A Fusion Mini-Reactor Exceed The Temperature At The Core Of The Sun
Fusion energy is almost like a unicorn. Everybody would like to have it but seems to be unattainable. ITER – the international experiment is getting more and more expensive and it’s still not finished. But fusion is just soo tempting.
Coil of the Wendelstein fusion reactor. Deutsches Museum, Munich.
Tiia Monto CC BY-SA 3.0], from Wikimedia Commons
One of the companies who has succumbed to its temptations is Tokamak Energy from the British Oxfordshire. Currently, they are developing a fusion device called ST40. And on Wednesday 6th of June, they announced they achieved a temperature of 15 million degrees Celsius – higher than at the core of the sun. And they want to start delivering power in 2030.
The key to their success is supposed to small-scale fusion power. The ST40 is only the size of a van. Other fusion reactors are much bigger, some even attack the size of a football field. To get such high temperatures, ST40 is using a technology known as merging-compression. Using this technology you use a spherical tokamak to create two rings of plasma that are later merged into a single radially compressed ring using magnets.
At the moment two main types of fusion reactors are being used. But both use powerful magnetic fields to keep super-hot plasma at its designed place. First are tokamaks – which are shaped like a donut. The second are stellarators – which are shaped like a very abstract donut. Tokamak Energy is pretty obviously using tokamaks.
Their first prototype – ST25 was built in 2013, their second was done by 2015. Now they have their third prototype – the ST40 and soon they want to attack temperatures of up to 100 million degrees Celsius. And in 2025 they want to start using their reactor for industrial purposes and by 2030 they would like to start delivering electricity into the grid. And while that is still a long way ahead it seems we are on the right road towards fusion energy.
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What if it creates a black hole and sucks us all in?
luckily that isn't how fusion reactors work
Hopefully we don't go to the dreaded planet of the apes
I think we will actually
Gosh. What kind of power can it generate?
As far as I know, it isn't current capable of producing more energy than you need for the fusion reaction to start. It is just a prototype that they use to test how hot their plasma can get.
If anyone is really interested in Cold Fusion they should check out LNER and the many experiments that produced all kinds of elements.
https://edgylabs.com/lenr-cold-fusion
And search for the GlowStick Experiments in LENR, but as to the companies that waste money on this endeavor of HOT Fusion while we have known about the real demonstrable result of cold fusion for 30 years a big Middle Finger that they can spin all of their combined 15 million degrees on.
And a Tsk Tsk on @scisteem for excluding the only viable and SANE energy reaction from the discussion.
First of all. I don't exclude anything. If I find it to be an interesting topic, I'll write about it.
When it comes to cold fusion, the problem is that I've never seen anybody making something that would be later on replicated either by external scientists or often even by the people claiming to have cracked the puzzle in front of a public audience.
If you give me evidence of real replicable experiments that we can talk cold fusion.
So basically you won't talk about it because you've not seen any "external" scientist replicate it, but you'd write about it, but of course that only after you ask me for evidence that you've exhaustavely searched for.
Tell me again all the evidence there is for Hot Fusion? In 30 Years? external scientist replicated?
Tsk Tsk for your prejudice that leaks from your thoughts and logic and the denialism you must be in since you've seem to exhaust your research into the subject!
Yes, one of the base principles of the scientific method is that experiments need to be replicable by external scientists. If they aren't, history shows that in the vast majority of cases it is just a fake.
The evidence for hot fusion is the fact that many scientific teams over the world have been capable of getting elements to fuse for decades now. We even have two tokamaks here where I live. They aren't commercially viable, but they are capable of fusion.
And the last part isn't an argument as attacks on character are one of the most common logical fallacies.
Now, this may be a logical fallacy as well, and if it is, I apologize.
You seem to think that I don't like cold fusion or that I wouldn't love for it to be real. I honestly would. But I have just not seen any evidence towards the existence of a sustainable cold fusion reaction existing.
As far as I know, the only real kind of cold fusion is muon-catalyzed fusion, but that requires a constant supply of muons and doesn't produce a self-sustainable reaction. Maybe there is some team that found a way to create self-sustaining muon-catalyzed fusion and if there as that would truly be a revolution in energy production. But until I see evidence for it, made in accordance with the scientific method, I will not be writing about it.
And to your second comment. Yes, I didn't exclude anything. I just found an article that I liked so I wrote about it. That doesn't mean I excluded anything.
Isn't the premise of hot fusion that it's sustains itself, so then where are the experiments and data that shows anything to that effect besides their models extrapolated from numerous different experiments? Absolutely nothing.
How long has fusion attempted to show a sustainable or stable prototype?
I've posted a LINK choke full of resources, with comments that rival the article itself that demonstrate beyond any shadow of a doubt that cold fusion has been possible since at least 1989, I've also referenced directly things that have demonstrated fusion at room temperature, and which shows great promise for being commercially viable way before any theoretical models exist to explain exactly why and how it works, and you must either be in DENIAL to that research presented or completely dismissive as "non-sustainable" despite the results that are vastly more
promising than any hot fusion endeavor, even this bullshit presented above as "self-sustainable" that there's little scrutuny over least compared to how you scrutinize the demonstrable effects of LENR, with "external" scientists being the authority, some odd qual for what passes as acceptable, though as hard as you try to defend your indefensible possition the hole gets bigger and bigger because you see evidence of self sustainable hot fusion reaction in the complete and utter lack of evidence and bias that for the billions poured into fusion there isn't anything at all to write home about, since fusing different elements is not what fusion was about, and that has been demonstrated to happen not at astronomical temperatures but regular temperatures you can create at home.
I think you are mistaking sustaining itself with being able to produce more energy than we put it.
Sustain itself means that once you get the initial reaction going it produces energy as long as it has fuel. We have been capable of doing that for a pretty decent amount of time. Technically ever since we dropped the first hydrogen bomb.
The problem is that we need to put in more energy to start the reaction than we get out of it in the end. Though I think I've heard of at least one fusion reactor that got more energy out than it put in, but only in a short burst of a reaction.
On the other hand, cold fusion, as far as we know it today, can't sustain itself because you the reaction isn't creating enough energy to create additional reactions.
The link you provided me had 0 scientific articles in it. It was just yeah, we saw a slew of people doing it, but no scientific papers, no real evidence.
In the end, I can't see a way to convince you that cold fusion is currently not a thing. Maybe it will be in the future, but it certainly isn't now.
So you denied the numerous references and the GlowStick experiments and claim that there's no evidence of creating more energy than what is put in, off hand without any substance, because "we saw a slew of people doing it" as if this hasn't been demonstrated since 89 and replicated, but you tout that hot fusion despite the billions wasted it has absolutely nothing to show for it.
Again anyone that wants to verify this look at the article posted and the commentary on it and then if you want to see the open source independent studies done search out Glow Stick experiments. This author is clearly in denial and dismissive without concern while applying double standards and talking about fusion as if it was ever demonstrated and the viability of it in 30 years while ridiculing the numerous repeated studies done on the anomalies of cold fusion both in excess heat and fusion of elements, which again are referenced in the article and the comments under it.
http://www.quantumheat.org/index.php/en/
Give me the link to the open source studies and I'll take them into consideration. So far you've only provided me with essentially marketing posts.
I'm not advocating for fusion energy if you don't understand that. I'm just writing about cool shit I find.
First of all, you didn't exclude anything? Should that be the punchline to my joke?