Blacksheep Science: The world's largest fusion reactor coming onlinein 2018.

[kareface]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427291.300

[Kilhart]

6 years too late, etc.

[Kryssan]

So olde its ancient. I've been talking about ITER for a while now in the LHC thread. ITER is just one sample of the fusion power plants currently coming online, NIF will most assuredly beat it to completion. ICF vs MCF, let the battle commence.

[sephir]

I'm a little confused with how the shielding would work. High temperatures will force the nuclei to fuse together negating their normally positive charges. Now because the shielding would be magnetic wouldn't the particles ignore this magnetic barrier once they reach that high enough temperature?

I'm not quite sure how the particles would be repelled by the barrier but not themselves.

[willriker]

i thought they had an issue with sustaining the fusion reaction. did they scrap the idea of sustaining it, in favor of utilizing bursts of energy?

[kareface]

I'm a little confused with how the shielding would work. High temperatures will force the nuclei to fuse together negating their normally positive charges. Now because the shielding would be magnetic wouldn't the particles ignore this magnetic barrier once they reach that high enough temperature?

I'm not quite sure how the particles would be repelled by the barrier but not themselves.

The state of the matter once heated should create a dense Maxwellian plasma which is prone to magnetic fields. Sun flares are actually caused by a shifting of large magnetic arcs that reach out of the center of the sun caused by the fusion, spewing plasma and energy into space.

[Eliseos]

i thought they had an issue with sustaining the fusion reaction. did they scrap the idea of sustaining it, in favor of utilizing bursts of energy?

The issue with fusion is gaining more energy than you put in to start the reaction. Sustaining the reaction is more of a side effect to this, once they can get passed this hurdle (it is a very very large hurdle) fusion will be a viable alternative.

[Chicomagiko]

Ins't this what Doc Oc tried to do in Spiderman 2?

[Karbuncle]

Ins't this what Doc Oc tried to do in Spiderman 2?

We never learn anyway ~.~, Incoming Blackhole/Explosion/MadScientist D:

[Kilhart]

I'm a little confused with how the shielding would work. High temperatures will force the nuclei to fuse together negating their normally positive charges. Now because the shielding would be magnetic wouldn't the particles ignore this magnetic barrier once they reach that high enough temperature?

I'm not quite sure how the particles would be repelled by the barrier but not themselves.

Don't fucking question the coconuts man

[Kryssan]

The issue with fusion is gaining more energy than you put in to start the reaction. Sustaining the reaction is more of a side effect to this, once they can get passed this hurdle (it is a very very large hurdle) fusion will be a viable alternative.

Not quite. Creating the reaction hasn't been an issue for years. Sustaining it is the hard part.

Ins't this what Doc Oc tried to do in Spiderman 2?

Not even close. Oh, I guess he did call it fusion. I believe he even talked about using Deuterium fuel. But that's where the similarities end.

We never learn anyway ~.~, Incoming Blackhole/Explosion/MadScientist D:

People who think the way you do make me sad for society.

I'm a little confused with how the shielding would work. High temperatures will force the nuclei to fuse together negating their normally positive charges. Now because the shielding would be magnetic wouldn't the particles ignore this magnetic barrier once they reach that high enough temperature?

I'm not quite sure how the particles would be repelled by the barrier but not themselves.

Why do you think their positive charges are negated? They're not. Deuterium and Deuterium or Deuterium and Tritium when fused make ionized Helium (plus a neutron for DT). It doesn't magically get its electrons back just because it fuses. This is not chemistry where you balance things out.







The ITER reactor is a child project of a long line of tokamak fusion research designs. Its parent would be JET. You can trace them all back quite a long ways. The tokamak design is used most widespread for fusion because it works the best so far, and the greatest amount of data is available for future design construction. You create a magnetic field using rather massive electromagnets positioned around a 'donut' that has a cross-section shaped in the form of a D. This helps confine the plasma field. The frozen fuel is then accelerated into the center of the chamber tangentially through feed nozzles. The massive temperatures of the plasma are all only contained within the field itself; when the field fails (and up to this point it always has, longest sustained reaction was around 5-6 minutes) the particles that made it up will have cooled to ambient temperatures by the time they hit the walls of the vessel.


You have to understand the playing field here; there is no 'shield' or such. There are no control rods or other devices for maintaining the field. All you have to work with is fuel injection rates and magnetic field shapes/intensities. The reaction is simply created by accelerating a fuel to a very high energy state while containing it in a magnetic flux, compressing it so that the highly energetic hydrogen nuclei have a great chance of collision, hence a great chance of fusion. However, the magnets we have currently cannot keep the field (assume you ignore their massive power requirements for this part of the discussion) from developing 'holes', or regions where the particles escape from the field. Matter likes being at low energy states, not high ones, so it'll go the path of least resistance. In this case that means through the hole in the field until the matter is no longer contained in the field, resulting in the collapse. Up to this point they've tried controlling this simply with computers and the magnetic fields, but this alone is not enough, as the last decade or so has proven time and time again. There are a great many ideas on the table as to how to fix these 'holes', which are going to be cumulatively tested with the ITER project.



The other side to fusion however is what the NIF project is currently investigating. For the longest time, MCF, what the tokamaks use, has been the primary means of testing and developing fusion energy. We've known about ICF as well, but we never had the technology to really delve into it. NIF will fix that problem. Where a MCF plant is focused on maintaining the field, ICF designs such as NIF work in pulses. All you really need in the ICF case is to ensure that you get more energy from your reactions than the lasers are using. You feed pellets in hohlgrams which are blasted by an intensely energetic laser field from all sides and points of the matter causing a collapse of the pellet upon itself, resulting in fusion.



If you want more information specifically about ITER or NIF, check out their websites here and here, respectively. For other information, you can try Google or you can just stop by the LHC thread occassionally. I post what information I come across if I think its worth sharing.