Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Fusion

All I remember about fusion and the ITER, was that the Bruce was proposed as a site. It required a very deep hole for the reactor. I told them that you can't put a deep pit there, without pumping out all of Lake Huron, so they settled on Darlington. Of course, this was a huge patronage plum, and the French won it.

A comment on my last post about ITER made me do some more research. It turns out that there are several possible fusion reactions that could produce power. The ITER is just doing one as a plasma donut, and it recently lost its US funding, perhaps as a result of an intense, almost religious, campaign directly to Congress.

The darling of the passionate is a fusion reaction involving boron. It produces no neutrons, but is ten times more difficult to ignite. It also lights up the sky with x-rays! (you win some, you lose some). Looking this up on the Internet, the debate is very non-scientific and quasi-religious. I finally found a Wikipedia article that made some sense. The article is very neutral, to avoid passions, but I think it shows a lot of obstacles in the way for all these systems. The capital costs will be huge, and these things are all going to be a bitch during an earthquake!

7 comments:

M. Simon said...

Obviously you have not studied the material I left.

If you do get around to studying it I'd be glad to answer questions.

BTW ITER will have X-Ray problems as well. However we know how to deal with them. Lead if you want a low volume shield and concrete if low cost is the object. In space a reaction mass shield (water) would work. There is also distance.

Might I add that The Bussard reactor because of its light weight and low neutron output can get us into space and to Mars in 40 days.

Not possible with any other technology in prospect.

I do agree Boron will be hard to light off. That is why we have engineers. And physicists.

If we need something easier to light off there is deuterium. Very abundant.

This is not a thermal technology. It is a colliding beam technology. The constraints are different. Something a lot of people are not aware of.

M. Simon said...

BTW I'm an engineer and well acquainted with the physics and engineering.

If you have questions I probably have answers.

Leave comments at any of the articles I listed. Or if you really want to get into the science and engineering try this:

IEC Fusion Technology blog

My place. Leave questions. BTW there is a Canadian I know who is raising money for a test reactor.

Harold Asmis said...

I went through a lot of stuff that did not appeal to me as a scientist. That said, however, it is all way beyond me, and it would be nice to see a sequential roadmap, and hard targets being met. If you can actually blow a boron atom, it would make a great x-ray laser fusion drive, like Larry Niven in Ringworld!

M. Simon said...

Hey, not to worry. I get criticism all the time from people who don't understand the technology or the physics.

If you ever get interested I can direct you to the appropriate papers or blog posts.

Monado said...

Off-topic, but did you notice that the Natural Resources Minister wants to fire the President of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission for not wanting to run a reactor without backup power?

Anonymous said...

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/248567/China_Invests_1_4_Billion_on_Nuclear_Fusion

Apparently the Chinese want on the Fusion band wagon.

Fusion power has been 25 years away for the last 40 years. Cue "tommorow" from Annie.

M. Simon said...

The reason fusion has taken so long is we have been committed to tokamaks.

Plasma Physicist Dr. Nicholas Krall said, "We spent $15 billion dollars studying tokamaks and what we learned about them is that they are no damn good."