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As 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", whic

As 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 ago
There 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.
- ck2 13y ago
  I found this to make some sense to me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Reactor_overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Reactor_overview I had fears that fusion could become fission but seems like that is not possible.
  - sp332 13y ago
    The elements involved are some of the lightest that exist. It's nearly impossible to get them to fission in the best of cases.
    - pygy_ 13y ago
      See http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gDm9siHIwrI/TXgaS3FfA7I/AAAAAAAAAXs/5jVPUBZZjBI/s1600/BindingEnergy_v_AtomicNumber-mod.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gDm9siHIwrI/TXgaS3FfA7I/AAAAAAAAAX... for an illustration.
mikeash 13y ago
I think you're mostly right and energy storage advances are much more exciting. However, they can substitute for each other to an extent. For example, moving transportation off of messy and expensive fossil fuels is almost all about storage. If there was a $5, 2kg battery that could hold enough charge for a car to go 3000 miles, the world would switch to electric cars almost instantaneously. We are also using fossil fuels to generate energy for lots of fixed usage where transmission is already in place. Take all of the coal power plants in the country and replace them with magical clean energy generation plants and you've made a vast improvement without any change in storage technology. If storage was magically solved, then you could use wind and solar and whatever much more easily, and replace fossil fuels that way. But storage seems to be a much tougher game.
tomphoolery 13y ago
I'm pretty sure if this failed, the Earth would catastrophically jettison its atmosphere.
_dark_matter_ 13y ago
I see what you're getting at, but I would argue that all attempts of "generating" energy are actually "transporting" energy from one storage to another. Take oil, for example; it is just a method of storing energy. In the same way, the hydrogen atom is the stored energy. Any of the methods you mentioned - sunlight, wind, streams, temperature gradients, etc. - are all examples of that same stored energy. The game is in converting it for our consumption. We're never actually "generating" energy. With that in mind, the single item with the highest "energy density" is the hydrogen atom. When we are capable of "transporting" it's stored energy to one of our storage mediums, we will have all the energy we need. Seems like it's worth the risk.
- TrainedMonkey 13y ago
  I would argue that there is a large difference between transporting and transforming. It is easy to transport/store hydrogen in a pressurized cistern. It is also fairly easy to transform hydrogen just by burning it. Of course burning fossil fuels and releasing tons of CO2 is how we got into whole global warming business anyways, so we want a more efficient transformation technology. But wait, it get's more complicated. Compare transportation and storage of hydrogen versus electricity. Vast difference, requires radically different technologies, so let's not call all energy 'same'.
  - Crito 13y ago
    Burning hydrogen itself is clean, producing only water vapor (which can be fairly trivially condensed, if necessary.) The problem is acquiring the hydrogen.
    - TrainedMonkey 13y ago
      Good point, no carbon involved.
- deleted 13y ago
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deleted 13y ago
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VLM 13y ago
"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?" To a first approximation a magical 100% effective explosion of a 500 MW fusion plant would be about as destructive as the explosion of a 500 MW coal plant. So yeah, dead stacked like cordwood and an impressive hole in the ground, but not much more than a nasty industrial accident. You'd lose a lot of windows but in bulk the building foundation would likely survive. Why an explosion would magically be 100% as effective as splitting a steam boiler like a bratwurst is a mystery, as the short version of why it takes so long to build these things is before they work they fail containment a lot of times. So its like building that 500 MW coal burner and designing it to split in half and get put back together over and over until with some fine tuning it works. In the long run, in like 2300 AD or whatever, I'm sure cheapskates will create some fascinating industrial accidents by neglecting to build in ablative shielding or liq H2 overpressure burst disks or whatever and the accidents will be quite exciting as a typical industrial accident.
lmm 13y ago
> 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? Unlikely. The reaction is not self-sustaining; it needs the very high pressure provided by the containment, and without that it would fizzle rather than boom (a hydrogen bomb works by using a fission explosion to compress the hydrogen part enough to fuse). The tritium in the fuel is radioactive and releasing it into the atmosphere would be... not ideal, but the reactor doesn't use a lot of it and it's light enough to fly off into space fairly quickly.
BigWorm 13y ago
I know they usually take some liberties, but the movie was nothing like the book.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Reality isn't like movies or tv, fusion reactors can't turn into bombs. For one, there simply isn't enough fuel in the device at any given time. For another, maintaining the conditions that allow fusion reactions to happen doesn't happen easily. If the equipment goes offline or haywire the worst case scenario is that the reactor stops. Fusion reactors are like balancing a pencil on its tip. If anything goes wrong it simply falls over. Fission reactors are different in two ways. One, it's possible for them to have a positive feedback in fission reaction rate due to lolss of coolant (this is called a "positive void coefficient"), but this can be changed in the design of the reactor and all modern reactors have a negative void coefficient. Two, fission byproducts are both extremely radiologically hazardous and continually producing heat from decay over long periods of time. This means that reactor fuel and used decomissioned fuel still needs to be actively cooled for a very long time, and if not then it can melt down which is very difficult to contain. These two problems are the genesis of the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, respectively. In contrast, the products of fusion reactor operations don't get hot and as mentioned the reaction will just stop running if anything goes pear shaped. These factors alone are major reasons why fusion power is so desirable. It wouldn't use of fossil fuels nor produce CO2 and would be unimaginably safer than fission power.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  > Two, fission byproducts are both extremely radiologically hazardous and continually producing heat from decay over long periods of time. It's probably worth pointing out that those two things are the inverse of each other. The elements that take the longest to decay are inherently the least radioactive, because that's what radioactivity is: The consequence of radioactive decay. Something with a half life of 24,000 years is barely radioactive at all. Something with a half life of 24 seconds will give you radiation poisoning very quickly if you encounter a lot of it but won't be anywhere to be found if you come back in an hour. The waste problem is also largely a political rather than scientific problem. The commonly-cited 24,000 year half life is for Plutonium-239 ("weapons grade plutonium"), which can be mixed at the outset with Plutonium-240 to make it unsuitable for bombs and impossible to separate, and then used as reactor fuel to destroy it entirely. The most radiologically dangerous fission byproducts (largely Sr-90 and Cs-137) are the ones with ~30 year half lives, making them radioactive enough to cause significant damage and also long-lived enough to persist for several decades, but they also have significant market value in nuclear medicine or radioisotope thermoelectric generators or scientific research. The massive political stupidity is in not removing the spent fuel from the reactor site and separating it into its constituent elements so that it can be put to productive use rather than sitting around waiting for disaster to strike. And the entire concept of burying it under a mountain for a million years is just ridiculous.
mng2 13y ago
Laboratory fusion is a rather delicate process, once described as 'containing a blob of jello with rubber bands'. The typical Tokamak fusion plasma is orders of magnitude less dense than air, and if it hits the wall of the containment chamber, it rapidly loses heat and stops fusion-ing. The challenge is really to keep it going long enough and strong enough for it to be useful; there is no runaway mechanism.
sbierwagen 13y ago
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? This is a reasonable concern, but your intuitions on the physical processes involved are off by a couple orders of magnitude. From a previous comment on another fusion story, two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839722 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839722 Fusion reactors are fundamentally different from fission reactors. You have to get a tenuous wisp of hydrogen (the reactor in this particular experiment was running at 10 mTorr, or 0.0013% atmospheric pressure) very, very hot, and keep it away from solid matter, which is millions of degrees of colder than the fuel plasma, and will suck all of the energy out of the reaction. You shut off the containment coils, and tremendously hot plasma ions leap away from each other, instantly stopping the reaction. If the reaction somehow "runs away", which it absolutely can't, then it brushes the walls of the vacuum chamber, poisoning it with cold metal ions, like injecting lead shavings that have been chilled to absolute zero directly into your heart. If our magical "runaway reaction" somehow overcomes this, and melts a hole in the vacuum chamber, then the atmosphere rushes in, both freezing cold and at intolerably high pressure, like the North Sea flooding into the hull of a submarine resting on the ocean floor. Fusion reactors don't melt down, or explode. At all. It just can't happen, much like how a Yugo rear-ending a garbage truck in Brooklyn doesn't instantly consume all of New York City in a gasoline fireball.
- bicknergseng 13y ago
  "a Yugo rear-ending a garbage truck in Brooklyn doesn't instantly consume all of New York City in a gasoline fireball." My new favorite metaphor.
  - lelandbatey 13y ago
    The metaphors that arise to describe worrying about things that can't actually happen are also my favorite. The one most memorable to me: "Putting a speed limiter on a Zamboni just in case the accelerator gets stuck"
  - jackgavigan 13y ago
orclev 13y ago
"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?" As others have said, this is hot fusion not cold fusion, so the answer is most likely it would damage some very expensive components. The holy grail of fusion research (which so far seems largely unachievable) would be fusion at something relatively close to room temperature (so called cold fusion), as opposed to this experiment where you're dealing with temperatures comparable to the heart of the sun. The reason that's such a big deal is that before actual fusion occurs on a hot fusion reactor, you obviously must first reach the target temperature which takes a not inconsiderable amount of energy to achieve, and then further energy to maintain. The trick to making hot fusion practical is to somehow get more energy out, than you have to put in to maintain those insanely high temperatures. Obviously if you can find a way to still achieve fusion at a much lower temperature the situation becomes much easier as you've got a bigger gradient to play with (I.E. it produces the same amount of power, but requires much less power to get it to the state necessary to produce that power). In order to achieve the massive temperatures necessary they do a couple things. First, you're talking about an incredibly tiny volume of space that's being heated to these temperatures (think of this as the difference between boiling the ocean vs. boiling a cup of water). Secondly they reduce the pressure to near vacuum. Thirdly they maintain these conditions inside of a magnetic bottle which is necessary primarily to provide insulation, both for the fusion material (the hydrogen) and for the apparatus that are heating and containing the fusion material (super conductors like it very cold and must be very close to the fusion material, so you're talking a pretty steep temperature gradient here). Now, assuming they actually get this thing working, it's going to consist of a very very tiny super hot ball of very very thin hydrogen gas, surrounded by a near vacuum, and then a shell of super cold super conducting magnets. If containment were to suddenly fail, that small ball of gas would very rapidly expand outward until it collided with the walls of the containment vessel which would most likely consist of super conducting magnets, and whatever insulating material they can find to slap between them and the hydrogen. But remember, this is a very tiny quantity of hydrogen and it's surrounded by what is effectively a vacuum, as it expands outwards it will rapidly cool and become even more tenuous. Some of the atoms my still be energetic enough upon impacting the containment vessel to pit it or otherwise damage it, but absolute worse case scenario they do some damage to the super conductors and the vessel walls. There's basically no scenario in which containment failure leads to anything that the average person would describe as an explosion. Now, what I would personally be worried about, and would be far more destructive is not a loss of containment, but some sort of catastrophic failure of the super conducting elements. Still probably not something anyone would worry about outside the facility, but it has a lot more potential to do damage that might conceivably hurt someone in the plant than something like loss of containment would.
polarix 13y ago
The principle is sound but the analogy is flawed: In this case the bucket's main contribution would be to collect the water, not carry it. If soup were indeed raining from the sky, a bowl or small cup would suffice.
dredmorbius 13y ago
It's not energy storage, per se, but entropy gradients (and the means to tap or trigger them) which humans (and, well, pretty much all other entropic processes) rely on. The challenge for fusion is that it's so phenomenally difficult to tap that gradient (without annoying the neighbors) that it may well prove impossible forever.
TuringTest 13y ago
"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" As seen in the article, the most worrying concern could be having the four-story tall metallic magnetic core launched through the roof with twice the thrust of a space shuttle.
Ygg2 13y ago
> Will the French Alps suddenly and catastrophically acquire a new valley? They'll get a shiny useless building at best. A perforated building at worst. With a lot more vapor.

sp332 13y ago

There 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.

ck2 13y ago
I found this to make some sense to me http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Reactor_overview http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER#Reactor_overview I had fears that fusion could become fission but seems like that is not possible.
- sp332 13y ago
  The elements involved are some of the lightest that exist. It's nearly impossible to get them to fission in the best of cases.
  - pygy_ 13y ago
    See http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gDm9siHIwrI/TXgaS3FfA7I/AAAAAAAAAXs/5jVPUBZZjBI/s1600/BindingEnergy_v_AtomicNumber-mod.png http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gDm9siHIwrI/TXgaS3FfA7I/AAAAAAAAAX... for an illustration.

mikeash 13y ago

I think you're mostly right and energy storage advances are much more exciting. However, they can substitute for each other to an extent. For example, moving transportation off of messy and expensive fossil fuels is almost all about storage. If there was a $5, 2kg battery that could hold enough charge for a car to go 3000 miles, the world would switch to electric cars almost instantaneously. We are also using fossil fuels to generate energy for lots of fixed usage where transmission is already in place. Take all of the coal power plants in the country and replace them with magical clean energy generation plants and you've made a vast improvement without any change in storage technology. If storage was magically solved, then you could use wind and solar and whatever much more easily, and replace fossil fuels that way. But storage seems to be a much tougher game.

tomphoolery 13y ago

I'm pretty sure if this failed, the Earth would catastrophically jettison its atmosphere.

_dark_matter_ 13y ago

I see what you're getting at, but I would argue that all attempts of "generating" energy are actually "transporting" energy from one storage to another. Take oil, for example; it is just a method of storing energy. In the same way, the hydrogen atom is the stored energy. Any of the methods you mentioned - sunlight, wind, streams, temperature gradients, etc. - are all examples of that same stored energy. The game is in converting it for our consumption. We're never actually "generating" energy. With that in mind, the single item with the highest "energy density" is the hydrogen atom. When we are capable of "transporting" it's stored energy to one of our storage mediums, we will have all the energy we need. Seems like it's worth the risk.

TrainedMonkey 13y ago
I would argue that there is a large difference between transporting and transforming. It is easy to transport/store hydrogen in a pressurized cistern. It is also fairly easy to transform hydrogen just by burning it. Of course burning fossil fuels and releasing tons of CO2 is how we got into whole global warming business anyways, so we want a more efficient transformation technology. But wait, it get's more complicated. Compare transportation and storage of hydrogen versus electricity. Vast difference, requires radically different technologies, so let's not call all energy 'same'.
- Crito 13y ago
  Burning hydrogen itself is clean, producing only water vapor (which can be fairly trivially condensed, if necessary.) The problem is acquiring the hydrogen.
  - TrainedMonkey 13y ago
    Good point, no carbon involved.
deleted 13y ago
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deleted 13y ago

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VLM 13y ago

"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?" To a first approximation a magical 100% effective explosion of a 500 MW fusion plant would be about as destructive as the explosion of a 500 MW coal plant. So yeah, dead stacked like cordwood and an impressive hole in the ground, but not much more than a nasty industrial accident. You'd lose a lot of windows but in bulk the building foundation would likely survive. Why an explosion would magically be 100% as effective as splitting a steam boiler like a bratwurst is a mystery, as the short version of why it takes so long to build these things is before they work they fail containment a lot of times. So its like building that 500 MW coal burner and designing it to split in half and get put back together over and over until with some fine tuning it works. In the long run, in like 2300 AD or whatever, I'm sure cheapskates will create some fascinating industrial accidents by neglecting to build in ablative shielding or liq H2 overpressure burst disks or whatever and the accidents will be quite exciting as a typical industrial accident.

lmm 13y ago

> 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? Unlikely. The reaction is not self-sustaining; it needs the very high pressure provided by the containment, and without that it would fizzle rather than boom (a hydrogen bomb works by using a fission explosion to compress the hydrogen part enough to fuse). The tritium in the fuel is radioactive and releasing it into the atmosphere would be... not ideal, but the reactor doesn't use a lot of it and it's light enough to fly off into space fairly quickly.

BigWorm 13y ago

I know they usually take some liberties, but the movie was nothing like the book.

InclinedPlane 13y ago

Reality isn't like movies or tv, fusion reactors can't turn into bombs. For one, there simply isn't enough fuel in the device at any given time. For another, maintaining the conditions that allow fusion reactions to happen doesn't happen easily. If the equipment goes offline or haywire the worst case scenario is that the reactor stops. Fusion reactors are like balancing a pencil on its tip. If anything goes wrong it simply falls over. Fission reactors are different in two ways. One, it's possible for them to have a positive feedback in fission reaction rate due to lolss of coolant (this is called a "positive void coefficient"), but this can be changed in the design of the reactor and all modern reactors have a negative void coefficient. Two, fission byproducts are both extremely radiologically hazardous and continually producing heat from decay over long periods of time. This means that reactor fuel and used decomissioned fuel still needs to be actively cooled for a very long time, and if not then it can melt down which is very difficult to contain. These two problems are the genesis of the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, respectively. In contrast, the products of fusion reactor operations don't get hot and as mentioned the reaction will just stop running if anything goes pear shaped. These factors alone are major reasons why fusion power is so desirable. It wouldn't use of fossil fuels nor produce CO2 and would be unimaginably safer than fission power.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
> Two, fission byproducts are both extremely radiologically hazardous and continually producing heat from decay over long periods of time. It's probably worth pointing out that those two things are the inverse of each other. The elements that take the longest to decay are inherently the least radioactive, because that's what radioactivity is: The consequence of radioactive decay. Something with a half life of 24,000 years is barely radioactive at all. Something with a half life of 24 seconds will give you radiation poisoning very quickly if you encounter a lot of it but won't be anywhere to be found if you come back in an hour. The waste problem is also largely a political rather than scientific problem. The commonly-cited 24,000 year half life is for Plutonium-239 ("weapons grade plutonium"), which can be mixed at the outset with Plutonium-240 to make it unsuitable for bombs and impossible to separate, and then used as reactor fuel to destroy it entirely. The most radiologically dangerous fission byproducts (largely Sr-90 and Cs-137) are the ones with ~30 year half lives, making them radioactive enough to cause significant damage and also long-lived enough to persist for several decades, but they also have significant market value in nuclear medicine or radioisotope thermoelectric generators or scientific research. The massive political stupidity is in not removing the spent fuel from the reactor site and separating it into its constituent elements so that it can be put to productive use rather than sitting around waiting for disaster to strike. And the entire concept of burying it under a mountain for a million years is just ridiculous.

mng2 13y ago

Laboratory fusion is a rather delicate process, once described as 'containing a blob of jello with rubber bands'. The typical Tokamak fusion plasma is orders of magnitude less dense than air, and if it hits the wall of the containment chamber, it rapidly loses heat and stops fusion-ing. The challenge is really to keep it going long enough and strong enough for it to be useful; there is no runaway mechanism.

sbierwagen 13y ago

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? This is a reasonable concern, but your intuitions on the physical processes involved are off by a couple orders of magnitude. From a previous comment on another fusion story, two years ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839722 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839722 Fusion reactors are fundamentally different from fission reactors. You have to get a tenuous wisp of hydrogen (the reactor in this particular experiment was running at 10 mTorr, or 0.0013% atmospheric pressure) very, very hot, and keep it away from solid matter, which is millions of degrees of colder than the fuel plasma, and will suck all of the energy out of the reaction. You shut off the containment coils, and tremendously hot plasma ions leap away from each other, instantly stopping the reaction. If the reaction somehow "runs away", which it absolutely can't, then it brushes the walls of the vacuum chamber, poisoning it with cold metal ions, like injecting lead shavings that have been chilled to absolute zero directly into your heart. If our magical "runaway reaction" somehow overcomes this, and melts a hole in the vacuum chamber, then the atmosphere rushes in, both freezing cold and at intolerably high pressure, like the North Sea flooding into the hull of a submarine resting on the ocean floor. Fusion reactors don't melt down, or explode. At all. It just can't happen, much like how a Yugo rear-ending a garbage truck in Brooklyn doesn't instantly consume all of New York City in a gasoline fireball.

bicknergseng 13y ago
"a Yugo rear-ending a garbage truck in Brooklyn doesn't instantly consume all of New York City in a gasoline fireball." My new favorite metaphor.
- lelandbatey 13y ago
  The metaphors that arise to describe worrying about things that can't actually happen are also my favorite. The one most memorable to me: "Putting a speed limiter on a Zamboni just in case the accelerator gets stuck"
- jackgavigan 13y ago

orclev 13y ago

"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?" As others have said, this is hot fusion not cold fusion, so the answer is most likely it would damage some very expensive components. The holy grail of fusion research (which so far seems largely unachievable) would be fusion at something relatively close to room temperature (so called cold fusion), as opposed to this experiment where you're dealing with temperatures comparable to the heart of the sun. The reason that's such a big deal is that before actual fusion occurs on a hot fusion reactor, you obviously must first reach the target temperature which takes a not inconsiderable amount of energy to achieve, and then further energy to maintain. The trick to making hot fusion practical is to somehow get more energy out, than you have to put in to maintain those insanely high temperatures. Obviously if you can find a way to still achieve fusion at a much lower temperature the situation becomes much easier as you've got a bigger gradient to play with (I.E. it produces the same amount of power, but requires much less power to get it to the state necessary to produce that power). In order to achieve the massive temperatures necessary they do a couple things. First, you're talking about an incredibly tiny volume of space that's being heated to these temperatures (think of this as the difference between boiling the ocean vs. boiling a cup of water). Secondly they reduce the pressure to near vacuum. Thirdly they maintain these conditions inside of a magnetic bottle which is necessary primarily to provide insulation, both for the fusion material (the hydrogen) and for the apparatus that are heating and containing the fusion material (super conductors like it very cold and must be very close to the fusion material, so you're talking a pretty steep temperature gradient here). Now, assuming they actually get this thing working, it's going to consist of a very very tiny super hot ball of very very thin hydrogen gas, surrounded by a near vacuum, and then a shell of super cold super conducting magnets. If containment were to suddenly fail, that small ball of gas would very rapidly expand outward until it collided with the walls of the containment vessel which would most likely consist of super conducting magnets, and whatever insulating material they can find to slap between them and the hydrogen. But remember, this is a very tiny quantity of hydrogen and it's surrounded by what is effectively a vacuum, as it expands outwards it will rapidly cool and become even more tenuous. Some of the atoms my still be energetic enough upon impacting the containment vessel to pit it or otherwise damage it, but absolute worse case scenario they do some damage to the super conductors and the vessel walls. There's basically no scenario in which containment failure leads to anything that the average person would describe as an explosion. Now, what I would personally be worried about, and would be far more destructive is not a loss of containment, but some sort of catastrophic failure of the super conducting elements. Still probably not something anyone would worry about outside the facility, but it has a lot more potential to do damage that might conceivably hurt someone in the plant than something like loss of containment would.

polarix 13y ago

The principle is sound but the analogy is flawed: In this case the bucket's main contribution would be to collect the water, not carry it. If soup were indeed raining from the sky, a bowl or small cup would suffice.

dredmorbius 13y ago

It's not energy storage, per se, but entropy gradients (and the means to tap or trigger them) which humans (and, well, pretty much all other entropic processes) rely on. The challenge for fusion is that it's so phenomenally difficult to tap that gradient (without annoying the neighbors) that it may well prove impossible forever.

TuringTest 13y ago

"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" As seen in the article, the most worrying concern could be having the four-story tall metallic magnetic core launched through the roof with twice the thrust of a space shuttle.

Ygg2 13y ago

> Will the French Alps suddenly and catastrophically acquire a new valley? They'll get a shiny useless building at best. A perforated building at worst. With a lot more vapor.