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Fusion reactor is held together with tape
- exabrial 3y agoThese are the kind of clickbait headlines I enjoy.
- adventured 3y agoIter will be humiliated in exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that the US Governnment's efforts to crack the human genome were humiliated by Venter & Celera moving at a far faster pace. While the smaller, faster, more nimble approaches will race on ahead, Iter will lag badly.
- doctorwho42 3y agoIronically, the US government had the opportunity to fund this project when it comes as still entirely contained at MIT. They didn't, and so the fusion people at MIT spun a startup to be able to receive funding and collaborate with the scientists still at MIT. So the government (1) could have been at the forefront of this project through funding MIT, (2) its tech and results would be entirely public, (3) we may have already had first plasma with sparc by now because the time it took MIT to accept they were no longer going to receive tokamak levels of funding - and then come up with CFS as a solution to get private funding for work within MITs system
- sanxiyn 3y agoCelera used HGP data but not vice versa, so that's not a fair comparison. Celera's use of shotgun sequencing was an inspired choice, but even in retrospect it wasn't obviously superior to HGP's chain termination. It was high risk high return bet that could well have failed, while HGP made a conservative choice. Sequencing has two parts of reading and assembling. Shotgun sequencing makes reading easier and assembling harder. Computing infrastructure of 1990s was barely enough to assemble shotgun reads of human genome, and Celera was overly optimistic from its success on fruit fly genome. They were saved by miracles and heroics at the end. Of course shotgun sequencing is much better now because we have much better computing infrastructure.
- ipcress_file 3y agoDamn. I was hoping for a Red Green-designed Mr. Fusion.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoRiding high on a 1985 Ford LTD station wagon piloted by Doc Brown with Harold pointing out some obvious omission at just the moment of catastrophic failure.
- dale_glass 3y agoI think this is very cool research, but I'm almost certainly neither fusion nor fission will be a significant part of the solution. Fission has already lost the competition, being far too expensive, and not getting any better. Fusion will take decades to get to production, let alone to being competitive. Meanwhile, renewables are extremely amenable towards mass manufacturing, mass deployment, and quick iteration, something neither fusion nor fission are good at. We'll ultimately solve the problem by inelegant brute force rather than by a small number of amazingly engineered wonders.
- Animats 3y agoHow promising is the physics of this thing? The basic claim here is that that, with a better magnet, tokomaks can produce useful power. Is that a valid claim? How does energy come out? As neutrons? Something with a charge? What's the first wall, the thing the emitted particles hit? These are the standard fusion reactor questions, and the article avoids all of them. Seeing an article this dumbed down from the IEEE is disappointing.
- DennisP 3y agoYes it's valid. Tokamak scaling is very well established: the output scales with the square of reactor size but the fourth power of magnetic field strength. Double the field, 16X the output. That's why CFS can build reactors much smaller than ITER to achieve basically the same thing. 80% of the energy from D-T fusion is neutron radiation. The CFS plan to deal with it is this: - Surround the inner war with molten FLiBe salt which functions as both coolant and tritium breeding blanket. - The inner wall is 3D-printed and replaced annually. - The magnetic coils are hinged so they can be opened up to replace the inner wall. MIT proved several years ago that they could do this in REBCO tape without adding significant electrical resistance. This old presentation from MIT's Dennis Whyte goes into more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
- Animats 3y ago> This old presentation from MIT's Dennis Whyte goes into more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4 Oh, that's fascinating. The tape has fantastic properties. The superconductive layer is only 1μm thick. The superconductor itself doesn't quench at high magnetic field strengths, which is different from most other superconductors. The insulator is stainless steel! Compared to a superconductor, anything with more resistance is an insulator. His key points are 1) now we can have much stronger magnetic fields, and 2) with stronger magnetic fields, some of the other hard problems, such as plasma instability, go away. Also, this tape is much easier to work with than other superconductors. Not brittle, less damaged by radiation, not too hard to terminate, superconducts below 43K. So some expensive engineering problems also go away. All this is very encouraging.
- godelski 3y agoThe title here implies hacky, but this definitely isn't. But next chance you get, go visit a physics or chemistry lab at a top university. I think a lot of people would be surprised by how hacky things often are in academic labs. You'll find nuclear reactors that are built by students as well as equipment built by them. Then remember that physicists and chemists aren't engineers; mechanical, electrical, nor software. I wouldn't be surprised if you found a fusion reactor in an academic lab held together by tape, metaphorical or literal.
- Ekaros 3y agoI would actually guess that Engineering in Universities would also be only marginally better. In research and such good enough really does get quite far. Even if you could fabricate the perfect part. Re-using or jury rigging something likely is still done to save time, money and effort.
- willis936 3y agoI worked at a university magnetic confinement research lab for a few years. It was certainly scrappy but no literal duct tape. What university labs can accomplish on a tight budget is impressive. Literally plucking vacuum pumps out of the trash. I'd do it again if it could pay the bills.
- p0w3n3d 3y agoTitle: "Fusion reactor is held together with tape" Lead: Fusion reactor requires 10000 kilometers of this superconducting tape Title: "spacex rocket is glued with bubblegum" Lead: 16 thousands of elves must chew resin from the Yggdrasil for 100 years to create a bubblegum that will hold spacex rocket together
- bcraven 3y agoYou may mean "lede"?
- p0w3n3d 3y agoEither I don't understand the reference, or I'm not understood. The "lead" is the first paragraph of the publication.
- trobertson 3y agoThat's what they're saying. It's spelled "lede": https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/lede
- p0w3n3d 3y agoThanks! It seems both spellings are correct, however nice to learn the main one, and additionally an idiom. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/lede https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/lede
- klyrs 3y ago> Although “high temperature” might suggest something that could burn you, HTS materials operate in a range of 20 to 77 kelvins (around –200 to –250 °C). Technically, grabbing a massive object at 20-77K will result in burns.
- joshspankit 3y agoI wish I could flag ieee.org for clickbaiting.
- lambdatronics 3y agoI toured a multi-million-dollar electron microscope at ORNL. They had a piece of tissue paper taped to the side. I asked about it, and they said that it was an airflow monitor. It turned out to be more sensitive than some very expensive sensors, according to the tour guide.
- ben_w 3y ago10,000 km? I wonder how many amps that can carry. (I have occasional daydreams of a global power grid; four of these reactors would have enough superconductor to go around the equator).
- explaininjs 3y agoTake down the world for the low low price of 4 missiles! Sign me up.
- RobotToaster 3y agoWouldn't a superconductor theoretically be able to carry infinite amps? since it has zero resistance? (I=V/R etc)
- ohazi 3y agoMore current produces a stronger magnetic field around the conductor, and superconductors usually have a maximum magnetic field beyond which they stop superconducting.
- Sanzig 3y agoThere is a critical magnetic field at which superconductors stop being superconductive [1]. Generally, a superconductor carrying a lot of current suddenly becoming conductive is a bad thing. This is directly related to the maximum current density in a particular superconducting wire, so you need larger cross sections to increase the current carrying capability. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_field https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_field
- WJW 3y agoNot really, at a certain amount of current (how much exactly depends of the shape and material of the superconductor in question) it "quenches", where it abruptly goes back to being a material with non-zero resistance. Since there is usually a ton of current already flowing through the material, this usually leads to damage as the former superconductor heats up rapidly. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Magnet_quench https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superconducting_magnet#Magnet_...
- archo 3y agoSPARC (tokamak) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARC_(tokamak)
- epistasis 3y agoWhat a weird let down that this is actually thousands of kilometers of super advanced super conducting tape, and not the more mundane varieties available at my local hardware store. Great headline.
- hammock 3y agoThe headline relies on our shorthand of “adhesive tape” as “tape.” There is no adhesive in this tape and it’s not holding anything together. “Tape” simply refers to the geometrical shape of the product
- epistasis 3y agoWell there's a second double meaning of the "held together" phrase in the headline too, as it's not adhesive properties of the tape but the electromagenetic properties of the superconducting tape that's doing the "holding."
- adhesive_wombat 3y agoCorrect. Unidirectional bonding strip is the preferred Star Command terminology for the adhesive material.
- ck2 3y agoWe can still make our own x-ray machines with mundane scotch tape for giftwrapping https://google.com/search?q=scotch+tape+x-ray+machine https://google.com/search?q=scotch+tape+x-ray+machine