ITER progress

[keith with the teef]

Lads. I got my nuclear scientist head on today with the obligatory dark glasses. So they are building a Tokamak in France that will be able to achieve Qx10 or maybe Qx50. If you fancy putting on some dark glasses and tuning in see the link. It will become initially operational DEC 2025.

https://www.youtube.com/c/iterorganization

 

 

[Ed P]

If you remember the derided Cold Fusion – check out NASA’s Lattice Confinement Fusion. Its as close to Cold Fusion as a Mule is to a Horse!

Lattice Confinement Fusion

Being very cynical it would not surprise me if 99% of the Cold Fusion criticism came from JET, Iter and Tokamak stakeholders. Or maybe it was the Saudis/Russians as they had the most to lose!

 

[keith with the teef]

Here is my position on cold fusion. lol. Thats is a bit harsh. Oh and as useless as the flat earth society. But in the back of my mind I would like to think somewhere out there in time and space cold fusion is taking place and giving off more energy than it uses and again Lol.  The ITER needs to be able to run super hot plasma kicking out well above Q10 really and we all know more like Q50. It looks to me as a layman that they got the machine right. I think the next big problem is to have the machine and more importantly the computing able to move fast enough to make a stable environment like our sun at maintaining the plasma and pumping out Q values in the right direction to turn water into steam for the turbines.

Back to cold fusion and just an idea. The universe came from the big band and one day all mater will be consumed as in burned. I figure that what will be now nothing will begin to collapse to its original state as in before the big bang and temps will be kelvin zero what? And some where in there cold fusion will take place. And again Lol as I can be as crazy as a flat Earther.

[Ed P]

Yet another route to nuclear energy is being pursued by the Aussies. This one works by smashing together hydrogen and boron to directly produce charged particles.

https://newatlas.com/energy/hb11-laser-fusion-demonstration/

I’m not so sure about the potential  energy balance and economics of this route. Hydrogen production is very energy intensive, while boron is pretty rare stuff and only forms 0.001 percent of the earths crust, so production and transportation costs will be high.

Novel, but I think I prefer the NASA Cold Fusion type approach.

[keith with the teef]

I found this and things don’t look so good?

Sabine Hossenfelder seems to know her stuff on lots of subject matter and she has her won channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ4W1g-6JiY

[Ed P]

You have to remember that the people in the Iter/Tokamak projects are fighting for their research grants and this makes them more likely to stretch points to make them look more favourable. That said, Sabine is just reiterating what every Engineer knew, and why I, as an Engineer, favour the ‘cold’ approaches of NASA/Cold Fusion.

Assuming these can be made to work these have a much higher likelihood of Qout >> Qin where Qin is the total energy input. In the case of the NASA scheme a  ‘catalyst’ is squashing the atoms together rather than plasmas and huge magnets.

Sabine is correct in stating that producing electricity from heat is a wasteful process, however the overall efficiency can be raised substantially if the ‘waste’ heat is used for other ways such as district domestic heating, or pre-heat for industrial processes etc. Even fish farms benefit if the water is a bit warmer.

In addition there is some limited research on the lines of the Aussie experiment where the Fusion neutrons are used to directly cause ionisation. The research is limited in this area but one example is the production of charged particles through the neutron bombardment of beryllium, which also produces gold as a by-product. I suspect however that this is more applicable to the ‘Cold’ routes rather than ITER-type systems.

[Ed P]

Correction, I misread the Los Alamos paper. Gold was not a by-product, it was actually one of the neutron targets that produced charged particles.

[keith with the teef]

I’m gonna hold a light for ITER. I hope it makes it.

“Did I tell you I have been invited to the BBQ”.

If it does not then I have high hopes for the thorium reactor.

Yeah, isn’t it, if you knock an electron off mercury you get gold. Summat like that.

[JayCeeDee]

On a smaller, more local/personal scale THESE batteries, from Bristol University research back in 2017, have led to THIS in recent days.

It’s a subject that intrigues me as it shows a possible way forward that is more durable than the existing ‘green’ solutions.

[Ed P]

Great that they can make a battery that will last 20 years. Batteries are important but my hopes are that someone will perfect commercial supercapacitors, of the sort being used by the military for laser and EMP weapons.

If they can get all the bugs out of it, they will make energy storage and electric cars far more efficient. Even the measly amount of sunlight we get in the UK should then be enough to photoelectric power an average home throughout the year.

[JayCeeDee]

Well, I just went down the YouTube rabbit hole looking for info on supercapacitors and it seems that they are actually in use, albeit in conjunction with lithium-ion batteries, as technology that’s out in the real world and starting the journey towards everyday usage.

THIS and THIS were the starting points for my journey.

We are going to see a lot of this in the near future in some unusual places, such as the Scottish Island of  Eigg. The island is self reliant for electricity  totally using renewables and the Supercapacitors are evening-out some surge usage, avoiding brownouts. As you see in the Fully Charged video they have a wardrobe sized 1.5 MegaWatt  unit, equivalent to a container sized pack of Lithium Ion batteries.

Also of interest was the Swiss tram network. It reminded me of another improvement that has been developed over here, but not in full usage yet, cutting down the weight of batteries in buses by using wireless charging put in place below the surface of a bus stop, so that while it’s taking on passengers it’s also recharging the batteries and increasing range.

[keith with the teef]

They recon that the solid state battery will be a mature technology in 2026.

[Ed P]

Thanks for the info. I suspect that we are only seeing the very tip of supercapacitor development as they have very real military applications. From what is publicly available it seems at this time that military research is directed towards EMP weapons such as THOR to fry the electronics in aircraft and drones. However it does not need a lot of imagination to extend that application to airborne weapons that fry an enemies electrical infrastructure and comms.

Typically commercial use of military tech comes about 10 years after it first appears in military use. On that basis the bigger real-world things will start to happen in the 2030’s. Maybe then, electric cars will get a lot lighter and have a 1000 mile range, and UK solar powered houses can go completely  off-grid.

[JayCeeDee]

You’re welcome Ed. I used to view YouTube as a bunch of extroverts telling the world how clever they were, sort of thing, but actually there is some great, real-life focused content that I now actually prefer to almost all of the Reality/Lifestyle content on commercial TV!!

With a side benefit of being a research tool for new tech and some science which is explained in an understandable, but not over-simplified fashion, for those who get the theory behind it, if not the detail. A little bit like Tomorrow’s World used to be.👍

But it can be a rabbit-hole you disappear down for a few hours without surfacing.😊

[keith with the teef]

That diamond battery looks to be to good to be true.

But it turns out that diamond has other fancy properties. They have also discovered that Diamond can hold quantum data making it the perfect storage for quantum computers.

Ah, yeah, Tomorrows World. Take a butchers at this gem, its from the BBC archive and the link to should be in the vid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Woz270D1HE

 

[JayCeeDee]

Just been YT’ing again and saw THIS . Useful in explaining the difference between Fission and Fusion – I just about got it – it’s also good to hear that Oxford is having early success, albeit on a small scale.

Fantastic that the largest capacity individual reactor currently under construction is in the UK at 1.7Gw. No surprise that the biggest overall capacity currently under construction at 15Gw is China.

[Ed P]

Using gem stones for data storage and lasers for quantum computers reminds me so much of just those elements in Blake’s 7 and other science fiction of the 80/90s/noughties!

I wonder if that pre-existing technology makes it impossible to patent the principles? At one time it was said that Arthur  C Clarke could have made a fortune by the way he presaged the use of geostationary satellites if he had just taken out a patent on the idea.

[Ed P]

Supposedly the Lawrence Livermore crowd achieved self sustaining fusion a year ago, but unfortunately a ‘dog ate their notes’ and they have not been able to replicate their success.

Slightly tongue in cheek comment. The real facts are here:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-achieved-self-sustaining-nuclear-fusion-but-now-they-cant-replicate-it

[Ed P]

I guess others have seen the reports in El Reg and other places that the South Koreans have taken a massive step towards Fusion power with a fusing plasma that stayed stable for 20 seconds/

Elsewhere I read that progress beyond this is a major engineering problem as one of the constraints that limited the duration of the run was that it became too hot.

Apparently you cannot just stick cooling coils into the fusion reactor as this would almost certainly make it impossible to maintain a stable plasma.  This is a double-edged problem as not only is it necessary to prolong the period of stable plasma, from a practical standpoint the energy/heat has to be extracted in order to generate any usable electricity.

Bottom line do not count on fusion power in our life-times.

[keith with the teef]

Ed P wrote:

Bottom line do not count on fusion power in our life-times.

Its great to see others trying to make this work and making breakthroughs, all though small steps in real terms.

But all information and experience gained may have a catalytic effect on the endeavors at ITER.

They have done the math on ITER and it should work as we have been through this before.

They say if it works and can be transferred into power stations then it will bankrupt the world.

But yeah, if I’m lucky I may see a fully functional power station.

There is something seriously Ironic about having god like technology to boil water and turn it into steam for turbines to make electricity.

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