Is It Time For the US Government To Back Fusion At NIF Over ITER? 308
ananyo writes "Laser beams at the National Ignition Facility have fired a record 1.875 megajoule shot into its target chamber, surpassing their design specification. The achievement is a milepost on the way to ignition — the 'break-even' point at which the facility will finally be able to release more energy than goes into the laser shot by imploding a target pellet of hydrogen isotopes. NIF's managers think the end of their two-year campaign for break-even energy is in sight and say they should achieve ignition before the end of 2012. However, with scientists at NIF saying that a $4 billion pilot plant could be putting hundreds of megawatts into the grid by the early 2020s, some question whether the Department of Energy is backing the wrong horse with ITER — a $21-billion international fusion experiment under construction at St-Paul-lez-Durance, France. Is it time for the DoE to switch priorities and back NIF's proposals?"
Perhaps a better idea, given the potential benefits of fusion research, would be for the DoE to throw their weight behind multiple projects, rather than sacrificing some to support others.
And this is better than thorium because....? (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like thorium reactors, which we've already built, and gotten working, are a much more tractable problem.
Re:And this is better than thorium because....? (Score:4, Insightful)
Thorium is just a trendy topic. Geeks are always so easily sold on the storyline, "There's this great new technology, and here's a list of five or so of its advantages -- it's the solution to all of the world's problems!". Which totally skims over, obviously, the disadvantages and challenges.
Re:And this is better than thorium because....? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks, but I'm aware of the "new technology will solve the energy crisis" meme. The deal is this. We do need a new source of electricity as hydrocarbon depletion, or more importantly, hydrocarbon's ever shrinking energy return, starts to bite in a big way. We don't have many affordable options that scale. Nuclear has a chance of that, but conventional plants are dangerous and uranium isn't an infinite resource either. We have much more thorium than uranium, and while the plants are technologically challenging, we've already built them. It's not a matter of "trying to break even." We've broken even. It's a matter of building enough of the things safely and economically. That take incremental development, not some major breakthrough. It seems to me that pursing thorium is an easier and more economic solution than continuing to futz with fusion.
Re:And this is better than thorium because....? (Score:5, Insightful)
It seems to me that pursing thorium is an easier and more economic solution than continuing to futz with fusion.
Why treat these things like we have to only pick one? It's not like the money for R&D into fusion reactors and money for the construction of production fission reactors are coming from the same place. Even if they were, I'm sure we could find some third thing to de-prioritize instead.
Thorium fission reactors have great potential for solving many current problems with fossil fuels. Thorium reactors could be running and solving our problem long before fusion reactors could.
Fusion reactors have the potential to solve our energy problems for any forseeable future -- making energy so plentiful and cheap that we could use it to do things that would be completely insane now. Even in a future where we are using nuclear fission for all our power, the creation of working, production fusion reactors would be a revolutionary change.
We want both. Let's not pit them against each other.
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We can't just build more, there are major technical problems that still need to be overcome. Thorium fuel needs remote handling, for example, because of high levels of radioactivity. The reactor itself becomes highly radioactive during its lifetime too and is thus a major problem to decommission. Keep in mind that in the UK and most of Europe entombing the reactor is not an acceptable option, the site must be properly cleaned up.
On top of all that there are no commercially viable large scale reactors and de
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And so what would you suggest that doesn't involve the starvation of 6.5 billion people or so? Before you answer, I recommend you review the actual numbers for power use worldwide here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil [wikipedia.org].
Re:And this is better than thorium because....? (Score:4, Informative)
THe accident problem is still a problem for any fission reactor - it hardly matters if the accident in question is extremely rare thanx to (admittedly quite extensive and expensive) precautions that we take - if it ever happens and it does it creates havoc and misery among human neighbours as well as great financial problem for the state which (naturally) is going to pay for damage and clean up.
You can't make any industry completely safe. Nuclear power is probably one of the safest, but also so tightly controlled that when something bad does happen is is big news. Much like the crashing of a plane is big news compared to the crashing of a car - this doesn't make planes bad, they are in fact very safe compared to cars.
As an example, coal power has a history of serious disasters - from mining accidents (usually restricted to killing/injuring the miners themselves, but occasionally a big deal for the whole community around a mine [wikipedia.org]), to huge environmental disasters [wikipedia.org]. Even in normal operation, coal power plants are designed to pump toxic and radioactive material directly into the atmosphere.
The difference between the environmental impact of coal and nuclear is largely that the design of nuclear reactors largely keeps harmful biproducts carefully contained whilst coal doesn't. This means that it is considered a big deal when radioactive material contaminates the environment, whereas contamination from coal fired power stations goes unreported (since it happens routinely every hour of every day).
Another example: hydroelectric has the potential for really serious disaster [wikipedia.org].
To date, we have had just 3 serious nuclear incidents:
- Chernobyl was the big one, 4,056 people lost their lives. Whilest this is a large number, it pales in comparison to other disasters, such as the afore mentioned hydroelectric dam failure that cost 171,000 lives.
- Three Mile Island is often cited by the anti-nuke brigade, but that demonstrates an inability to read and understand the reports - three mile island is a pretty good example of everything going to hell and basically not much bad happening.
- Fukushima - a serious accident, of course. Low level contamination over a large area. But that's what it is - low level. The fact that the media concentrated on this nuclear power accident instead of the vast number of lives lost through the quake and tsunami demonstrates that nuclear power's big problem is down to image, hype and public paranoia/misunderstanding rather than a substantial level of risk.
Military reactors have a lot to answer for, of course. For example, Dounreay is a pretty good example of how not to run a nuclear facility. This is largely down to the fact that the military pretty much had a free reign to do what they liked rather than being under the strict regulation and oversight that commercial reactors are subjected to.
Stepping away from power and comparing to other large industries, I would much rather live next door to a nuclear power station than a chemical plant. In part because the nuclear power station will be subjected to much stricter regulation, but also because anything that does leak from the power station is likely to be much less of a danger than some of the really nasty substances used in chemical works (even though a nuclear leak will probably draw far more media coverage and protests from the environmentalists than a chemical leak would).
Fission really is one of the safest (if not the safest) method of large scale power generation. As for handling the waste: this can largely be reprocessed, we just need to provide incentives to do this rather than just storing it away. However, it seems unfair to compare the problem of handling nuclear waste with technologies that routinely release their wa
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Thorium, yes, but the wider view is reactor design. Doesn't have to be Thorium, we also have all this lovely nuclear waste from old reactors lying around.. and a good bit of it is still perfectly fissile, given the right sorta conditions. That's producing energy from trash, for the 21st century.
Then again, scary nuclear, NIMBY SAYS NOPE!
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Well, duh, but you know what? At least it works.
Greens, politicians and indeed nerds to all go on about fusion too. Nevermind that it doesn't break even thermally, let alone once you factor in electrical conversion and fuel production. Nevermind that even if it did, the current projects are totally nonviable commercially. And all that aside, proposed processes _still_ produce neutrons and leave their facilities radioactive just like fission plants.
If you're calling interest in thorium fission trendy and
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Fusion has been breaking even thermally for quite some time now.
What it doesn't do is run continuously, which makes practical extraction difficult. But the fact that we've made steady progress towards this goal, and found no physical laws preventing it (instead we have learned a great deal about plasma physics and how it relates to efficient fusion confinement) means we should continue researching it.
Capture the Energy Produced? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm vaguely familiar with the NIF and their "how it works" section breaks down in great detail everything involved in generating the beam, amplifying the beam, targeting the beam, and imploding the target, but how do they capture the energy produced by the target?
Re:Capture the Energy Produced? (Score:5, Informative)
They don't.
Next question?
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Well technically it heats up the walls and any shielding. Unlike a torus / iter type thing, you don't wrap the reactor with liquid helium cooled superconducting magnets so thats not too big of a deal. To a crude first approximation you can heat a NIF device up until the vapor pressure starts screwing up the reaction and optics (I donno, dull red glow?)
Re:Capture the Energy Produced? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been around NIF and it is an amazing machine. It's also designed (and funded) to study warm dense matter physics like equations of state at high density for nukes, not fusion. Use of NIF for fusion is a great side-benefit and hopefully they can get useful data from it.
The HiPER project to design a fusion reactor based on fast ignition has been though an initial concept design phase, but is now waiting further development. There is still a lot of research which needs to be done in target physics, lasers, and materials before ICF is ready to build an ITER-like machine
The physics behind the ITER tokamak [wikipedia.org] on the other hand is quite well understood at this point. Sure there are outstanding issues which are still being worked on (ELMS, divertor detachment, RWM control spring to mind) but we're pretty confident it will work. The design of ITER started in 88, and before that the INTOR project in '78, but it has taken a long time for politicians actually put some serious resources behind it. Hopefully it won't take that long for ICF projects like HiPER to be taken seriously and funded at a level which will make them happen
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When was that again? (Score:4, Funny)
[NIF's managers] say they should achieve ignition before the end of 2012.
I'm guessing their target date is December 21.
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It's not their target, per se. It's earlier than that, but after you take into account vacation time, funding delays and an unexpected blackout due to solar flares, Dec 21 will be when ignition is actually reached.
Cheaper than War (Score:5, Insightful)
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People like to equate our oil needs with our electric needs. Maybe I'm misinformed, but they don't seem to equate. If we found a completely free source of electricity, that used a large building to produce, we wouldn't get rid of our oil demand. We would get rid of our coal demand. Electric transportation still suffers from battery issues at the moment. At some point in the future cheap electricity might reduce our oil demand, but with urban sprawl and the current shortcomings of electric transport, I
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assuming an unlimited 'free' electricity supply, synthesis of oil from base chemicals starts to look doable. its just energy after all - all it needs is converting into chemical form.
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Battery issues are coming to an end, soon enough the range anxiety crowd will be recommended a therapist instead of a bigger battery. Average-Joe-priced electric cars are already going 100 miles on a charge and doing an 80% quick charge in half an hour. That's over 3x the average American's daily driving distance. The vast majority of cars could be replaced with electrics right now.
The only thing we really need petrofuels for is non-tiny aircraft, and in the short term, non-huge boats.
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I think you mean non-fossil - ideally, yes, but just switching to electric vehicles is good futureproofing, and in most places is still much cleaner even with fossil fuel sources, since you can fit much better emissions control equipment on a large building than a small vehicle.
Re:Cheaper than War (Score:5, Interesting)
If we found a completely free source of electricity, that used a large building to produce, we wouldn't get rid of our oil demand.
Not really. Given enough cheap energy, synthetic fuel is pretty trivial.
The energy cost of ethanol distillation makes it a borderline negative source of energy... but if that energy is infinite and free, well then... Think about it... aluminum is essentially congealed electricity (look how its made). So you make aluminum greenhouses out of free electricity and dirt, then you string 24x7 ultra-high intensity lights using free electricity, the plants grow in water that was desalinated ocean water using free electricity, then you ferment the "stuff" and distill using free electricity... Given an infinite source of free electricity, pretty much, sea water comes in one pipe, and motor fuel ethanol comes out another pipe.
You could condense carbon dioxide out of the air and strip the carbon off, condense water out of the air to strip the hydrogen off, mix together in a somewhat complicated o-chem lab, and make synth-gas. Air goes in one pipe, gasoline comes out the other pipe.
Takes a heck of a lot of energy to pull that trick off, but it can be done.
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$4 bln is nothing. The US could fully fund this AND fully fund ITER (as opposed to the dribble they're giving) AND fully fund that joint US-EU project to Mars that's at risk, just by taking the money out of senseless earmarks or by pulling just one thousand extra troops home a few months early.
There's probably more than $4 bln wasted by officials leaving lights on or taps dripping.
You have, however, not just to consider the immediate costs and benefits. There's the long-term as well. Mining uranium and/or c
About a day's deficit spending for the US (Score:2)
Scary isn't it?
Yet no one in Washington truly wants to stop this train wreck. Maybe we can get lucky, get fusion to work, and sell it to pay off our debts.
NIF has adequate funding (Score:2)
to support nuclear weapon maintenance and design by studying the behavior of matter under the conditions found within nuclear weapons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Ignition_Facility [wikipedia.org]
They could throw the Polywell a few more bucks... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or at least let the DoE get involved instead of driving them to the DoD with inter-departmental pissing contests.
For the money that the Polywell people are asking, and what a full-size model would cost compared to the "superconducting cathedrals"* of ITER, they'd be fools to not at least give them a try.
*The late Dr. Bussard sure did know how to turn a phrase. There's no doubt about that, which is more than can be said about the actual Polywell concept itself - at least so far.
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Try Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor first (Score:4, Informative)
The LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) is a much more promising technology. For starters it's already been done, decades ago at Oak Ridge. It only needs to be commercialized. Also it lacks the hard gamma problems inherent in fusion.
See energyfromthorium.com [slashdot.org]
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Thorium isn't good. Much lower energies than conventional fission reactors, the mining isn't cheap or safe and produces just as much pollution and industrial accidents, ignition still requires uranium and there's still waste products - maybe not as radioactive, but still deadly for many decades.
Thorium reactors would be good in space, because the primary fuel is basically inert and you need only a small amount of power to get them started. They could therefore be put into a hibernation state and activated a
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Mining is not an issue. We're already throwing thorium away from current heavy metal mining and from coal tailings.
Let me repeat that: we're currently throwing away fuel. No additional mining effort needs to be done to have all of the thorium we need.
Second, nuclear is orders of magnitude more efficient than solar and wind. Solar and wind efficiencies are generally based on capacity, and NOT on actual output. The actual output from solar and wind installations are far lower than their capacity because t
Re:Try Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor first (Score:5, Insightful)
It only needs to be commercialized.
You say it so casually, as if it wouldn't take billions of euros and decades of time... It isn't just the reactor that needs to be designed, proven and certified, it's the infrastructure to handle the fuel and decommission the thing after its working life.
Hard problems haven't been tackled yet (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, good luck with getting power into the grid by 2020.
The reason why I'm saying this, is that it's an incredibly bold goal to turn the technology they've already got into a working prototype, incorporating everything learnt elsewhere, into a next-generation scientific experiment, let alone a power plant, by 2020. Hell, even HIPER won't break ground before 2020.
Besides, the REAL fun stuff, is things like advanced materials for the combustion chamber, and a working blanket, which NOBODY has yet demonstrated, not JET, not ITER, not NIF -- nobody.
Worse yet, we don't know what problems we'll run into once we achieve ignition in NIF, or the burning plasmas regime in ITER.
To the genius who suggested that ITER is a political waste of time is obviously unfamiliar with the science. Even if ITER achieves its low-balled goals, it'll be a massive step towards a working plant. And they plan to actually test working power-generating, and tritium-breeding blankets as well, although that won't start until quite late in the project (the D-T phase of the project).
The 'patriotic' Americans slagging ITER on /. should be quiet, as the US is, true to form, turning its back on the rest of the world, starving the US Domestic Agency of funding, and doing what it wants anyway.
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The US could afford to pay for all of the major fusion ventures on Earth, if not in full then close to it, for the next 5-10 years without even being a measurable blip in the accounts. I don't think we'll have fusion by 2020, but if the US actually did put hard cash on the table to the tune of $10 billion extra per project, we might well be in line for large-scale conversion to fusion by 2025.
The taxpayers just spent $100 billion a year every year for the last 11 years, on average. It took that long to get
What is break even? (Score:4, Informative)
It seems to be that the thermal energy produced is equal to the optical energy put in. Well, great, it's a milestone of sorts, but still massively far off actually producing energy. First and foremost, conversion of thermal to electrical is 33-40% efficient. Then you have to convert that to optical, an efficiency I do not know, but seems according to the Wiki page to be 1% (422MJ bank, 4MJ shot, could be old). Still, maybe it could be a lot better, but probably wouldn't exceed 80-90%. So, you actually have to beat this "break even" by a factor of at least 3 in order to actually output energy. But that doesn't account for fuel production, nor maintenance or construction of the facility.
And, I should also point out that this story is just that their laser works, not that an sample was fired producing "break even" energy.
Will it work? Maybe. But realistically, by the time we see commercial power from this, a fission plant built today would be reaching end-of-life.
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Your 99% loss in the shot turns into heat. Low grade process heat to be sure, but it doesn't just "disappear".
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No but thermodynamics has some rather stern things to say about how much of that you're going to be able to recover as electricity again, not to mention the considerable issues associated with letting the laser system and optics themselves heat up into any sort of useful temperature for a heat engine.
Fantasy Fusionists (Score:2)
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The US is bleeding $100 billion a year every year to fight various wars that were largely the fantasy of a mad Texan. Let's say that there's 10 fusion projects with a serious potential of actually breaking through and you fund each at $10 billion more than current - but just as a one-off. So for one additional year, the US bleeds another $100 billion but after that the bleeding stops.
Without any further changes, the net result would be that the money saved would exceed the interest paid on the deficit. Not
The Numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
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A little concerned here... (Score:2)
Is it really economic to do this? If we have to build a new facility every time it goes past breakeven and explodes, it just seems like it is going to be expensive. Not to mention the politics of siting a bomb blowy-up thingy near cities where they need the power.
A lot of cool stuff came out of NIF (Score:4, Informative)
Let's put this in perspective please... (Score:2)
The cost of EVERY single stealth bomber (plane and supporting program) comes in around 3 billion dollars. So considering this is about creating a virtually endless supply of energy capable of sustaining us for thousands of years, Why is this even a consideration. Move $100 billion from defense (I would argue this is the most important defense spending in our history) and get'er done, once and for all.
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Marketing and science do not mix. (Score:5, Informative)
I love how projected "breakeven" and "ignition" in 2012 has suddenly been extrapolated to MW powerplants on the grid within a decade.
Nevermind that we don't capture the energy yet, which might give us best-case 50% efficiency. Nevermind we need 3x breakeven the breakeven energy for converting heat into steam to power a turbine. Nevermind just about every factor of 2-3 efficiency loss out there. I'm going to post one goddamn link that was true when I interned there, and is still consistent today and then I want to see what the "scientists" who projected this commercial powerplant planned to do about this minor detail:
http://www.ieer.org/reports/fusion/chap3.html [ieer.org]
By contrast, a large commercial power plant using ICF will require around five shots per second. Laser drivers also have low efficiencies, currently around 1% for solid-state lasers such as those to be used in NIF.
99% efficiency loss right off the bat. What's left for these people to even argue about?
ITER's nickname (Score:3)
When I worked at the Office of Fusion Energy, US Department of Energy in the early 90's, we referred to ITER as "money ITER".
Re:well, i dunno (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:well, i dunno (Score:5, Informative)
NIF itself isn't really the answer, though. It's great for super-dense matter studies and gathering information of use for nuclear bomb detonations, but if the goal is sustainable fusion, NIF's approach is too expensive and inefficient. Rather, you need to go with a variant like HiPER [wikipedia.org]. NIF relies solely on a compression pulse. HiPER uses a compression pulse plus a heating pulse. This allows the compression pulse to be much smaller and easier to achieve.
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The government is getting back its investment on the Internet and the R&D involved. Unless you mean that the government has to make all of the profits on it, I'd say that his point isn't proven. There's nothing wrong with private companies making money off the government's work, unless the government got insufficient return on its own investment.
Re:well, i dunno (Score:4, Interesting)
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...the main benefit that the Internet brings to society.
On the whole, I agree with you. Even /. is a benefit - how would I have ever learned about goatse otherwise?
But there are costs, many, many costs, such as on-line bullying [slate.com], the erosion of our private and public lives, [registerguard.com] laws like the DMCA and SOPA either becoming the law of the land (or threatening to). There are even more insidious threats [youtu.be], but those are too terrible to speak of...
So yes, I agree there are many benefits to the way the Internet has grown from the ARPANET, but there are costs too. Whether
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Honestly? These [wikipedia.org] are the only true winners...
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Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Basically, this should be a 'hero' project. Like a moon shot. Lets face it, we need to transit off of fossil fuels to a large degree sometime down the line. Not tomorrow. Not next year, but certainly in the next decade or so. Nuclear fission is an option - but as we've seen, not a terribly good one. Solar / wind / hydro / ponies and pixie dust / conservation will also help but we still need a backbone capable of powering modern civilization unless we want to devolve into something less pleasant. And that backbone has to put a lot of gigajoules into the system on a 24/7/365 basis.
So we need to put our money where our collective mouths are and work on something capable of bringing up the entire world to first world standards.
Or fight the war to see who's standing over the oil fields.
Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
well then Thorium nuclear reactors would seem to be a better bet.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)
Not just Thorium, and there's probably better designs out by now anyway, but I for one was very pissed and still am that Clinton canceled America's Integral Fast Reactor project. Because ohhh scary nuclear. Except the IFRs produce less waste, safer waste, and can be fed just about anything, including most the crap that right now is considered waste.
Bad project, Bill kill!
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Why the fuck do people keep on mentioning Thorium reactors? They still produce fission products. And fission products are the only thing that nuclear reactors need to protect against releasing to the public. Fission products are also statistically determined. You will always get short medium and long term radionuclides even if you burn up some.
There are benefits to Thorium reactors, but in a major accident they will still release enough highly radioactive substances that will require evacuation and quarant
Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)
Why the fuck do people keep on mentioning Thorium reactors? They still produce fission products. And fission products are the only thing that nuclear reactors need to protect against releasing to the public. Fission products are also statistically determined. You will always get short medium and long term radionuclides even if you burn up some.
There are benefits to Thorium reactors, but in a major accident they will still release enough highly radioactive substances that will require evacuation and quarantine of the affected area for decades. Yes, a thorium reactor can still meltdown, it still has decay heat, and it would require complex engineered safeguards to protect it.
You do realize that EXISTING thorium reactor designs -
1. Do not need water as coolant (hence no high pressure evironment and much smaller)
2. As designed will shutdown on their own with no outside intervention.
3. As designed they can't "overheat".
"Best results occur with molten salt reactors (MSRs), such as ORNL's liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), which have built-in negative-feedback reaction rates due to salt expansion and thus reactor throttling via load. This is a great safety advantage, since no emergency cooling system is needed, which is both expensive and adds thermal inefficiency. In fact, an MSR was chosen as the base design for the 1960s DoD nuclear aircraft largely because of its great safety advantages, even under aircraft maneuvering. In the basic design, an MSR generates heat at higher temperatures, continuously, and without refuelling shutdowns, so it can provide hot air to a more efficient (Brayton Cycle) turbine. An MSR run this way is about 30% better in thermal efficiency than common thermal plants, whether combustive or traditional solid-fuelled nuclear.[27]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Commercial_nuclear_power_station [wikipedia.org]
4. The US has a metric fuckton of thorium in it's coal deposits.
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Buzz, it's 2.2 dickwads per metric fuckton. The imperial fuckton is a Longton, thus there are 1.5 metric fucktons per Imperial Fuckton.
Re:Of course (Score:5, Informative)
How do you generate hydrogen in a molten salt reactor? What's the source?
The Fukushima reactors generated it because the water was boiling to steam and reacting with the zirconium-cladded fuel canisters. There are no such canisters in a molten salt reactor, and there is also no water and no pressurisation of the containment structure (what's the vapour pressure of Lithium Fluoride anyway? ;) ).
The danger of overheating is also removed - the fuel is already molten *by design*, and is contained in the system by a plug of solid fuel that is kept below the melting point by active cooling. Should the power fail (or the temperature of the fuel go too high for the cooling if the plug to cope), the plug of fuel melts and the whole primary loop drains off and settles in a non-critical arrangement run off area. It will then either solidify, or remain as a liquid if the temperature is high.
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There are uses for fission byproducts you know? Nuclear medicine saves more peoples lives then reactor accidents have ever taken.
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You keep hearing about thorium reactor, because a lot of people are convinced it would be a very good idea to do this based on the options that are clearly possible in the near term. Maybe, you should do your own research on the LFTR reactor and see why lots of people think so. And just so you know (in case you did not), fusion will also have radioactive byproducts, expected to be less of a problem than LFTR reactors though.
Ultimately might be able to get LFTR power for as low USD 0.01 per kwh, and there ar
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Or fight the war to see who's standing over the oil fields.
Imaginary Yale grad dialogue:
So we already selected that option, its really freaking expensive, but we're "winning" so why fool around with the alternatives?
For generations we've been dropping the median standard of living so when the oil runs out we'll remain in charge, so no problemo there.
Why do I/we need to do this to remain in power, again?
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Why do I/we need to do this to remain in power, again?
Because you keep electing warmongers like Bush and Obama that would rather destroy the earth than cede one iota of control...
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Bush, did conceed control ... when he stepped down after his elected term. Obama hasn't really started any wars, and basically ended one. I mean, he's not exactly a pacifict, but he's not exactly Bush/LBJ either.
General Fusion (Score:2)
Basically, this should be a 'hero' project. Like a moon shot.
By that argument after spending $100B we'll get ITER/NIF to work but the cost of building any more fusion plants will be so overwhelmingly expensive that we will not build anymore for the next 40 (and counting) years. Instead why not take a chance on something a lot simpler like General Fusion [generalfusion.com]. These guys have a beautiful reactor design and are working on a shoestring budget to develop it. While the chance of success is not known (they themselves estimate it to be 10-50%) if it were successful it would be
Re:General Fusion (Score:4, Insightful)
"By that argument...blah"
Nonsense.
He means a project in a similar manner to the "hero" projects of old, like Apollo, and Project Manhattan. Where you basically say "cost be damned, were doing this". Either for prestige (Apollo), or self defence ( project M ), or saving our collective asses ( cheap fusion power )
Investing a huge fortune in money on inventing a commercial grade reactor does not automatically imply that the resulting commercial design will be as expensive to mass produce as the money spent on R&D.
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I don't favor either NIF or ITER because frankly I don't care, but I've been hearing "Fusion is almost at the break-even point" for the last 20 years.
In my lexicon almost =/= 20 years and I have to wonder why it was not achieved back in 1995 or 2000 (as they claimed would happen). Perhaps they should be more careful with their claims of "almost there", else we'll start viewing them like the boy who cried wolf.
And for energy sources, why not just burn liquefied sugar (ethanol) and other plant oils in our c
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Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
I have been hearing about biofuels since the early 80's so I don't think they have a record that is any better than fusion.
Brazil is still mostly dependent on fossil fuels. Gasoline there is a 25/75 ethanol/gas blend.
A population reduction - are you volunteering?
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A population reduction - are you volunteering?
A large part of the Slashdot readership is doing exactly what is necessary for population reduction. Some of them even voluntarily.
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Cane is working for brazillians because they have climate and soil that can grow a lot of it, for a relatively poor country. It's completely unrealistic most other places. You'd never have enough land for that to work in say India or china, and corn ethanol is horribly inefficient compared to cane.
Also, research is new, novel and doesn't always work as well as you'd hope. It's not engineering where they know what the outcome will be. On the scale of things 20 billion dollars for one research project is
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Sugar cane also works for Brazil because they don't have nearly as many cars on the road in the first place. There's also the very serious hazard of using arable land to grow fuel rather then food, and the follow on effects that can have on global food prices.
Biofuels are really a non-starter - it's inefficient solar power, with all sorts of limitations and where and how much of it you can use. It also is only an answer for transportation fuel at that. There's no possible way we could satiate our electricity demands using biofuels (when you need 60% of the arable land in the US to manage the oil needs of transportation alone - optimistically).
Fusion research has to be done, no matter the cost, until we either definitely establish it can't be done, or we succeed. Given the positive results that we have that, it seems likely we can succeed - but nothing that complex is ever easy or quick.
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In my lexicon almost =/= 20 years and I have to wonder why it was not achieved back in 1995 or 2000
because 20 years previous we hadn't signed on the dotted line to do it.
Its kind of like building a house. I can hire out to get one built in a year, anytime I want to start ... but until I sign on the dotted line its going to perpetually be "a year away".
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Polywell as no thermal confinement and will never reach break even.
Could you elaborate on this point please? I'm merely an interested layman but I was under the impression that the ions in the device all had energies close to the well depth, i.e. not an M-B distribution.
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Both!
Every problem (short of too much entropy in the universe, maybe) becomes easier if you have enough energy. No clean water? Desalinate sea water with tons of energy. Earth too hot? Fuck it, let's build domes under the sea and grow crops with artificial light. Can't get enough rare earths? Mine the living shit out of huge masses of dead earth (I'm assuming the planet is basically fucked by the time we need to do this kind of thing) for the trace minerals. If there's a viable project that has the potentia
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Not to mention the awkward little problem of cheaply manufacturing those ultra-precise little fuel targets, and positioning them quickly and accurately enough inside the reactor for it to be practical.
This is the part that makes me call B.S. The fuel pellets contain tritium, which as far as I know requires a fission reactor to produce. Right now the fuel pellets aren't even the primary target of the NIF's lasers - instead, they encapsulate it in a little shell called a hohlraum, which I believe is current
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The really touching part is that you really believe that without a Government, there wouldn't be violence and people taking by force.
From what I've read, as bad as Somalia is today, it was worse when it had a government.
Certainly given that governments have killed hundreds of millions of people in the last century I would say that private sector murderers would have to work pretty hard to catch up.
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There's nothing inherently wrong with fossil fuels. We're just running out is all. (Oh and I seriously doubt the OP is a fossil fuel corporation. No need for ridiculous attacks.)
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Please stop using the little science project called the Internet, stop using electricity, take off any of your clothes which contain polyester and go live in a field, as modern civilisation would not exist if cretins like you were allowed to veto massive infrastructure investment like this as 'a little science project' and it is the logical conclusion of your happy ignorance.
kthxbye
Re:Theft (Score:4, Insightful)
What's with spergy computer nerds and libertarianism? I guess it must be appealing to reduce the complexity and unavoidable ambiguity of human society into just a couple of quasi-moral rules pulled out of nowhere.
Re:Theft (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess it must be appealing to reduce the complexity and unavoidable ambiguity of human society to something that can be solved via one-size-fits-most central planning by an Intelligent Designer, a noble bureaucrat with a brilliant mind and a crystal ball.
Yep, spergy computer nerd incapable of making subtle distinctions right there. You manage to put up both a straw man and a false dichotomy. Primarily because there's no other way to support your argument.
Here's your problem: you correctly identify some of the problems that government has, but then decide to solve them by throwing out all government. You are completely clueless as to the requirements for a functioning society, as well as the costs necessary to maintain it. The correct discussion is to talk about whether the money is better spent elsewhere. Your blanket squeal about thievery is completely, utterly sophomoric.
localized, decentralized experiments are essential to peaceful evolution towards a prosperous world.
And you also managed to get evolution wrong. Here's a little hint: evolution has nothing to do with a better world, or more prosperous world. Only with who makes more kids.
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Ironically, you are the one who has put up straw men and a false dichotomy.
I don't state that all government should be thrown out. Rather, I imply that the power structure should be decentralized and localized as much as possible.
Firstly, evolution is a process; biological evolution just happens to be the most prominent example of evolution.
Secondly, evolution is defined by 2 phenomena: Variation and Selection. For the record, neither of these phenomena need be random or even mindless (especially selection)
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We did become a superpower by international cooperation. Our international cooperation with the allied powers in the defeat of the axis powers in WW2. That and the fact that in the aftermath nearly 100% of our industrial capacity was still intact at the end of the war.
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America didn't become a superpower by international collaboration; it did so out of invention and innovation, and a sense of patriotic duty.
Then it busily removed invention and innovation, and what's left is the ignorant "AMERICA FUCK YEAH" mentality that somehow suggests the US should try its best at solving the energy crisis without external influence, because heavens forbid humanity should collaborate at solving, y'know, the most important problem it's ever had.
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Do you know something that you are not sharing, or do you just hate Texans? I tried to find some more information on why the supercollider was canceled and all I found was that it was a financial consideration at the federal level. [wikipedia.org] The fact is that I, like many Texas residents, would have loved to have seen the completion of the project and the subsiquent boon to our lo
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The only way in which Texas comes into the issue is that Texas representatives wanted the SSC built there rather than added onto existing infrastructure i.e. Fermilab. So that greatly expanded the cost of digging the tunnels.
I don't think that was a decisive factor in the SSC cancellation.
Certainly 'hateful rednecks' had nothing to do with it. And even if they did, putting it in Texas didn't hurt it. As an immigrant to Texas, my impression is that the only thing your stereotypical science-hatin' Texan wo
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i thought you were serious until you mentioned the charlatan Rossi. Go kill yourself.
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Rossi at least seems to be selling snake oil.
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"policy is made by ideologically-blind libertarian halfwits"
You're referring to some other nation. With no true leadership in the U.S., the libertarians are certainly not in power, and incapable of forming any coalition to gain power.
You may, however, be refering to the crony capitalism that is pervading our goverment. That and dueling idologies on all sides is causing us some problems, not just in healthcare.
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Replying to a troll, and a bad-mouthed one as well, but the WHO figures are at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/mar/22/us-healthcare-bill-rest-of-world-obama [guardian.co.uk]
Somewhat offtopic perhaps, but effiency of large-scale projects is relevant here. Also if there is more money left over from essentials, and I consider healthcare an essential, there is money for R&D