Posted on 01/23/2006 6:14:41 AM PST by Abathar
Columbus's trip was not an expensive trip, chump change to Ferdinand and Isabella. Had Columbus been like NASA we'd still be circling the Azores in fiendishly expensive ships that were barely seaworthy. And the fiendishness of expense would mean that there were thousands of specialities and industries all lobbying the imperial spanish court to keep things just the way they were accustomed to, at least until Spain went bankrupt.
Sorry I drifted into the Space Shuttle thread ... the logic still applies to tokamaks.
A Tokamak is a toroidal fusion reactor. Doesn't matter what the magnets are made of to float the plasma. The only difference is efficiency. The fact that they don't mention the US is purely to imply that we are laggards, when there was a privately funded and functioning Tokamak under the physics building in my undergraduate college.
Yeah, but that's STILL relatively clean compared to the amount of radioactives generated by the fission process. Not that that amount of radioactivity (from fission) is an insurmountable problem--I'm all for starting a breeder/burner fission energy cycle ASAP.
LOL!!! Just about what I pictured when I read the article...
You are familiar with the cheap "made in China" toys, aren't you?
yep, you get what you pay for.
Uh, U.S. has build Tokamak reactors for a while now, I took my intro quantum physics class in the same building that house one of the U.S. Tokamak on the Washington University in St. Louis campus, walked by it everyday :).
Using super-conducting magnet is an evolutionary design improvement, hardly a break-through.
The thing is - the article's title is mis-leading, there is nothing particularly "first" about this, it's just part of on-going basic research in high energy physics, similar work is also being done in Europe, Japan, Russia, and North America.
To be fair, if you read the article, the Chinese scientist aren't claiming this as a significant first in anything either (except they are building it dirt cheap compare to building one in the U.S.), or that they have the whole fusion (e.g. artificial sun) thing figured out. They are only re-stating the same holy grail (unlimited clean and cheap energy from hydrogen) that everyone's been chasing for the last half century.
Oh yeah, it is part of project 863 general science and technology research. Which thus far hasn't produced anything terribly impressive - not unlike similar big govenrment funded money hole / big science project in the west.
http://www.863.org.cn/english/annual_report/annual_repor_2000/als2000_09.html
I think we want them to fail, and in a spectacular and deadly way. I would rather hope they succeed because if China becomes energy self sufficient then world oil prices will fall and gas will become cheaper. There is also a tech sharing network with alot of scientist around the world for which some of the research data will get out. Slowly, the advance of knowledge will occur with or without the Communist government's permission, and the day of the combustion engine will end. I will thank God if I am alive to see it.
Tritium breeding, extraction, and control
Must have lithium in some form for tritium breeding
http://64.233.179.104/search?q=cache:HRUOWUttxAMJ:www.fusion.ucla.edu/abdou/abdou%2520presentations/2005/Abdou-9th-ICCoEE-PlenaryLong.ppt+vanadium+lithium+nuclear+reactor&hl=en
You know a lot more than I do about this. At least there is international cooperation and the future looks promising.
nothing new here...
mankind has still to figure out how to add more fuel to the process once it is started, harvest the energy that is created and keep things from melting down once you keep the fusion fire burning. The guys from iter caim it will take another 60 years of research until the useable process. Maybe the Iran conflict helps them thinking - but I suppose not.
Are you sure about that? Been along time since I read it (mid '80s), but IEEE seemed to think that the high level waste from D/T fusion would be about same as fission plus you have problem that very expensive structures (eg magnets) would be neutron damaged and degraded.
"Cold Fusion"
Ha!
Oh ... wait ....
Trouble wih that link is it's hard to tell fact from speculation. He kind of mixes the two.
Actually the project has.
One is the SHA-1 encryption algorithm (used in many communications, credit card, etc. processing) Check out SHA-1 encryption being broken by a professor in Shandong province:
http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Chinese_researchers_crack_major_U.S._government_algorithm_used_in_digital_signatures
http://theory.csail.mit.edu/~yiqun/shanote.pdf
There is a paper out there where the researchers showed in the paper, step by step algorithmic way to break the encryption (actually did it by hand). This has gotten the attention of the top cryptologist everywhere.
This is just one project they have made PUBLIC.
brilliant marketing.
The hippie crowd will not really be able to confuse nuclear fussion with fission reactors.
Its a warm and fuzzy "sun" reactor.
duplicate:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1563242/posts
original by same author
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.