20 ms·
South Korea's fusion device KSTAR runs for 20 seconds at 100M degrees Celsius
- ivalm 6y agoHere is a Wikipedia entry for this tokamak since the article isn’t very descriptive: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSTAR https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSTAR
- lwigo 6y agoAlright, I'll be that guy. What materials do we have that can contain something that hot?
- dboreham 6y agoA magnetic field?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bigbaguette 6y agoCrazy strong EM fields to make sure that the plasma doesn't get anywhere near anything!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ISL 6y agoNone. dboreham has it right -- all the confinement is done magnetically or photon pressure. Stars do it through gravitation.
- marathonian 6y agoSo what happens if it touches something? Meaning, somehow, the magnetic field fails due to equipment. Would it be like highly corrosive acid going through material or a much more violent reaction?
- petschge 6y agoThe heat capacity of the plasma is actually fairly low. So while it might take a but of wall material, it would cool very quickly, electrons would get captures, and you are left with a bit of gas at rather low pressure.
- marathonian 6y agoNon-rhetorical: So what's the point of this experiment? Seems like harnessing its energy will not be very effective based on how quickly it dissipates
- Dylan16807 6y agoThink of it just like fire. Fire will also give you almost no energy if you physically scoop it up. Instead you leave the fire where it is, continually generating heat, and you capture what pours off. Or you pump in fuel, ignite it, and exhaust it over and over at a high speed, like in an engine.
- foota 6y agoThere is little energy stored in the gas, but it produces lots of energy. I.e., every second the gas might produce a megawatt second of energy, but only have the heat capacity to store 1 kilowatt second. Numbers may not be to scale but you get the idea. I'm also not sure how this stays stable. I guess that if the gas gets hotter the process breaks down? Mayb the volume expands within the confinement and the reaction rate goes down as a result?
- SamBam 6y agoBut surely the whole point of this is to eventually create a lot of steam, right? So hopefully it will have enough energy to do that.
- andi999 6y agoWhat is actually the plan to harvest the energy (how to get the heat to a steam engine or whatever and generate electricity?)
- nomel 6y agoDetails for some of the power supplies used for the superconducting magnets in the first plasma experiment: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5226386 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5226386 And details about the magnets: https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20261539 https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20261539 > The vertical load on coil system is estimated to be 330 tons for the coil weight and 320 tons for vertical disruption load. With some incredible forces that can be generated by the plasma. > The lateral loads in tokamak could be generated by plasma disruptions and localized halo current flows through the plasma facing components (PFC) or vacuum vessel. The estimated peak lateral load in KSTAR is about 1.3 MN
- lolc 6y agoHuge electromagnets. Perfectly tuned. With the power budget of a small town.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- willis936 6y agoKSTAR uses superconducting confinement coils. It takes virtually no power for the confining field. I work on a research machine that uses copper coils. It uses 16x 1000 HP train traction motors with 2000 lb flywheels for energy storage to power the confinement field for one second. :)
- fy20 6y ago16x 1000HP is 12MW, so yes a small town of ~10,000 people. For a few seconds at least :-)
- willis936 6y agoMy point is that superconducting confinement coils don't take any power to maintain their field. You just spin them up and leave them there. The power to keep cryogenics running is a hundred-fold less than the electrical power needed for confinement coils. JET and DIII-D are the largest magnetic confinement fusion research devices made so far and they both use copper coils. They have confining fields of 3.45 T and 2.2 T, respectively. My machine operates at a modest 1 T (for now) and is much smaller. I'm sure the electricity bill that the confining coils that those large machines racked up is substantial.
- dredds 6y agoForgive my ignorance, but aren't cryogenics and plasma temps at complete odds to function in near proximity?
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- Sparkyte 6y agoJust buy a bunch of totinos pizza rolls.
- klmadfejno 6y agoIn the original spider-man 2, this is what Doctor Octopus is trying to achieve with his metal arms before he goes insane (because... the arms were evil or something?). Perhaps Deep Mind could try outfitting self aware human exo-skeletons to control the magnetic containment of fusion reactions now that they're done with protein folding.
- femto 6y agoThe main reason the plasma needs to be kept away from the walls is that they will conduct the heat away from the plasma and the hot gas will cease being a plasma. It has analogies with static electricity. Static electricity might have a voltage of tens of thousands of volts, but it does little damage when you touch someone as the number of electrons (current) is so small that not much energy is involved. Similarly with a plasma. The temperature (energy per particle) is very high but the number of particles is small, so the total energy is low. Touching something will cause the energy to leak away (cf. static electricity discharge) converting the hot plasma back to cool gas.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoSome designs for fusion walls consider molten sodium walls. Liquid walls have the advantage that they can’t crack, and you can use the absorbed energy to heat water and run an engine.
- tantalor 6y agoCelsius units are so difficult to relate to... what's that in Fahrenheit?
- lacker 6y agoJust multiply by 2 for a poor man’s Celsius -> Fahrenheit conversion. 200M degrees.
- grosswait 6y agoOr by 1.8 for a grade schooler's conversion.
- ISL 6y agoSince the conversion factor is about two: 200,000,000 degrees.
- highwind 6y agoAt that temperature it's almost meaningless to compare the numerical value of C and F. But it's 180M F for the curious.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Octoth0rpe 6y agoDo... you actually have anything practical to relate it to at that scale? If you're talking over 1M degrees, it doesn't much matter if it's C, F, Rankine, or whatever. It is fucking hot :P
- talmr 6y agohow does that hot temp get controlled?
- iamgopal 6y agoAt how many seconds we will have fusion reactor ?
- tsimionescu 6y agoIdeally indefinitely many, but a few million may be a nice start.
- cromwellian 6y agoI feel like we need a SpaceX for Fusion, someone willing to fund and build a whole bunch of SPARC reactor prototypes of various sizes quickly, with the understanding they may or may not work. The Nature Papers on ARC show it's almost sure to work. So it's rather disappointing it'll take 5 years to build SPARC, and then another 10 for ARC. Seems to me the primary problems are manufacturing and scaling components like REBCO. Someone like Musk would look at this and go "ok, first thing, let's build our own REBCO factory, and even mine the materials if necessary ourselves to get cost efficiency". They're still approaching this as "big science" project, where they don't want to fail, and they're gonna subsist on grants and as much off the shelf providers as they can. Given the climate crisis, the government should be doing the same as they did with the CRS for space, award DOE contracts of $X billion for a working reactor, dole it out to people doing SPARC or Thorium Molten Salt (LIFTR) designs. The innovation rate in Fusion is way too slow, we need to build and fail a lot more rather than sink $22 billion into multi-decade projects like ITER.
- boogies 6y ago> we need to build and fail a lot more inb4 FUD from people who think nuclear power failures have been lethal more than once
- cma 6y ago"Please consider this a commitment that I will fund fusion energy for any house in Flint that has water contamination above FDA levels. No kidding."
- obilgic 6y agoI don't think SpaceX came in to play when it was "may or may not work", tech is mostly developed by NASA and others over decades. SpaceX's value add is eventually providing economies of scale.
- foota 6y agoThey developed a new rocket engine and the ability to land upright, both significant engineering challenges, which it seems is what the problem is currently for fusion (i.e., we need to build and iterate on things that mostly seem they should work)
- radoslawc 6y ago> South Korea's fusion device KSTAR runs for 20 seconds at 100M degrees Celsius Maybe I'm being paranoid, but given what 2020 has been so far maybe is not the best year to tinker with 100M C fusion devices ;)
- lallysingh 6y agoNo it's the best time. If it fails, nobody will notice with the rest of the planet burning.
- pfundstein 6y agoI was curious what might happen if the containment field collapsed, and found this[1] on reddit from 6y ago. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it sounds pretty bad -- though not nearly as bad as a nuclear meltdown at a fission plant. > It will depend on the reactor design. Let's assume a worst case scenario, there is a breach in the reactor containment vessel and the fuel gets out. In that case, your reactor is likely destroyed, and a fuel leak will contaminate local groundwater. > Fusion reactors very broadly have two main species that are being developed, inertial confinement and magnetic confinement reactors. Inertial confinement uses lasers to heat little pellets of hydrogen fuel on all sides to the point that it fuses, and I won't discuss them here. Magnetic confinement is more of your 'typical' reactor design. For instance, the tokamak. That's the ITER reactor in France. It has a donut shaped chamber where hydrogen plasma is heated to 150 million degrees Celsius and contained by magnetic fields in order to fuse hydrogen into helium. Let's suppose it gets out. First, the magnetic field fails. The magnetic field is supported by superconducting magnets which have to be kept at temperatures close to absolute zero in order to carry the electric current that produces the field. The heat of the escaped plasma will cause the wires to stop superconducting and all of the energy of the magnetic field will very quickly be dumped into heat in the wires, boiling off the cryogens. This is called a quench and it can seriously fuck up the magnet and cryogen system. (Come to think of it, if the reactor has an outer cryogen tank that's basically at absolute zero and a plasma at some hundred million degrees then this reactor probably has one of the steepest temperature gradients in the universe- this kind of thing just doesn't happen naturally). > Anyway- the expanding cloud of gas. When the gas expands it cools very very quickly and ceases fusing almost immediately, stopping the fusion reaction dead in its tracks. Unfortunately, the fuel is a mixture of hydrogen isotopes- deuterium with one proton and one neutron, and tritium with one proton and two neutrons. Deuterium is stable and found in nature and is actually harvested from the hydrogen in sea water since that's a readily available source, but tritium is actually unstable and highly radioactive. > A tritium leak into the environment is bad because hydrogen is so reactive it makes it really hard to clean up. Greenpeace has a good fact sheet about the risks of tritium leaks, and as pro-nuclear energy as I am, I have to acknowledge that tritium leaks are really fucking bad. > When radioactive material gets out into the environment you want it have a very very short half life, or a very very long one. That way it'll either all decay away immediately, or it'll decay so slowly that it's not really irradiating anything. Tritium has a half-life of 12 years, which is neither fast nor slow, it's right in the sweet spot of being terrible. That tritium will bond with oxygen to make water molecules. Radioactive water molecules. These will make their way into the water table and are impossible to remove because they look just like any other water molecule... except sometimes it'll spit out a high energy electron. If this water is in your body, then that radioactive decay will shoot a high energy electron through you, destroying organic molecules and scrambling your DNA. At the least, this can increase your risk of cancer a marginal amount. At its worst, it could kill you. > Best case scenario: the reactor is destroyed but the gas is contained by some secondary containment vessel so the tritium leak doesn't happen, and the gas can be collected and processed properly. Anyway, even in worst case scenario I can imagine for a fusion reactor failure is still a million times less dangerous than fission reactor meltdown. >> Lockheed Martin said that they can have a fully functional fusion reactor in three years. > I'll believe it when I see it. [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nbn11/what_would_happen_to_a_fusion_reactor_if_the/cmc8xl7/ https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/2nbn11/what_wou...
- nickpinkston 6y agoHere to plug the excellent: Fusion Energy Base by Sam Wurzel (prev Founder/CEO of Octopart, early YC founder). This is a great article on measuring fusion progress: https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-in-fusion-energy-the-triple-products https://www.fusionenergybase.com/article/measuring-progress-...
- booleandilemma 6y agoCould this be weaponized in the way nuclear energy can be weaponized?
- humanfromearth 6y agoNo.
- bufferoverflow 6y agoIt already is. Hydrogen bombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermonuclear_weapon The largest non-thermonuclear bomb was only 500 kilotons yield. The largest thermonuclear bomb was 50 megatons. 100x.
- dtx1 6y agoYes, we call that a thermonuclear bomb. The only problem is that in order to detonate a thermonuclear bomb you need a nuclear bomb to ignite the Fusion reaction first. Civilian/Generative Fusion can never be weaponized the same way nuclear fission has been. Fusion only occurs under the most extreme temperature and magnetic conditions, if they vary even slightly the fusion process stops instantly and you get no energy. We can barely get a energy positive fusion process working in a reactor with all the best tech in the world. Barely. It cannot and will not ever be weaponized the way you think.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoUnlimited energy makes rail guns really nice.
- jtms 6y agosshhhh... don't leak our plans for the fusion powered orbital rail gun platform - its top secret!
- willis936 6y agoAny fusion reactor in this century will likely be putting out a Lot of fast neutrons. These fast neutrons can turn otherwise benign heavy elements into weapons-grade fissile material. There are detection techniques for this kind of breeding and I’d imagine any country capable of building a fusion reactor would also be okay with audits. If you just want weapons-grade fissile material, there are far more economical avenues than a fusion reactor. Also, if fusion reactors become more viable than fission reactors, then we could put a global ban on all fissile materials. They would serve no purpose except for weapons.
- pontifier 6y agoMore fusion news means another plug for DD PRO Fusion! The "DD" stands for Deuretium-Deureriunm. The DD PRO Fusion reactor uses single species Deuterium and doesn't require Tritium fuel. Learn more at http://www.DDPROfusion.com http://www.DDPROfusion.com
- blondie9x 6y agoGood breakthrough but video on page was troubling to me. The plastic surgery made me feel uncomfortable. Seeing that face way too often.
- apsec112 6y agoSorry, but this, by itself, is a totally meaningless article. There might be an actual scientific advance here, but if so, I have absolutely no idea what it is. "100 million degrees" may sound impressive, but it's completely trivial to create a plasma at that temperature; plasma temperatures are typically quoted in electron-volts (eV) or kilo-electron-volts (keV), and a temperature like this probably corresponds to somewhere in the tens of keV. You can make a plasma like this in your garage, and run it as long as you like (there are guides on YouTube). But it won't produce net energy, ie., you won't get more energy out than you put in. To know how impressive this is, we need to know: - Was net energy produced during this time? - How much plasma was there, ie, how large of a scale was the experiment at? - How dense was the plasma? - How repeatable is the experiment? Could it be run again sustainably, or did it fry all the equipment with fast neutron radiation? The article doesn't seem to mention any of these, and without them, "100 million degrees" is meaningless.
- sida 6y agoWait what? You can create something that runs at 100 million degrees in your garage? Can you explain a bit more for the unlearned?
- nielu 6y agoI'm not sure about the garage, but you can sure do it in your microwave - NileRed did a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0u8Vtf2GoQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0u8Vtf2GoQ Aaand he had to break all of his beakers afterwards: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGqVMbAQhBs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGqVMbAQhBs
- choonway 6y agoBuilding a dyson swarm, or even a fraction of it would be the real game changer. Distance from sun to moon - 148,000,000 km. Radius of earth - 6,370 km fraction of light emitted by sun falling on earth (pi6370^2) / (4pi*(148e6)^2) = approx 4.6e-10 or 0.00000000046 or 0.000000046% To put it in perspective - if we could collect 100% of the light energy emitted from the sun each day, it would amount to the energy that the earth receives from the sun in 6 million years.
- kolinko 6y agoWe are building it - it's called photovoltaics and growing fast.
- choonway 6y agoIt is more efficient to use mirrors and reflect the light energy to the destination instead of using it to charge batteries / transmission lines and transport it physically. Perhaps a concentrator on the moon or something?
- sfifs 6y agoGiant parabolic concentrators in space also essentially become weapons and therefore no major nation will allow others to possess them. Laser beams to transmit power may be more efficient but same problem with weaponization
- choonway 6y agoIt only goes to show that there can be only one winner in space, not that solar concentrators can't be built.
- sneak 6y agoI think the game may have to change a few times already before a Dyson swarm (or even a significant fraction of one) could be built. We're going to need cheap clean power in large quantities to even think about manufacturing something like that. You have to walk before you can run.
- speedgoose 6y ago> No other fusion power plant in the world has managed to run for more than ten seconds. This sentence is incorrect, I guess they meant at 100M degrees because some older tokamaks did run for longer than 10 seconds at lower temperature. Like the Chinese one that ran for 100 seconds at 50M degrees, but 100M degrees for a short time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Advanced_Superconducting_Tokamak https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experimental_Advanced_Superc...
- qwertox 6y agoThe "Omega Tau"-podcast does have an episode about superconductivity where they interview a superconductor engineer from ITER [1]. A section of the podcast is about "Quench Protection", which relates to what occurs when the superconductor looses its superconductivity and the energy needs to be removed from the system as fast as possible before it melts. From the abstract of "Capacitor bank for Fast Discharge Unit of iter facility" [2]: > In case of failure, in particular quench in a superconducting coil, rather fast and safe energy discharge from the magnetic system is provided by FDU, which breaks the coil supply loop and provides energy dissipation in high energy resistors. The ITER FDU should interrupt currents up to 70 kA with a voltage up to 10 kV. There are also some slides on the web from CERN about quench protection at the LHC [3] with photos and diagrams in it. The podcast also has several episodes on fusion "157 – Fusion at ITER" [4] and "312 – The Wendelstein 7-X Fusion Experiment" [5] (and more linked in the descriptions of those episodes). On a very separate topic, it also has a good one about weather forecasting "326 – Weather Forecasting at the ECMWF" [6] [1] https://omegataupodcast.net/285-superconductivity/ https://omegataupodcast.net/285-superconductivity/ [2] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6191678 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6191678 [3] https://indico.cern.ch/event/194284/contribution/34/attachments/281522/393603/TenKate_-_CAS_-Handout-Quench-Erice-2103.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/194284/contribution/34/attachme... [4] https://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/ https://omegataupodcast.net/157-fusion-at-iter/ [5] https://omegataupodcast.net/312-the-wendelstein-7-x-fusion-experiment/ https://omegataupodcast.net/312-the-wendelstein-7-x-fusion-e... [6] https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-ecmwf/ https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-e...
- jason0597 6y agoEvery time I read news about fusion and all the optimism surrounding it, I always remember this 1983 paper that categorically proves how fusion will never happen on a commercial scale: http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trouble-With-Fusion_MIT_Tech_Review_1983.pdf http://orcutt.net/weblog/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/The-Trou... Relevant discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782346 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20782346 So, forgive me for not feeling any excitement anymore in my life about fusion. For me, fusion is just as meaningless as a flying skyscraper. I've yet to see anyone present a good rebuttal of that 1983 paper.
- tuatoru 6y agoThat's a good discusssion of the technical objections to fusion. There is also this paper[1] from 2018 which shows that fusion will have higher capital cost than anything else. (The abstract reads like it was produced by fusion enthusiasts. They were using historical figures for PV and for on-shore and off-shore wind, and using the LCOE method which IIRC uses "overnight construction" assumptions.) There is also the point that a higher investment hurdle rate is appropriate for fusion as it's an untried risky technology. Another paper points out that fusion economics are particularly sensitive to unplanned outages. (More modular and dispersed generation methods are of course less sensitive than gas or coal to outages, e.g. plane crash.) So, fusion had its chance. Now we have cheaper alternatives, which are getting cheaper still. 1. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544218305395 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S036054421... Approximation of the economy of fusion energy
- ngcc_hk 6y agoFusion has been 10 years away ... for how many decades now. I am younglin when old engulf to heard about the promo use. It is still decades away. 2025 is a surprise target as it is only 5 years away.
- jonplackett 6y agoScience is really kicking ass this year.
- iuguy 6y agoFrom TFA: "No other fusion power plant in the world has managed to run for more than ten seconds" WEST[1] (Formerly Tore Supra) holds the continuous operation of a fusion reactor record time at 6 minutes 30 seconds. It's always frustrating where teams build fantastic projects but then make false claims that are propagated across the Internet. Don't get me wrong, 20 seconds for a new reactor is good, they'll do longer. After all, the French did in 2003. [1] https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones#18 https://www.iter.org/proj/itermilestones#18
- ClumsyPilot 6y agoPerhaps the modes of operation were not comparable? Unless you really understand whats going on, i would not be calling it false claims. However i do agree it is unclear
- whatshisface 6y agoMaybe it's the specific word, "power plant," that qualifies the claim.
- amckenna 6y agoI believe the difference here is the temperature. If you look at KSTAR's operating tests you can see that they have run for 72 seconds in the past, so they must be implying 20 seconds at > 100M, or their statement about the 20s runtime would be invalidated by their own operating history. What's more - the scientific article about the Tore Supra 2003 test is paywalled, but based on the abstract it looks like it was a test of: "simultaneously heat removal capability and particle exhaust in steady-state fully non-inductive current drive discharges" and not a test of maximum sustained temperatures. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSTAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KSTAR [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0920379605001341 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09203...
- jackric 6y agoJust waiting for DeepMind AlphaFuse to crack limitless energy too cheap to meter
- brookshalladay 6y agoI have no idea of the significance, but do we really need to be doing this? Is there any risk of creating a black hole or mega explosion? On the surface, it sounds extremely dangerous.
- brian_herman 6y agoSouth Korea will make the power source and electronics and Japan will make the body of the gundamn. https://japantoday.com/category/entertainment/japan’s-new-life-size-moving-gundam-statue-unveiled-in-full-dramatic-glory https://japantoday.com/category/entertainment/japan’s-new-li...
- KoenDG 6y agoSo, 100M degrees, huh? Absolve me of my ignorance, but how exactly does one shield that? Is there an upper limit to what can be shielded/contained?