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This topic is offered for those of our members who would like to help to build a repository of links and text about fusion research.
The first post in this new topic will be a report on the resurgence of the Stellarator.
(th)
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The article at the link below reports on the resurgence of the Stellarator in competition with Tokamak and the Laser Ignition concept.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/06/ … on-energy/
The article includes a bit of history. I had not realized that the Stellarator had preceded the Tokamak.
I attended a lecture by Lyman Spitzer years ago, when he was visiting his home town.
Lyman Spitzer Jr. was born on June 26, 1914 in Toledo, Ohio.
(th)
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The article at the link below is about a traditional Tokamak under construction in Japan ....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/japan-debuts … 00642.html
Gizmodo
Japan Debuts Six-Story Experimental Fusion Reactor
Isaac Schultz
Fri, December 1, 2023 at 3:15 PM EST·2 min readThe completed reactor. << image
The biggest experimental nuclear fusion reactor in operation was inaugurated north of Tokyo today, as scientists continue to plug away at making nuclear fusion a viable source of the world’s energy.
The reactor—JT-60SA—is a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped reactor that can heat plasma to 360 million degrees Fahrenheit (200 million degrees Celsius). The reactor fired up for the first time in October; at the time, researchers affiliated with the project estimated that it will take two years for the reactor to produce the plasmas necessary for experiments, according to the publication Science.
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Nuclear fusion can be done in different ways, but it is regardless a much cleaner process than nuclear fission. Fusion is a thermonuclear reaction that causes two light atomic nuclei to fuse into a heavier nucleus, producing huge amounts of energy in the process. Nuclear fission happens by splitting a large atom into smaller particles; it produces less energy than fusion reactions and produces radioactive material as a waste product, while fusion does not.
The interior of the JET tokamak, which achieved a record reaction in 1997, a result doubled by JET last year.
Last year, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achieved net energy gain in a fusion reaction, meaning the reaction produced more energy (3 megajoules) than it took to power the reaction in the first place (2 megajoules). It was a significant achievement, but required a far more tremendous amount of energy to power (300 megajoules); in other words, despite the sensational flurry that every bit of progress on fusion causes, there’s a long road ahead.
The fusion experiments that take place in JT-60SA will inform the science that will eventually happen in ITER, a reactor that can hold six times the volume of its Japanese partner. However, JT-60SA will not use tritium—a rare isotope of hydrogen—in its reactions, while ITER plans to start using it in 2035, according to Science.
Nevertheless, JT-60SA will “bring us closer to fusion energy,” Sam Davis, the reactor’s deputy project leader, said in the inauguration. “It’s the result of a collaboration between more than 500 scientists and engineers and more than 70 companies throughout Europe and Japan.”
While large collaborations are working on large tokamaks and stellarators, projects like the MIT-CFS collaboration’s SPARC experiment are building smaller reactors that make use of high-temperature superconducting magnets. SPARC is expected to be completed in 2025, the same year ITER’s first plasma is (currently) expected.
The running joke about scalable nuclear fusion is that it is always just over the horizon—maybe 30, 50 years from now. This timeline is fanciful, but it can never be a reality without work being done towards that end now. So fingers crossed and hats off to you, JT-60SA. Make your run be a fruitful one.
(th)
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The Chinese are also invested, China has a nuclear fusion reactor called EAST and there is also a report of the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor.
https://phys.org/news/2020-12-china-nuc … l-sun.html
https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/news/20 … 9388.shtml
Culturally it might become mainstream among the Green-Left with guys like Oliver Stone making 'Nuclear Now' movies and films, the latest movie is based on the book A Bright Future: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow. The movie accuses the anti-nuclear movement of equating nuclear power with nuclear weapons and thus creating a primal fear against this form of energy. I'm not sure how they will get those renewables, emissions reduction target without some 'Fusion' reactor happening.
There are also hybrid fission-fusion systems discussed in other newmars topics
Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2023-12-01 16:27:44)
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