This is an area of power generation I’ve come back to several times in the decades since I worked for a vendor to contractors building nuclear fission-based power plants in the US. Though my experience with that industry was pretty negative, it never set aside my view of the capabilities of the science involved — and especially the potential of the following generations of research into nuclear fusion-generated power. Notably, we can avoid most of the problems associated with radioactive waste.
An experimental device that aims to generate clean energy using nuclear fusion will be [completed] in the next few months in Hefei, capital city of East China’s Anhui Province.
The new device will be an upgrade of China’s first superconducting Tokamak device, dubbed HT-7, which was built by the plasma physics institute, in partnership with Russia, in the early 1990s.
HT-7 made China the fourth country in the world, after Russia, France and Japan, to have such a device.
Scientists believe that deuterium, extracted from seawater, can be used to produce enormous amounts of energy from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction under huge temperatures of 100 million C.
After nuclear fusion, the deuterium extracted from one litre of seawater will produce energy equivalent to 300 litres of gasoline.
The European Union, the United States, Russia, Japan, South Korea and China are partners in the Cadarache project in France — which is just breaking ground after 18 months of political wrangling, mostly between France and Japan on where the latest ITER project would be built. It’s much more expensive than the Chinese project. Presumably it’s larger.
I hope to see these experiments bearing fruit, sooner or later. We’ve been waiting a long time.
Many in this country who hold the purse strings think this will never work, refuse to fund research into it and continue our dependence on foreign oil. You watch China will perfect this and make a fortune on it. I remember when this country used to be that way.
I doubt that this direction for resolving fusion problem for power generation will work. It is just the crudest use of technology (“let’s ram it until it works”).
One should check the patent of the prominent Accelerator Physicist A.G.Ruggiero of BNL, Upton NY. As one of pioneers of the study of the new type of accelerators that would get higher energy collisions with more “technique” than “brute force” and hence be much smaller and cheaper, Dr Ruggiero have patented interesting methodology to use this new technology to design small colliders which would be using Li and its nonradioactive(!) fusion to create fusion power generators. Size : small (you could have one at home), cost low (compared to the energy and resources needed) enviromentaly SAFE :).
I expect something like that (or other new higher tech’) to yield real and applicable results.
(PS nonradioactive above means that though energy would be released it would not be in the form that you’d be able to measure with the geiger counter… simple explanation for the general public).
(PPS This new technology uses so called “crystalline beam” state of matter within accelerator rings: highly energetic ions moving arround but in the very organized structure in relation to each other, quite like the crystal state in the solids).
I thought that containment was the biggest problem with fusion, but I see no mention of that in the article. I haven’t kept up on it, but I seem to recall that magnetic containment schemes sucked up all the energy, in effect yielding a negative output. Updates, anyone?
Fusion is a wonderful goal, and I hope they achieve it. But breath-holding is not advised. Nor is breath-holding for Laser Holographic Movies, Heli-cars, a Moon Base by 2001 and so on.
Good thing none of you are on the research team…
Yes, the biggest problem is containment. This is no material (yet) that can with stand the heat. So they use a magnetic field to contain it, this uses massive amounts of Power. You basically need a Fission Nuclear power plant to run the field. The theory and goal of the fusion plant is that the power output will be greater than the energy to sustain the magnetic field. By the way the US along with Europe and Russia has spent Billions on R & D on this. Just because China says their going to do doesn’t mean it will work. But than again maybe China has a different approach than the US and others. Who knows but if it works it will benefit the world.
Of course we have much recent history to show the number of people dying in mines and on the battlefiueld because we did not adopt fission nuclear power in the interim. Now tha we have a solution for disposal of nucler waste, we should do what the French did decades ago.