New fusion reactor about to be switched on.
Discussion
Buzz84 said:
BigMacDaddy said:
AER said:
Buzz84 said:
All this facinates me, potentially clean unlimited energy if it can all be sorted.
If your wish becomes true, global warming becomes a serious issue. We will have to fit extra radiators to the earth...OK, so educate us 
Surely any potential increase in global temperature due to thermodynamics would be more than offset by the huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions? Unless of course the effect of these is perhaps not as great as we are led to believe.
Surely any potential increase in global temperature due to thermodynamics would be more than offset by the huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions? Unless of course the effect of these is perhaps not as great as we are led to believe.
Edited by BigMacDaddy on Thursday 3rd December 08:38
BigMacDaddy said:
OK, so educate us
Surely any potential increase in global temperature due to thermodynamics would be more than offset by the huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions? Unless of course the effect of these is perhaps not as great as we are led to believe.
Greenhouse gasses effectively insulate the planet, reducing the rate at which energy, as heat, is dissipated to space.Surely any potential increase in global temperature due to thermodynamics would be more than offset by the huge reduction in greenhouse gas emissions? Unless of course the effect of these is perhaps not as great as we are led to believe.
"Unlimited" fusion power will add more energy/heat to the planet and so require a greater rate of dissipation to space to maintain temperature.
It's much the same thing as more powerful engines requiring bigger radiators...
fluffnik said:
Greenhouse gasses effectively insulate the planet, reducing the rate at which energy, as heat, is dissipated to space.
"Unlimited" fusion power will add more energy/heat to the planet and so require a greater rate of dissipation to space to maintain temperature.
It's much the same thing as more powerful engines requiring bigger radiators...
I get what you're saying but it seems you're presuming they either won't replace existing power stations (that generate heat) or will produce a huge surplus OR be very inefficient. More of an engine swap maybe, problem is at the moment we haven't a clue what the engine efficiency with be."Unlimited" fusion power will add more energy/heat to the planet and so require a greater rate of dissipation to space to maintain temperature.
It's much the same thing as more powerful engines requiring bigger radiators...
Also unlimited? it's not really unlimited though surely, you only get the energy out from the mass you put in?
GrumpyTwig said:
fluffnik said:
Greenhouse gasses effectively insulate the planet, reducing the rate at which energy, as heat, is dissipated to space.
"Unlimited" fusion power will add more energy/heat to the planet and so require a greater rate of dissipation to space to maintain temperature.
It's much the same thing as more powerful engines requiring bigger radiators...
I get what you're saying but it seems you're presuming they either won't replace existing power stations (that generate heat) or will produce a huge surplus OR be very inefficient. More of an engine swap maybe, problem is at the moment we haven't a clue what the engine efficiency with be."Unlimited" fusion power will add more energy/heat to the planet and so require a greater rate of dissipation to space to maintain temperature.
It's much the same thing as more powerful engines requiring bigger radiators...
Also unlimited? it's not really unlimited though surely, you only get the energy out from the mass you put in?
Really the statement should be "Unlimited Fusion energy has the potential to increase/decrease global warming, depending on a number of other factors that may/may not materialise if Fusion is ever achieved"
BigMacDaddy said:
Really the statement should be "Unlimited Fusion energy has the potential to increase/decrease global warming, depending on a number of other factors that may/may not materialise if Fusion is ever achieved"
Not particularly punchy as news headline though is it 
As energy gets cheaper people will waste a lot more of it (try going to Iceland in the winter, you need have the windows open most of the time as the heating will be on full blast all the time), but if it's not generating greenhouse gasses, and some of it could potentially be used for carbon capture, it might be interesting.
They're going to start firing up helium plasma this month (the 10th) and hydrogen plasma at the end of January apparently.
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/3985731/w7x_15_2
http://www.ipp.mpg.de/3985731/w7x_15_2
Dr Jekyll said:
AER said:
If energy becomes abundantly cheap, how do you fund efficiency measures...? It's hard enough now even at today's elevated prices.
Why would you want to?Efficiency is driven primarily to make a limited resource last longer or do more. If energy becomes effectively unlimited - the driver to make things more efficient falls away.
There may of course be other drivers to make things more efficient (e.g. safety). For example - the wiring into homes can only support a certain amount of loading before it overheats or burns out - so having lots of massively inefficient electrical goods is a potential fire risk. However these drivers aren't nearly as strong (at the moment) as the need to conserve energy.
Where a resource is cheap/abundant - you usually find that waste is more common. It doesn't matter whether that resource be water, food, ice or energy.
Edited by Moonhawk on Friday 11th December 13:33
Obesity being a prime example.
The Wail has a piece about this W7-X reactor:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-335...
Way too early to call it a success. Hydrogen is where the money shot it, not helium.
If they are successful, nuclear fusion will face massive opposition from the green blob. It has nuclear in the name for a start.
The Wail has a piece about this W7-X reactor:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-335...
Way too early to call it a success. Hydrogen is where the money shot it, not helium.
If they are successful, nuclear fusion will face massive opposition from the green blob. It has nuclear in the name for a start.
Moonhawk said:
Dr Jekyll said:
AER said:
If energy becomes abundantly cheap, how do you fund efficiency measures...? It's hard enough now even at today's elevated prices.
Why would you want to?Efficiency is driven primarily to make a limited resource last longer or do more. If energy becomes effectively unlimited - the driver to make things more efficient falls away.
There may of course be other drivers to make things more efficient (e.g. safety). For example - the wiring into homes can only support a certain amount of loading before it overheats or burns out - so having lots of massively inefficient electrical goods is a potential fire risk. However these drivers aren't nearly as strong (at the moment) as the need to conserve energy.
Where a resource is cheap/abundant - you usually find that waste is more common. It doesn't matter whether that resource be water, food, ice or energy.
In the early days of computers programs were written to use memory as efficiently as possible, even if that made them difficult to read and maintain. Now that memory is cheap it makes sense to use more of it in order to reduce programming time. Coders time effectively being more scarce/expensive than memory.
The old guard may huff and puff about inefficient programming 'you could have save 4 bytes there etc etc'. But memory isn't being wasted, it's being used to save on a scarce resource.
Dr Jekyll said:
Moonhawk said:
Dr Jekyll said:
AER said:
If energy becomes abundantly cheap, how do you fund efficiency measures...? It's hard enough now even at today's elevated prices.
Why would you want to?Efficiency is driven primarily to make a limited resource last longer or do more. If energy becomes effectively unlimited - the driver to make things more efficient falls away.
There may of course be other drivers to make things more efficient (e.g. safety). For example - the wiring into homes can only support a certain amount of loading before it overheats or burns out - so having lots of massively inefficient electrical goods is a potential fire risk. However these drivers aren't nearly as strong (at the moment) as the need to conserve energy.
Where a resource is cheap/abundant - you usually find that waste is more common. It doesn't matter whether that resource be water, food, ice or energy.
Fusion is a massive technical challenge, and scientists are still struggling to understand what is really happening in the plasma. Modeling plasma is difficult because things are happening on different length scales, and it's impossible to write one code to model all of these together, and predict what will happen in certain conditions.
The fusion environment is by far the most extreme thing on earth, or in the universe. As well as heat from a 100 million degree plasma, there are neutrons being fired out which damage anything which gets in their way, so we need new advanced materials which won't transmute to anything radioactive in the neutron radiation, and will keep their structural and thermal properties. (This is what I am doing my PhD on)
From an engineering perspective, I see Stellarators (like this one in Germany) as a more promising solution than Tokamaks. Tokamaks need a current driven through the plasma to produce the correct magnetic field to contain it in the vessel, but this current can lead to more plasma instabilities. So far Tokamaks have tried to manage these by local heating, or adjusting other magnetic coils during operation, but it's a horrendous balancing act, and generally results in the plasma cooling down and switching off. "Both are terrible beasts," smiles the Scientific Director of W 7-X. "Ours is a beast to build; yours is a beast to operate." (https://www.iter.org/newsline/172/680)
To try and answer the thermodynamics question, most of the heat produced is used in heating the plasma. Since it is a vacuum vessel, the temperature at the walls is (only!) around 1400C, (upto 2000ish in some components), and the coolant will be around 300-800 depending on what design concept you look at. Not that much heat will reach the outside world.
I'm no plasma physicist, maybe one will come along and answer things better.
The fusion environment is by far the most extreme thing on earth, or in the universe. As well as heat from a 100 million degree plasma, there are neutrons being fired out which damage anything which gets in their way, so we need new advanced materials which won't transmute to anything radioactive in the neutron radiation, and will keep their structural and thermal properties. (This is what I am doing my PhD on)
From an engineering perspective, I see Stellarators (like this one in Germany) as a more promising solution than Tokamaks. Tokamaks need a current driven through the plasma to produce the correct magnetic field to contain it in the vessel, but this current can lead to more plasma instabilities. So far Tokamaks have tried to manage these by local heating, or adjusting other magnetic coils during operation, but it's a horrendous balancing act, and generally results in the plasma cooling down and switching off. "Both are terrible beasts," smiles the Scientific Director of W 7-X. "Ours is a beast to build; yours is a beast to operate." (https://www.iter.org/newsline/172/680)
To try and answer the thermodynamics question, most of the heat produced is used in heating the plasma. Since it is a vacuum vessel, the temperature at the walls is (only!) around 1400C, (upto 2000ish in some components), and the coolant will be around 300-800 depending on what design concept you look at. Not that much heat will reach the outside world.
I'm no plasma physicist, maybe one will come along and answer things better.
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