/sci/ - Science & Math

>>9572281
Environmentalists will start suicide bombing the place if this gets anywhere.

>>9572301
Why the living fuck would they do that? Most environmentalists are either educated or way too dumb to improvise an explosive.

>>9572281
>tfw you will see fusion energy in your lifetime

>>9572308
The educated ones are the dangerous ones. What do you think eill happen once you tell people their religion has become obsolete because of a small fragile box making electricity

>>9572324

>>9572281
Some anon told me USD is backed by Saudi oil. If oil becomes irrelevant, USD will crash and everybody who didn't migrate to bitcoin will be responsible for the economic crisis.

>>9572326
...They'll be fucking thrilled? I'm at a loss here, anon.

>>9572332
Then its going to be backed by ARC reactors.

>>9572326

Fusion simply consolidates existing white male power structures, and that's not ok.

>>9572281
http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-newly-formed-company-launch-novel-approach-fusion-power-0309

http://news.mit.edu/2018/3q-zach-hartwig-mit-big-push-fusion-0309

>>9572333
No, he's right.
They will pretend to be happy but they will feel dead inside.
Anyway they will soon find another eco-battle to pour all their hopes in.
This time a battle they can't win though, they aren't going to do the same mistake again.

>>9572332
>and everybody who didn't migrate to bitcoin will be responsible for the economic crisis
What do you think bitcoin is backed by?
If the USD crashes, bitcoin will crash along with it. Anyone still holding coins at that stage will kill themselves as at least fiat will still have worth domestically.

>>9572281
That's amazing. Will be interesting when this project is putting energy in the grid preparing comercialization when ITER won't even be finished. What will it be of the efforts put on ITER?

>>9572301
No they won't senpai they are probably fusion , anti fossil

Well, 15 years is better than the usual "20".
I wish them (and all other fusion projects) luck.

>>9572332
You shouldn't believe the retarded memes that people repeat online
The US is now an oil exporter

>>9572793
It's on track to be the world's biggest oil producer...

>>9572793
You do know that you can't negociate in the internacional market oil for anything other than dollars right? And it is not because nations only trust the dollar.

>>9572281
No reason to believe this will ever be economically viable even if it works.

>>9572281
>tfw fusion will only ever be 15 years away instead of 30
Yay!

>>9572812
That was once. The world is slowly moving on from the Petrodollar, actually.

>>9572332
>Some anon told me USD is backed by Saudi oil.
The USD is propped up by OPEC. You think we went to war in Iraq for humanitarian reasons? OPEC prices oil in USD. Saddam wanted to do things differently and he got killed for it. Qaddafi wanted to do things differently and he got killed for it. Assad wants to do things differently and he got a "revolution" for it, which will probably end in his death if Trump can't get this country together because the next neolib/neocon will go into Syria to take him out.

If the US develops working fusion power then we have complete energy independence and whether other nations want USD or not will become completely irrelevant.

>>9572301
This. Autistic fusiontards here probably won't agree but they'll be singing a different tune if this gets anywhere. Environmentalism is just a facade for misanthropes, foreign spies, corporate blackmail wars, and plain crazies.

I'm not a physicist from what I understand there is no fallout (since you don't have radioactive materials like U235 or plutonium undergoing fission or fusion that could spread around if something went wrong).
However should the reactor be breached or fail while on and under pressure the result would be a fairly catastrophic explosion.

Or am I wrong?

>>9572965
Actually there is no catastrophic explosion, the fusion simple stops because it is a very delicate process and any small failure will simply desestabilize the plasma and fail to produce any energy.

>>9572965
Maybe your burn a hole in the ground, but thats it. Unlike fission, here your problem isn`t keep the reaction controlled but keeping it going at all.

>>9572965
>I'm not a physicist from what I understand there is no fallout (since you don't have radioactive materials like U235 or plutonium undergoing fission or fusion that could spread around if something went wrong).
hydrogen fusion has a neutron problem, but helium fusion doesn't

neutrons are ridiculously radioactive

>>9573019
Isn't the neutron problem something that the liquid blanket helps with? And also it only happens when it is being opperated which can easily be contained, while in fission you have to store the waste during really long periods of time.

>>9573019
Right but free neutron radiation isn't really "contaminating" (although it can make other materials radioactive) in the same way a radioactive source scattered about would be a big problem.

>>9572281
>SPARK fusion reactor
It should be named SPERG fusion reactor

>>9573078
>>9572281

>>9573078
>>9573079
>>9572281

>>9573019
>neutrons are ridiculously radioactive
Neutrons are not "ridiculously radioactive" they are just a type of radiation and wouldn't be a problem with proper shielding. Material in the reactor would become slightly radioactive due to exposure to a neutron flux, but it wouldn't be anywhere close to the issues that you have to deal with from fission reactors i.e spent fuel, decay heat, fission, products, etc

>>9573019 >>9573120
>neutrons are ridiculously radioactive
neutrons are *radiation

>>9573125 >>9573019 >>9573120
neutrons can collide/merge with other atoms forming radioactive isotopes which emit other ionizing (alpha, beta & gamma) radiation

>>9572301
How's fusion bad for the environment

>>9572536
>What do you think bitcoin is backed by?
What is? You tell me, so I can have a laugh.
>at least fiat will still have worth domestically
Yeah, just like in Germany post-WW1

>>9573125
unbound, free neutrons are radioactive
they will decay to a beta ray and a proton
>beta ray
>fancy

>>9573173 >>9573125 >>9573120
Neutrons decay into protons + beta males

>>9573120
>Neutrons are not "ridiculously radioactive" they are just a type of radiation and wouldn't be a problem with proper shielding.
1) you're retarded
2) no radiation is a problem with proper shielding what the fuck is even the point of this response
3) kys

>>9573177
>normies decay into halpha- and beta-males
I mean a proton is like half an alpha...

>>9573155
The n word

>15 years

Why do scientists take so long to put shit together? Get a group of engineers and fabricators on this and they will smash it out in a year or two.

>>9573247
Unironically capitalism... I kid you not, sad.

>>9573253
wrong

>>9573200
>The n word
nig....neutrons

>The p word
pus....protons

>>9573247
>Why do scientists take so long to put shit together?
lack of funding.

>Get a group of engineers and fabricators on this and they will smash it out in a year or two.
Companies put money on Engineering project that led to immediate return of investment.

Stakeholders push the company to hurry up projects. Because they wanna see the profit the fastest as possible.

It's why Elon Musk Space X outruns NASA

However most engineers lack the advanced Math & Physics abilities needed to tackle a highly advanced scientific project such as this fusion reactor.

>>9573272
>However most engineers lack the advanced Math & Physics abilities needed to tackle a highly advanced scientific project such as this fusion reactor

But surely the plans are drawn up with all necessary details by the scientists right? After that it's just a matter of fabricating components as per the technical drawings and bolting it all together.

>>9573259
nucl*ar

How long until the oil lobby kills this project?

>>9573289
>Fusion net gain of 2x

Tomorrow these guys will probably have suicided via gunshot to the back of head.

There's only six years left in Lockheed's 10 year fusion timetable

>>9573306

>>9573247 >>9573282
Investors, Government & Public don't value enough the Research in Physics & Space.

People invest billions to cure cancer or to reverse ageing

While People think investing in Space and Physics is a waste of money.

Government cut funding to Physics and increase funding to Healthcare.

Ironically the research for curing cancer or reversing ageing gave few results.

While Apollo missions, Manhattan Project, CERN, contributed much more.

>>9572735
Iter is a joke.

>>9572793
>produce 10 million bbl/d
>consume 19 million bbl/d
>800 billion trade deficit every year
So this... is... the power... of US export...whoa!

>>9573155
Think of all the bacteria that live around the reactor core!

>>9573289
never

>>9573313
? It's not about money, its about grant seeking scammers doing useless shit

There is no existing Fusion design that has any hope of producing power
"Science" is filled with leftist voting people, who have voted for generations for the ones who prefer all money to go to gibs.....

These supposedly "educated" people fell for the leftist propaganda about creationists or "climate change deniers", so that Republicans sure as shit don't want to fund them....

They have made their bed, now they lay in it.

>>9573544
>There is no existing Fusion design that has any hope of producing power

Have you even watched the video for the SPARC/ARC proposal? REBCO superconductors are a real game changer for fusion. Magnetic field scaling has always been the barrier to proper fusion and these new superconductors have smashed the shit out of that barrier.

>>9572830
>The world is slowly moving on from the Petrodollar, actually.
The US military, along with its allies, will continue propping up the petrodollar for the foreseeable future. Not even poo-in-loos or chinks want their own people in charge, due to the extremely corrupt nature of those "emerging powers".

>>9572965
You think the magnetic field protects the reactor from the plasma. It‘s actually the other way around.
A fusion reactor only contains a grams worth of material at a time. Sure, that material is hotter than the core of the sun, but once those few grams meet several dozen tons of steel, the whole thing basically completely fizzels out without doing much of anything to the device.

>>9573544
>There is no existing Fusion design that has any hope of producing power

>>9573615
>You think the magnetic field protects the reactor from the plasma. It‘s actually the other way around.
the plasma protects the reactor from the magnetic field?

>>9573544
Magnificent bait.

>>9572281
Its a tokamak?

>>9572281
How many designs are in the race?

Inertial confinement fusion driven by lasers
Tokamaks
Magnetized inertial target (with pistons and w/o!)
Magnetic mirrors
Z pinchs (linear and toroidal)

How many more?

>>9573313
People feel directly threatened by cancer and ageing, most people don't give a shit about science though. So you get millions of retards crying why money is spent on much more useful things that won't destroy the fabric of society by keeping old farts alive forever, because 'muh problems on earth'.

>>9572333
It's similar to the sense of lost purpose WW1 veterans went through after the war. When you're entrenched your goal is clear. When you are free, what is your goal?

>>9573908
Spheromaks, stellarators and many more.
All way behind tokamaks in Q.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk

>>9572308
>Why would [any] X do Y?
>Most [but not all] of X have a reason that leads us to expect that they would not do Y.
So you agree with that guy.

>>9573930
This is the same reactor shown, and one of the guys leading the project.

I'd suck his dick

>>9572333
That's like saying people who bitch about the wage gap want the gap closed/fixed. It's not about the problem, the end goal IS the bitching

>>9573200 >>9573284
>n word
https://youtu.be/pqQrL1K0Z5g?t=7m
>nuclear

>>9574164 >>9573200 >>9573284 >>9573259
please don't say the n-word, a-word, b-word, c-word, d-word ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlAqizx7Lf0

Hearing MIT talk about a commercial reactor when they haven't even demonstrated if the thing works as a research reactor is at the least a lie for funding and really a disrespect for all the scientists who have worked on fusion for the last 70 years.

How can one even make a commercial reactor when they don't even know the expense of the materials and whether it would even be economically viable?

>>9574485
They gave a price on the materials as they are available off the shelf and from there it is simply a matter of cost/return. Did you actually watch the video and follow the equations? These new superconductors are fucking amazing in the difference of magnetic field strength, which traditionally has always been the big obstacle for fusion other than the blanket, which they have solved by taking 10 minutes to think about how to put the fucking thing together. I'll grant you that it is just a paper reactor, but following their pretty basic parameters, everything holds up. Will you eat your words if they achieve a Q value of 2+, or just continue to shitpost about how fusion will never work?

>>9574122
>It's not about the problem, the end goal IS the bitching
No

>>9573282
No, not even close. It will take a while to fully understand the physics and solve all the problems.

>>9574582
It's easy to talk about it, why don't they do it then?

>>9572281
>MIT

When have they ever been relevant in anything at all? Their grant chasing is as bad as NASA. Also, fusion is a meme. You have to add too much power to it and get far less power out of it. You literally need something as large as the sun to make it work, using gravity as the main way to keep it together to produce the energy output needed.

you know how many times there's been some "novel approach" that goes fucking nowhere?

>>9572308
Same reason environmentalists go after nuclear energy like it's the devil. They're ALL stupid.

>>9575173
more like they fall for the very easy to fall for human fallacy: negatives always outweigh positives

>>9574582
>These new superconductors are fucking amazing in the difference of magnetic field strength

And a quick search of this magic material shows it is very difficult to make into usable material with. Even making a wire is hard because it is so brittle.

This is PR, not science.

>>9575199
They make it into tape form.
https://www.fujikura.co.uk/products/energy-and-environment/2g-ybco-high-tempurature-superconductors/

>>9575170
Its not really a "novel" approach but rather an upgrade in something we already know works but requires stronger magnetic fields, which those superconductors can provide.

>>9575170
This isn't a novel approach, it's just a tokamak that uses modern superconductors instead of the state of the art from 30 years ago. The better conductors allow for higher plasma temperatures and densities for much longer confinement times, all resulting in a much greater rate of fusion for a specific power input, meaning a much smaller reactor is possible.

This thing is basically a better ITER in miniature.

>>9574944
They are doing now, lol.
They didn't do it before because we didn't have the technology.
Why didn't we build jet fighters in world war one? Because we couldn't. By the end of world war two, we could, so we did.

>>9575601
What will happen to ITER if this one turns out to have energy on the grid before ITER even opperates fusion?

>>9575199
That was the technological barrier until we figured out how to coat continuous strips of magnetic tape with this stuff, which is why people are now talking about making reactors with it.

>>9574944
You are tip top retarded

>>9575609
ITER project leaders commit suicide and nothing of value is lost.

Even if ITER goes ahead to completion it's a dead end, because using that technology an actual break-even power producing fusion plant would need to be about 50% bigger, and something that big could never be a viable way to produce a significant portion of the world's energy.

SPARK is a direct predecessor reactor to prove the technology that will be used to build ARC, a reactor designed to produce power for the grid and not require dozens of billions of dollars and decades of time to build. ARC would be able to actually replace a lot of the world's current power plants.

>>9575609
Money will be poured in some other money pit project.

>>9572301
>>9572947
Yes, they must be PURE EVIL, it's the only plausible explanation for a group of people to hate clean, harmless energy sources like fracking, coal, and oil

>>9575738
They also love solar and wind which ruin the environment to make and have a very limited lifespan. If environmentalists had a brain cell to spare between them they should be all over well designed fission plants.

>>9575625
If SPARC really takes 15 years to build, ITER will be running years before then and will still provide good information on how to run one of these reactors.

The people who want to cancel ITER are braindead greentard conspiracy theorists.

>>9575778
>The people who want to cancel ITER are braindead greentard conspiracy theorists

Or maybe people disgusted at the incredible waste of resources on an already obsolete project and retards spouting sunk cost fallacies?

>>9575786
ITER costs about the same as a new 2-unit fission power plant. It's chump change for this industry.

Fun fact: the lead man behind SPARC is still heavily involved in ITER and the research it will be doing.

>>9575178
No, many of the leaders of the green energy movement are liars and frauds, probably paid shills, and the other leaders and the followers are naive ignorant fools who are grossly misinformed about practically everything in the topic of energy production.

>>9575738
Environmentalists are not pure evil. However, "pure stupid" or "pure ignorant" are pretty close to correct.

>>9575625

Designs based from fusors already have managed to produce neutrons for commercial purposes in low cost commercial reactors.

Why "big science" technological houses have not invested more time and money on fusors than on tokamaks and lasers, is beyond of my understanding.

But scientific lobbing is the first reason to come in my mind.

>>9576097
generally, the more rhetoric filled a statement the less true it is
like this one

>>9576125
You seem to have some misconception that achieving fusion in a fusor means you can achieve net gain fusion in a fusor. This is not the case.

Fusion reactions are not that hard to achieve. What is hard is designing a machine that can generate a fusion reaction that outputs more energy than is put into the plasma keeping it hot and the magnets keeping the plasma contained. To achieve this breakeven point (Q=1) requires a large number of fusion reactions per mol of plasma ions. To get a high rate of reactions per mol, your machine needs to keep the plasma very hot and confined very well. It's also important to be able to keep the plasma fusing for a long time, because starting up the reactor requires more power than simply keeping it running, so even if you can run steady state for a few seconds at Q=10, you're not going to be net positive if you need to keep restarting the reactor dozens of times per minute.

Any college student can build a fusor in their garage and dose themselves with neutrons. All a fusor really does is take a diffuse plasma and concentrate some of it in a small area allowing some fusion to occur. This is nowhere near the Q factor required for break even though, it's more like Q=0.00001. For reference, the best operating tokamaks have achieved up to Q=0.1, ITER will achieve Q=0.7, and SPARK would achieve Q=1, albeit it will not be configured to produce energy, instead it is more of a test bed for swapping out parts and rapidly working the kinks from the design. ARC would be getting a Q factor of around Q=17, well above break-even and generating significantly more power than it required to run, even after considering losses to inefficiencies.

>>9576143
>http://www.greenpeace.org/archive-international/en/campaigns/nuclear/
"Greenpeace has always fought - and will continue to fight - vigorously against nuclear power because it is an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity. The only solution is to halt the expansion of all nuclear power, and for the shutdown of existing plants."

>>9576171
also like this one

>>9576159

>All a fusor really does is take a diffuse plasma and concentrate some of it in a small area allowing some fusion to occur

But is not the best way for confinement? lets remember that tokamak geometry is not the best for confinement (that´s why spherical tokamaks exist).

There have not been any kind of project on fusors that would even compete the mega programs done on tokamaks, lasers, etc...why? I don't see any technical issue to try it on large scale.

>>9576159
>>9576189

Actually, the fact that cold plasma could hold some significant fusion in a low powered confinement, something that could not be done on laser or tokamak approach, is for me very revealing.

>>9573306
This is the first coherent post that I've seen you make. Thank you for taking your meds.

>>9572326
>The educated ones are the dangerous ones. What do you think eill happen once you tell people their religion has become obsolete because of a small fragile box making electricity

They'll stop pretending and just admit they're radical communists. Or they'll co-opt a different movement.

>>9576191
>something that could not be done on laser or tokamak approach

All tokamak experiments can achieve fusion. Most of them have already as well. Like I said, achieving fusion is not the issue. Achieving enough fusion to power the reactor is the problem. Tokamaks are approximately five orders of magnitude better at fusing atoms than fusors are. Fusors are just easier to build. Not only do fusors only cause a minuscule amount of fusion reactions by comparison, they actually lose the vast majority of the plasma heat through conduction into the vessel walls, which is why a fusor requires a significant power supply to keep adding heat back into the plasma, because the fusion rate is simply not high enough to even keep the plasma warm, let alone produce net energy.

This problem, where the containment of the plasma in a fusor is done by a physical wall, is the reason why no fusor will ever achieve Q=1, or even close to it. fusion can only occur in a volume roughly 1/100th the size of the containment vessel, and the vessel is constantly hemorrhaging heat. If all you want are neutrons that's fine because you can just dump power into the device, but to produce energy you NEED to contain the plasma in an isolated and dense manner, where at least 99% of the plasma's volume can support fusion reactions, and those reactions must occur at a rate above a minimum threshold determined by your reactor's magnetic power draw.

ONLY tokamaks and possibly spheromaks are capable of this in principle. Stellarators are nifty but the one we've built so far is an experiment in directing plasma and won't achieve fusion, and even future stellerator designs are less likely to break Q=1 than tokamaks, because of the relatively low volume to surface area of the plasma allowing it to cool more quickly in a stellarator, requiring significantly more fusions per second to make up for that heat loss.

>>9576191
>>9576230
Put simply, the reason no one has tried to make a fusor device with a Q factor even approaching 1 is because anyone who knows how fusion works and knows how fusors work knows that it is physically impossible to build a fusor that can generate more power than it uses to keep running.

>>9576192
>hurr durr i'll make fun of mental illness because I'm such a badass edgelord

>>9575803
ITER will never make any money ever
And its far more expensive than 2 fission plants

>>9576301
>And its far more expensive than 2 fission plants
No, it isn't.

>ITER will never make any money ever
It's not meant to. It's an experiment.

>>9576309
There is no bottom limit for the price of a fission plant, its literally just a lump of uranium that boils water/some fluid.

>It's not meant to.
Yea so its useless

>>9575284
>>9575610
Okay I didn't see that they had the tape form, but I'm really confused because it says the wire barely does two tesla. Another reactor says they need at least 16 tesla for it to work.

Is it that simple as putting 20 of these wires in?

I remember a few years ago Lockheed said they were working on Fusion, and since then... nothing.
I'm always highly skeptical of these big claims about Fusion. I think if there was adequate investment into the technology, we could probably have working Fusion power generation in a few decades, but it just seems to me like the funding is almost non-existent and the only projects are very small scale research ones.