Looks like somebody already invented it.
Posted on 01/23/2006 6:14:41 AM PST by Abathar
HEFEI, 01/21 - A full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, which aims to generate infinite, clean nuclear-fusion-based energy, will be built in March or April in Hefei, capital city of east China`s Anhui Province.
Experiments with the advanced new device will start in July or August. If the experiments prove successful, China will become the first country in the world to build a full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, nicknamed "artificial sun", experts here said.
The project, dubbed EAST (experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak), is being undertaken by the Hefei-based Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. It will require a total investment of nearly 300 million yuan (37 million U.S. dollars), only one fifteenth to one twentieth the cost of similar devices being developed in the other parts of the world.
The new device will be an upgrade of China`s first superconducting Tokamak device, dubbed HT-7, which was also built by the plasma physics institute, in partnership with Russia, in the early 1990s. HT-7 made China the fourth country in the world, after Russia, France and Japan, to have such a device.
"The EAST project research results will be significant for the International Thermonuclear Experiment Reactor, or ITER, in terms of basic research both in engineering technology and physics," said Wan Yuanxi, who is in charge of the project.
Wan said ITER will also be a full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device with an advanced configuration, but much larger than EAST.
The program, still in its initial stages, involves Russia, Japan, the United States, the European Union, China and the Republic of Korea.
Controlled nuclear fusion is seen as an efficient way for people to generate infinite, clean energy to offset the dearth of fossil fuels such as oil and coal.
Scientists believe that deuterium can be extracted from the sea and an enormous amount of energy can be obtained from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction under huge temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius. After nuclear fusion, the deuterium extracted from one liter of sea water will produce energy equivalent to 300 liters of gasoline.
If a device is developed that can withstand temperatures as high as 100 million Celsius degrees and control a deuterium-tritium reaction, it will be as though an "artificial sun" had been created able to supply infinite, clean energy for human beings.
Hasn't there been a few Bond movies about this?
now all that will be needed is to scale then down for warp drives and ones own personal 'Mr. Fusion' units.
Looks like somebody already invented it.
Pinging.
(psssst: I didn't want to correct you in front of other Freepers so I'm whispering, but China is not the CCCP. That would be the former Soviet Union, the Union of Soviet Sociaist Republics. CCCP are in this case Cyrillic characters. To be honest I wouldn't recognize the Chinese characters for China if I saw them.)
Actually, it's pretty sad that we're sliding backwards (intelligent design) while they move forwards.
The US has several TOKOMAK reactors. There was one at UT in Austin when I went to school there in the 80's. I think what is different about this one is that the magnets used in the device are energized with superconducting wire. Therefore the device as a whole will use less energy.
You can't have a hope of getting tokamak stuff working without super-computers, and a whole lot of metallurgy and high-power electronics. The same kind of stuff that useful for precision fusion nuke devices, btw.
Uuhh.., is this a rhetorical question?
If the Chinese can do something like this for a fraction of the cost in the U.S., it just might have something to do with the fact that they are not hampered by an EPA, OSHA, Federal Employment Standards, an "environmental wacko movement", obstinate labor Unions, and greedy subcontractors.
And they won't need all those silly safety devices, either!
The Tok they had in San Diego used to de-Gauss their computers when it fired up. Kinda messes up the data aquisitions :-)
CCP
Just as bad as CCCP
....since that would make the Chinese experiement look like 30-yr catch-up mode.
Since I'm not a nuclear physicist, someone in another post mentioned that the Chinese are using superconducting magnets. The older, U.S. reactors did not.
The US sure has had and has tokamaks.
Maybe that's why they've cornered the market in the rare-earths needed to make superconducting magnets.
To a degree, you are correct. However, there are certain R&D excemptions. However, in chemistry for example, new chemicals must be TOSCA listed if used in a production environment. Hence, new materials may be invented or discovered in the U.S., but to get around toxicity testing, they are manufactured overseas and the finish product is imported here. In the industry where I work, most of the new materials are coming from Japan. None have been invented in the U.S. in the last 5 years. The stuff gets invented there, and we develop the product here.
What Lithium? You can't have lithium in the plasma; it radiates away too much energy. I guess you could line the reactor with some sort of lithium compound, but elemental lithium is too volatile to line the reactor - it would contaminate the plasma, besides as you stated not all of the neutrons would get caught in a lithium lining - in fact it's really hard to block neutrons. If you go to deuterium/deuterium fusion this problem is eliminated, but the ignition temperature goes way up. The IEEE did a series of studies on this back in the '80s and concluded that this was one of the biggest problems with a potential D/T fusion reactor
The Chinese have not shown themselves to be overly concerned about such things. For example, there is a village just downrange from their rocket launch facililty that gets hit by flaming debris from launch failures....
What makes it hard is what makes it worth doing.
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