What, you fear a resonance cascade?
Posted on 07/31/2006 11:26:15 AM PDT by Gasshog
Please stop jumping up and down and talk to me, Demetri!
Red Dawn :)
What, you fear a resonance cascade?
Has anyone told Al Gore? Global warming may actually become reality...
Doomsday machine? How so?
No biggie...just drown it in the river.
What? No way. The eco-nuts are absolutely certain that the sun has nothing whatsoever to with the climate.
My favorite RPG of all time.
They need to make a new version, but reverse the roles of Russia and China.
disclaimer: don't know beans about this show.
Humm
Shades of the "Hellbore" weapon found in the Bolo series of sci-fi stories.
I dunno - it just sounds scary, and I read some posts in other places that were spooky -- OOOOooooo! I knew there were some smart fellers around here that could 'splain.
Mike, what happens if the magnetic bottle fails and plasma gets loose? Is this dangerous?
Good luck to the Chinese with this one.
In that case, it's usually the incoming wormholes that you have to worry about.
A variety of systems including LHCD, ICRH, cryogenics, real-time control, water-cooled graphite limiters, ferretic liners and more than 30 diagnostic procedures, etc. were installed and operated in accommodation with long pulse operation requirements. Some of the most important results are briefly described as follows:
Significant progress in achieving high performance discharges under the quasi-steady-state condition in the HT-7 super-conducting Tokamak has been made. LHCD was used for plasma current sustainment and current density profile control. Improvement of plasma confinement was obtained by controlling the current density profile via off-axis LHCD. Experiments have demonstrated that IBW can control the electron pressure profile by localized electron heating via electron Landau damping and improve the plasma confinement. The features of IBW in controlling electron pressure profile can be integrated into LHCD plasmas to tailor the current density profile and avoid MHD instability. The operation mode utilizing simultaneous injection of LHW and IBW was optimized to achieve high performance plasma currents under a quasi-steady-state condition.
HT-7 has produced a variety of discharges with the normalized performance ©¬NH89 > 1~3 for the duration of several hundred energy confinement times. The normalized performance indicated by the product of ©¬NH89 >2 was achieved for > 220 ¥óE (see Fig.1). The fraction of a non-inductive plasma current was larger than 80% in such discharges with a considerable bootstrap current contribution.
The duration at the normalized performance of H89 >1.2 with ©¬N around unity has been extended to nearly 8 seconds, longer than 400¥óE. More than 90% of the plasma current was sustained by LHCD and bootstrap current. It was found that these discharges formed an internal transport barrier at the footprint of the minimum q of a negative shear configuration.
This status was kept in the time scale much longer than the energy confinement time and current diffusion time, implying the existence of a sustained current of steady-state high performance plasma.
The reproducible long pulse discharge with Te(0) ~ 0.4 keV and central electron density up to ~0.8*1019 m-3 has been obtained with a duration of > 60 seconds. The longest discharge was sustained 64 seconds by LHCD (see Fig.2). A new operation mode without central solenoid current has been demonstrated. In this case, the plasma current was really fully sustained by LHCD. This operation mode is important for simplification of the superconducting Tokamak design for a steady-state plasma discharge. The highest central electron temperature up to 4.5 keV at line-averaged density of 1.5*1019 m-3 has been obtained in plasma current ramp down experiments with LHCD and IBW heating.
In such discharges, strong peaked electron temperature profile was observed with improvement of the core plasma confinement. The MHD stabilization by LHW and IBW power modulation were successfully demonstrated.
The large-scale poloidal E*B time-varying flows were directly measured by using a forked Langmuir probe in the boundary plasma of the HT-7 Tokamak.
Low frequency (<10kHz) E*B flows were observed at the plasma edge, and they possess many characteristics of zonal flows, including a long poloidal wavelength and narrow radial extent. The cross-bicoherence of turbulent Reynolds stress indicates the existence of nonlinear three-wave coupling processes and the generation of low frequency E*B flows. The estimated flow-shearing rate is of the same order of magnitude as the turbulence decorrelation rate and may thus regulate the fluctuation level and thereby the turbulence-driven transport.
The component of Reynolds stress due to magnetic turbulence was first measured in the plasma edge region of the HT-7 superconducting Tokamak using an insertable magnetic probe. A radial gradient of magnetic Reynolds stress was observed close to the velocity shear layer location; however, in the new experiment described here, its contribution to driving the poloidal flows is small compared with the electrostatic component. A comparison of the profiles between the radial gradient of electrostatic Reynolds stress and the neoclassical damping of poloidal velocity gave the experimental evidence that the electrostatic turbulence-induced Reynolds stress might be the dominant mechanism to sustain the poloidal flow shear at plasma edge in a steady state."
More graphs and such at http://english.cas.ac.cn/Eng2003/page/SRA/A_4.htm
Romulan energy torpedoes anyone?
Only if you're standing right next to it.
The magnetic containment isn't to protect anything on the outside, it's to try to cram the fusion materials close enough together, at high enough temperatures, to undergo fusion. It's extraordinarily hard to achieve those conditions, and if the containment fails, the temperature and pressure drop out of the range necessary for the fusion to sustain itself. So it just fizzles out instead of producing energy.
And the reason that magnetic containment is used (with incredibly massive magnetic fields) is because no physical container could withstand those conditions without melting. A magnetic field, on the other hand, doesn't break down in the heat.
Haha, it is very amusing to see all the negative comments here. Some of you guys probably have to work for Chinese companies in the future. Well, just to piss off more ppl here. Here is an article saying US defense contractors are sending some of their work to the Chinese.
http://news.com.com/2061-10796_3-6099303.html?part=rss&tag=6099303&subj=news
U.S. defense contractors sending classified work to China?
July 27, 2006 12:13 PM PDT
First, China began to assemble household products for the U.S. market. Then the country graduated to notebooks. Now Chinese companies are performing research for classified systems bound for the Defense Department.
So says David Lewis, CEO of StarTech. StarTech is a high-end outsourcing firm. It has retained students and professors at Tsinghua University, China's most prestigious technical university, and contracts them out to independent companies in the West. StarTech can also retain scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. (One of the chief scientists at the CAS, Jian Mian Heng is a former HP scientist and a close relative of China's former president Jiang Zemin).
"Our largest customer is a U.S. defense contractor working on black projects for the U.S.," he said at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit.
Lewis told me the same thing at a cocktail party the night before, but today he said it in front of an audience of about 100 investors. So it's not party chatter. Lewis, however, can't provide the name of the contractor. Outsourcing companies as a rule do not disclose most of the projects they work on. As a result, there may not be any way to definitively confirm it. However, it would be a strange exaggeration for an exec whose main goal in speaking to the audience is to raise money. Exaggeration would hurt his credibility.
A huge draw is the quality of science. Academics are increasingly citing Chinese research projects in their paper and the sheer number of Chinese scientific papers is on the rise.
It's cheap in China too. "How about $20,000, full labor costs, a year for a PhD from (an equivalent university to) MIT," he said. "Compare that to a quarter of a million in the U.S."
If you don't need a PhD, you can still hire programmers for $14 an hour in China, he added.
Posted by Michael Kanellos
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.