed off the field generator, and finer control.
Best part: you can stick it on your refrigerator door to hold long grocery-shopping lists.
Thanks. I am certainly not a physicist, just an electrical engineer but in addition to all the electromagnetic field/wave stuff I did take two courses as an undergrad that inform my knowledge of nuke fusion: Modern Physics and a course on Electric Ceramics (superconductors, piezos, stuff like that). So I am probably just one step above a regular reader of Discover magazine when it comes to being able to design a fusion reactor.
But it’s interesting to me. Very frustrating that 35 years after taking those courses, which made it seem so, so close, we have never got fusion to actually be practical. Always hopeful we’ll get there before I age off of this world. It sure would turn the world upside down if we did.
20 tesla = 10^6 * (2*10^-5) tesla = one million times larger = six orders of magnitude.
“On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of *20 tesla*...”
A key word here is ‘large’, and another is ‘ramped’. Small superconducting electromagnets have generated a brief field strength of about 45 tesla. This achievement is a sustained - even if not for long - strength of 20. For hot fusion, it looks like what has been needed for decades is a way of generating at least 8-10 tesla.
Anonymous artist conception.
Shades of Galt’s motor.
> 2 x10^-5 tesla
Well, to 200 Tesla (not the car ;-)
That’s 7 orders of magnitude. That’s hugh.
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