14 ms·
A Star in a Bottle
- geetee 13y agoNo one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion dollars—a sum that makes iter the most expensive scientific instrument on Earth. And WhatsApp cost how much?
- benjamta 13y agoMy father worked on the ITER project for many years. This article goes some way to express the shear scale of this project, it's absolutely vast. When I was a lot younger I was taken on a tour of JET (http://www.efda.org/jet/ http://www.efda.org/jet/) and was overawed with the size of it. ITER is an order of magnitude bigger. The machine that follows ITER is where things get really interesting. Called DEMO, it's still in the planning phase - but will provide a template for future commercial fusion power generation. They're talking about possibly putting fusion generated power into the grid by 2040. Truly exciting stuff.
- XorNot 13y agoMy favorite memory of being in France a half year back was visiting the ITER site. Partly because we misjudged how to get there and trekked 3km up the highway from the bus stop in the middle of nowhere to get to it. It was still just a hole in the ground then - they were getting ready to put in the seismic dampeners for the base layer of the Tokamak structure. Since then I've had it liked on Facebook so I can see the progress bit by bit.
- benjamta 13y agoIt's fascinating seeing it progress (albeit from afar), true cathedral scale engineering.
- parasight 13y agoI can't seem to find any current pictures using Google. Can someone provide a link or is it prohibited to take pictures of the construction site.
- quarterto 13y ago> getting ready to put in the seismic dampeners for the base layer of the Tokamak structure I love that this sentence sounds like 50s pulp scifi.
- ck2 13y agoand then there is PROTO (seriously, these guys love acronyms)
- sliverstorm 13y agoHate to nitpick, but it's sheer scale Shear is a verb (or noun); I shear the sheep Sheer is an adjective; I was awestruck by the sheer cliffs
- benjamta 13y agoquite right - thanks for pointing that out :)
- transfire 13y agoITER is a money hole. It was setup to suck R&D money away from real fusion research.
- tfgg 13y agoWhile I do think that alternative fusion paths should be better funded, cranks aside, I don't think that it's the fault of ITER that it's the most promising and best developed and so the best funded one. The entire field is ridiculously underfunded for what it can offer and we shouldn't be having to risk it all on one or two projects.
- antimagic 13y agoExactly. This article just makes me mad - they are penny-pinching on quite simply the most important piece of technology that humanity has ever tried to develop. If commercial reactors are switched on by 2040, the planet's CO2 output will have dropped drastically by 2060 - way more than all but the most optimistic estimations linked to climate change. $10b is nothing compared to what was destroyed in the GFC. It's nothing compared to what the US spent on a largely futile war in Iraq. It is nothing compared to what G8 governments spend every year on defence. FFS, damages from Hurricane Sandy are estimated at twice that figure. It's peanuts. Somewhere along the line, the message that this is R&D, and not science has been lost. Politicians honestly seem to think that this is another of those toys that scientists are always wanting to build, and not the solution to the world's energy problems. Dear politicians - no, this is not another space telescope. It's not even another LHC. It is nothing more or less than the one technology that can save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change, and they quibble about the cost. Madness.
- lifeformed 13y agoIt's a little bit over the cost of a single aircraft carrier.
- DanBC 13y ago> Politicians honestly seem to think I am not making an anti-American point here. UK politics has equally daft politicians. But politics is full of people like this: http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=87390 http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=87390 > "Wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it's hotter to areas where it's cooler. That's what wind is. Wouldn't it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I'm not saying that's going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can't transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It's just something to think about." http://imgur.com/gallery/JPoWLEx http://imgur.com/gallery/JPoWLEx
- happyscrappy 13y agoSingle page: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_...
- jackgavigan 13y agoAs a child, I read Friday by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called "Shipstones", which are described as a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker." In the novel, the Shipstone's eponymous inventor realised "that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension. "Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it." Ever since then, I've been far more interested in new methods of storing and transporting energy than in new methods of generating energy. Also, what happens if the mechanisms that contain the "Star in a Bottle" fail? Will the French Alps suddenly and catastrophically acquire a new valley?
- sp332 13y agoThere isn't very much fuel in the reactor at a given time, and the reaction only happens in the very center. If the containment fails, the material will just continue in a straight line instead of being redirected to the center, and it will spread out and cool off very quickly. A bigger worry might be that too much fuel is added at once, but heating and ionizing all that fuel is already very difficult for the reactor, so it would probably just quench it.
- tonetheman 13y agoAnd zombies will come out of it and we will all die... or they will switch it on and we will instantly turn into a star. :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ryanklee 13y ago> will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower. This is a strange sentence. (1) Notice Height of object-A; (2) Notice Weight of object-A; (3) Compare Weight of object-A to Weight of object-B where object-B is known more for its property of Height than of its Weight. The sense here (I think) is that the Eiffel tower is significantly taller than than ITER, and therefore ought to be significantly heavier. But it's not! ITER is heavier, and heavier by a lot. Go figure! But what a silly line of reasoning. Is it a common conclusion that taller things should also be heavier things? Further, this seems to me to be of the same breed as "bigger than the state of Rhode Island"-type of arbitrary comparisons -- only in this instance more confusing!
- tempodox 13y agoYou are easily confused.
- dTal 13y agoThis is unfair - he (I assume ryanklee is a he) merely said it was confusing, not that he was confused, and spent the entirety of his comment explaining why it was so (and I agree, it is an odd comparison). If you disagree, rebut him instead of condescending.
- lmm 13y agoGiven a lot of the article is about how they're having to reinforce the floor and so on to bear the weight of the thing, I think it's emphasising how dense the core is going to be.
- leoedin 13y agoThe article's full of fairly silly elaborate descriptions. My favourite so far (3 pages in): > Some in the field believe that a working machine would be a monument to human achievement surpassing the pyramids of Giza. Which suggests that the pyramids of Giza are a monument of human achievement that hasn't yet been surpassed. You only need to take a look at almost any 20th century bridge, skyscraper or even ship to know that that isn't really true. Certainly the pyramids of Giza are a monument of ancient Egyptian achievement, but the last few centuries have completely and utterly surpassed that.
- ck2 13y agoLHC didn't make me nervous and I laughed somewhat at the people who sued to keep it off for fear it might end the world. This one however, I dunno. Sounds like things could go wrong with that much energy. When they made the first atomic bomb, they had theories about what might happen but not 100% sure and there were some surprises. But I'll take death from this over death from fracking.
- aqme28 13y agoIt's actually a lot less energy than it sounds like. The temperatures will hit 10-100 times the temperature of the sun, but the density inside will be very very low. This thing couldn't vaporize a car. Remember, this is only a 500 megawatt device, and the reaction is so unstable that if it somehow escapes the containment of the device it dies instantly. It can't "run away" like some fission reactions can. edit: Not actually sure how much energy it takes to "vaporize a car in seconds." In terms of energy this thing is roughly equivalent to any other fairly large power plant.
- benjamta 13y agoExactly right. Fusion is not at all like nuclear fission. It's so incredibly hard to maintain the reaction that any catastrophic failure stops everything. There's no unrequested fission surplus situation possible here...
- Florin_Andrei 13y ago> but the density inside will be very very low The density is not that low, but the total amount of ultra-hot matter is pretty small. If magnetic confinement is lost, the plasma will expand and cool; there is no sustained fusion without the confinement. The core would probably be wrecked, but that's about it.
- aqme28 13y ago"The density is not that low, but the total amount of ultra-hot matter is pretty small." I'm sorry but I don't understand the distinction.
- ck2 13y agoa cryogenics plant, which will produce liquid helium Wait, they are manufacturing helium? Thought that wasn't possible? Or just converting gas to liquid?
- maxerickson 13y agoYes, it is a fusion plant. Helium is a product of hydrogen fusion. edit: but they appear to be talking about support infrastructure, not a product of the fusion.
- ajcarpy2005 13y agoTransmutation from one or more elements to one or more new elements is indeed possible, if difficult.
- adamtj 13y agoIt converts gas to liquid. The gas comes from radioactive decay of elements in the earth's crust. It's a non-renewable resource. When helium escapes into the atmosphere, it's so light that it eventually escapes out into space and is gone for good. A fusion reactor such as this will make helium from hydrogen, and would be the only way we have to do so. It probably won't do it in industrially interesting quantities though.
- pilom 13y agoHelium exists in 2 parts of this plant. In the plasma toroid (the hot part) hydrogen will be converted into helium but in incredibly small quantities (X grams/hour). In the electromagnets, there will be liquid helium. This is to keep the wires in the electromagnets cold enough to be superconducting. This liquid helium is mined from the earth and then cooled to a liquid in the cryogenics plant. So overall, they are "manufacturing" cryogenically-cooled-helium by taking helium from the ground and cooling it. They are also "manufacturing" helium atoms at a very small quantities by fusing hydrogen atoms together.
- Grue3 13y agoThen isn't the process limited by the amount of helium on Earth (which is pretty low)? Once all liquid helium evaporates the reactor wouldn't be able to produce enough helium to replace it.
- ck2 13y agoCheck this out, Japan is going their own way instead of this experiment According to researchers at a demonstration reactor in Japan, a fusion generator should be feasible in the 2030s and no later than the 2050s. Japan is pursuing its own research program with several operational facilities that are exploring several fusion paths. http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/45/2/004 http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/45/2/004 Also, they are already planning the successor to ITER, a commercial plant called DEMO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO
- marze 13y agoYou can get the date fusion power will become feasible by adding 30 years to the current year. Been holding steady at 30 for quite some time.
- ck2 13y agoWell I get that logic but this time they are putting some serious money where their mouths are. Even the USA/Russians could not come to an agreement to build such a project.
- drjesusphd 13y agoThat's only because, as soon as that claim was made in 1980, the fusion budget was immediately (and thereafter, steadily) cut. "We're only 30 years away? Bah, what's the rush?"
- mng2 13y agoActually, Japan is one of the biggest contributors to ITER. Notably, they are continuing a strong domestic fusion program -- compare this to the U.S., where most of the fusion budget is going to ITER, at the expense of domestic fusion programs (such as Alcator at MIT).
- Ygg2 13y agoGotta fuel those giant mecha suits.
- Flammy 13y agoObviously the tech is really awesome, but I was curious how the projected power level compares (500 megawatts) Comparison to existing powerplants: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+megawatts http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+megawatts TL;DR: We already have significantly bigger plants. ('average' coal and nuclear plant produces about twice as much power)
- tnorthcutt 13y agoWell, yes, but this is a test reactor. It wouldn't make much sense to build a "production scale" reactor just for (initial) testing.
- pilom 13y agoFor those curious, the Three Gorges Dam in China is the largest powerplant in the world and has a maximum power rating of 22,500 MW (22.5 GW).
- cwal37 13y agoTo be fair, Three Gorges (like any large hydro) is comprised of many turbines, 32 700MW turbines in this case. To counter, the biggest nuclear power plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, has 7 generating units which are each above 1 GW. Two of those units are at ~1.3GW, nearly double a Three Gorges turbine. For more perspective, the smallest nuke in the States is Fort Calhoun which has a single reactor at 502MW.
- drjesusphd 13y agoBut there's only a few hundred years' worth of uranium and coal remaining (and we better not be burning the latter for that long for greenhouse reasons). There is millions' of years worth of fusion fuel on Earth. The fact that it's "only" half a coal plant is hardly a criticism.
- prewett 13y agoWell, $20 billion and counting for half a coal plant is a bit of a problem... And actually, it's not half a coal plant, because the half coal plant is net + 500 MW, and since ITER isn't supposed to reach the ignition point, the output is 500 MW, but the input is > 500 MW. If fusion requires wonder-of-the-world kind of technology to not even break even, it makes me somewhat pessimistic. (However, I still say, more power to them, fund them, let's see where this goes)
- EGreg 13y agoDecades from now? Well I hope they build the prototype in space then, and far far away. I don't want that heat escaping...
- EGreg 13y agoHeat radiation is hard to trap. In fact, we use it in nuclear reactors to boil water, which should in theory let even more heat escape due to the second law of thermodynamics. Yes, a vacuum may stop convection but heat can escape through radiation. What then? That's why I would want this thing so far away that the angular projection of the Earth onto it is small.
- lquist 13y agoI am awestruck by ITER. This is the reason that I am in this field.
- slacka 13y agoIt's crazy that the US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in Iraq. Yet, we spend practically nothing on technology that could offer clean, safe, energy independence. I'm happy to see any money going into fusion research, but it does seem that Focus Fusion has a much better chance of delivering in the near term. If you're unfamiliar with the technology, check out the Google tech talk below. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg
- Zikes 13y agoWe didn't go to Iraq for oil, we went there so that more of our own money could be funneled from government coffers into politicians' bank accounts by way of defense contracts.
- scarmig 13y agoEven that goes too far. We're terrified of the fact that we live in an arational, incomprehensible world. It's a comforting fiction that some large conspiracy controls everything for the benefit of itself at the expense of everyone else, because at least that admits the possibility of control. And if societies can be controlled, at least in principle they can be fixed. Much scarier is the idea that power stumbles blindly around like a drunken three legged elephant, arbitrarily murdering half a million people for no coherent reason beyond, well, why not?
- Zikes 13y agoI didn't say that the entirety of society is under the control of a single cabal, only that the people in power at the time were able to exert enough influence in that instance to send the country into an unnecessary war so as to benefit themselves financially.
- byerley 13y agoPerhaps scarier and more accurate is the idea that it's done for a very good reason, but that we lack the context/intelligence to understand it as individuals. No one wants to be the organism in a superorganism.
- rubicks 13y ago"Big machines either work as they’re supposed to or they don’t." Anyone else struck by the wildly reductionist sentiment in that statement?
- habosa 13y agoHate to be that guy, but how can a star in a bottle cost only ~105% of WhatsApp. One of them is incorrectly valued.
- occam65 13y agoThat made me legitimately chuckle! Though think about how popular of a communications platform that WhatsApp is, particularly in parts of Asia and Africa. It's transformed the communications industry in those areas! That still may not account for the relatively small difference between the two, but it helps put into perspective exactly why WhatsApp was so valuable.
- sitkack 13y agoI think WhatsApp is great, but is something that _didn't need to exist_. And by that I mean, the carriers structured their SMS fees in a way that did not mirror technical reality. "Data" was billed a more realistic rate as opposed to hyper-inflated SMS rates and allowed SMS type-traffic to flow over the data channel. Had carriers priced themselves properly, WhatsApp would have never had a foothold.
- nickstinemates 13y agoNot a SMS pricing issue. I believe it's the fact that it costs anything at all. When wifi is free, and you have a method that enables communication without a phone plan.. that's goodness.
- sitkack 13y agoCorrect, but that is a failure of the carriers not supporting their customers. Cellular carriers should be supporting VOIP over data (3g,4g) and internet wifi. But since they are rent seeking, they won't disrupt their voice and sms traffic, enabling plays like WhatsApp.
- nickstinemates 13y ago
- monsterix 13y ago> No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. I am not sure about this one comment in the article submitted by OP. As far as I understand the temperature at the center of the earth should be as high as that of the Sun. The core is known to be the heaviest and hottest part of our planet.
- Sharlin 13y agoThe temperature of the Earth's core is about the same as the temperature of the Sun's surface: a mere few thousand Kelvin. Not much hotter than the tungsten filament in an incandescent light bulb. The Sun's core is some 30000 times hotter, and the plasma in a Tokamak type fusion reactor about ten times hotter still.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> > No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. > I am not sure about this one comment in the article submitted by OP. As far as I understand the temperature at the center of the earth should be as high as that of the Sun. I think the most recent estimates have the core temperature of the Earth at about the surface temperature of the Sun, plus or minus a few hundred kelvin. (In the neighborhood of 6000K) The core temperature of the sun, and the temperatures expected in the reactor described, are several orders of magnitude hotter, on the order of 10^7 K.
- qntmfred 13y agothe technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty million years oh, ok
- drjesusphd 13y agoWhat's wrong with the claim? It's only dependent on getting the D-D fusion reaction burning (which we're still a long way off). Second only to matter/antimatter annihilation, nuclear fusion is the most energy-dense process in the universe. And the fuel consists of about 0.03% of the world's oceans.
- qntmfred 13y agoi wasn't aware that we had any accurate projections of the world's energy needs 30 million years from now
- drjesusphd 13y agoOf course we don't. A more accurate statement is that it would supply the world's present energy needs for 30 millions years.
- scotty79 13y agoIs it harder to build smaller tokamak? And if so, why?
- drjesusphd 13y agoNo, it's not. A huge tokamak is far more likely to reach break even. Smaller designs would be an important part of a healthy research program, but unfortunately, the US has been gutting the smaller projects.
- femto 13y agohttp://www.efda.org/faq/i-would-think-that-iter-would-require-a-substantial-amount-more-power-to-produce-the-plasma-than-jet-if-you-were-to-create-a-smaller-reactor-you-would-need-less-energy-to-run-it-thus-allowing-for-it/ http://www.efda.org/faq/i-would-think-that-iter-would-requir...
- mindbet 13y agoI read this article, and I couldn't help thinking — Couldn't they spend these billions on something like deep geothermal energy and get a much better (and more likely) return?
- drjesusphd 13y agoNot really. What's nice about fusion is the ridiculous amount of energy that would be available as fuel. Geothermal would do very little. www.withouthotair.com
- oxryly1 13y agoHindsight and all. I think the promises of fusion energy turned out to be overhyped during the latter 20th century.
- vilhelm_s 13y agoOne good resource for this kind of question is David MacKay's book "Sustainably Energy - Without the Hot Air" (free online: http://www.withouthotair.com/ http://www.withouthotair.com/). He goes through each type of sustainable energy source and estimates how much power it can provide. At least in the UK, the total potential for geothermal energy is quite small, much less than other sources such as wind and solar. But its a nice short-term supplement, we can construct them today. Having working fusion would be an amazing thing. The raw materials (lithium and deuterium) are plentiful enough that they will basically never run out, it would provide energy forever.
- ximeng 13y agoI wonder if a more open design approach would help them to build trust, increase quality and reduce expense. Rather than the team doing all the work themselves they could open up more data to outsiders to look at and spend more of their time on management. See italic points below. The more of the article I read, the more it sounds like by sharing information openly they could save massively. " As the meeting ended, he noted that there was not enough time to vet the components that occupy the third floor: plans had to be gathered, specifications brought up to date, problems reconciled. “It is not reasonable,” he said. “It means that we would need to process thousands of data points in three weeks.” Chiocchio asked if things would speed up after early floors were finished, but there were simply too many details to work through before delivering drawings to the contractor. “We have no more float,” Cordier said. “If we delay now, we will have a real delay. The only way to avoid a schedule loss is to increase our resources to cope with it.” That afternoon, Chiocchio joined me for lunch. He seemed exhausted. iter, by the time it is finished, will contain ten million individual parts, but he had only twenty-eight people working for him. He later showed me a room near his office where three men sit at workstations every day to hunt down conflicts. Before each man, there was the huge iter puzzle in miniature, filling up two computer screens. Up close, the design looked as though someone had taken the industrial landscape that runs alongside the New Jersey Turnpike and compressed it into a cube the volume of a Holiday Inn. “We have to check everything, from clashes to interfaces—like here,” one of the men said, pointing to a schematic where a support structure for the tokamak was not lining up with an embedment plate."
- pandler 13y agoI hate for my only comment on this fascinating piece to be largely irrelevant, but has anyone else noticed that the publication date is March 3, 2014? It's only the 25th of February.