ITER

i'm aware that most of you won't be as excited as me on this, but this is big guys.

After years of hard bargaining, (with a fully integrated engineering design already completed), the decision has finally fallen to build ITER in Cadarache, France (instead of Japan).

To be persuaded, Japan has demanded that they would provide the director general, have half of the staff meetings held in Japan, build the DEMO reactor, have europe pay 50% of the costs, etc..

For those who do not know what ITER is: its the future of electricity generation, based on nuclear plasma fusion. It's a huge project, involving Europe, USA, Japan, China, Russia and Korea. I'm not going to give a lecture about how it cancels out the negative effects we have today (environment-wise etc), just visit http://www.iter.org/ or for the agreement http://www.iter.org/index_newsroom.htm

I'm excited that it's beeing built closely to where i live, giving me more hope to be able to visit it one day (/dreams: work there one day;) ), but i'm mostly excited cause they can finally start building it.

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These words are my diaries screaming out loud

Yes. Nice.

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"Azelito, stop being a f**king bitch. All I see you do is complain and insult people in your recent posts. We don't care, go find a razor you emo pansy..." -Windows98

Big fusion just keeps going bigger. Every new version they say
they will hit unity fusion power out and they never do. I my
opinion the 5 billion or whatever its going to cost to make ITER a
reality would be infinitely better spent on smaller research projects,
improving our understanding of the plasma dynamics. Then maybe we
could attempt something bigger. But after all - what good is a
fusion reactor if it needs to be the size of 5 aircraft carriers?
It's not very practical, and no actual electrical power company would
build one. Industry is smarter than the government in that regard

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To get something to work, sometimes you just have to beat your head against the wall longer; the skin grows back, but the brick doesn't.

Source hates soup!

azelito said:
Yes. Nice.

use blue for irony

SaintGreg said:
Every new version they say they will hit unity fusion power out and they never do.

the last "big" reactor, JET, was built in 1983, and they never exlaimed they would reach a buring plasma.

SaintGreg said:
I my opinion the 5 billion or whatever its going to cost to make ITER a reality would be infinitely better spent on smaller research projects, improving our understanding of the plasma dynamics. Then maybe we could attempt something bigger.

JET, among other smaller reactors were exactly for that purpose; understanding the plasma dynamics. if they didnt understand it enough at this point, they would have never agreed to spend 12billion euros on ITER.

SaintGreg said:
But after all - what good is a fusion reactor if it needs to be the size of 5 aircraft carriers? It's not very practical, and no actual electrical power company would build one. Industry is smarter than the government in that regard

The site requirement is 100m x 100m , the actual plant is much smaller. And this is not an industrial-scaled reactor, only the step towards designing an industrial reactor. And ofcourse it would be way too expensive now. But with energy demand increasing, nuclear fission being stepped away from, and competitive oil and gas reserves only lasting for, what, 70 years, fusion will become competitive once it has matured.

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These words are my diaries screaming out loud

Thank God. I've been following this for years, and I'm damn pleased to see them finaly pick a site!

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Some people are like slinkys...

They aren?t really good for anything, but you can't help but laugh when one tumbles down the stairs.

I haven't really been following fusion as of late, but I wonder how
inertial confinement research is going? I always thought that was
certainly the more promising route for power generation. I know
sandia planned to create a target container to be driven with their
z-pinch but I don't know what ever happened to that. All that
z-pinchy goodness. Mmmmmmm.

Either way, not all fusion schemes have been explored on the small
scale enough to (IMO) be put to that large of a scale.
Stellerators, spheromaks, spherical torus, etc etc. Pretty much
the biggest of the big has always been the plain jane tokamak, even
though it seems like the newer (smaller) projects have seemingly been
more sucessful, or at least have more potential.

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To get something to work, sometimes you just have to beat your head against the wall longer; the skin grows back, but the brick doesn't.

Source hates soup!