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posted by cmn32480 on Monday November 02 2015, @09:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the fusion-is-still-only-10-years-away dept.

From Yahoo Finance:

Germany is about to start up a monster machine that could revolutionize the way we use energy.
For more than 60 years, scientists have dreamed of a clean, inexhaustible energy source in the form of nuclear fusion.

And they're still dreaming.

But thanks to the efforts of the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, experts hope that might soon change.

Last year, after 1.1 million construction hours, the institute completed the world's largest nuclear-fusion machine of its kind, called a stellarator.

The machine, which has a diameter of 52 feet, is called the W7-X.
[...]
Check out this awesome time-lapse video of the construction of W7-X on Youtube.

Additional information can be found at this referenced article from Science .


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by gnuman on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:27AM

    by gnuman (5013) on Tuesday November 03 2015, @04:27AM (#257813)

    I have high hopes for Thorium reactors, which can be small scale too IIRC.

    You are then wrong. As someone that actually knows quite a bit about nuclear physics, let me just tell you that thorium == uranium for all intents and purposes. Actually, uranium is *bred* (created) inside the "thorium reactor" as the first step in the process of generating energy. The *only* two benefits of using thorium is,

        1. slightly less heavy "waste" in the reaction chain, and
        2. some nations, like India, have lots of thorium but no uranium. So thorium is good for India

    That's about it.

    For everything else, you can make the same things with uranium as you do with thorium. Thorium reactors *require* fast neutron reactors, and almost all modern reactors are only thermal (low energy) neutron reactors because they are easier to design. Fast neutron reactors will be required to burn the current "nuclear waste". In those reactors you can stick in thorium, uranium, current fission waste, reprocessed fuel, plutonium, etc. All negatives of uranium, like Fukushima style meltdowns, are the same in thorium. If you want to avoid meltdowns, you need passive safe reactors, which has as much to do with thorium as my phone has to do with air I breathe.

    So, there is no "thorium reactors" per say. Heck, some of current reactors can and do already burn thorium. And when refueled, they burn uranium. And when refueled they burn plutonium, or mix of the three.

    And you certain do not want any of these as "small scale". Larger reactors allow you to minimize capital costs per MW. There is also much less issues with security of the materials.

    Large scale is even more important in fusion reactors, where containment energy requirements scale at a slower rate than energy production. And no, there is no magic science to get around that, unless you believe in cold fusion.

    Too much research money is tasked to large centralized systems

    I guess you missed the billions and billions of dollars spent on solar and wind. Even without government subsidies, wind and solar make sense in many, many locations. Large centralized systems are actually taking a hit because utilities don't want to invest in future, just milk what they have until it literally falls apart.

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  • (Score: 2) by G-forze on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:38AM

    by G-forze (1276) on Tuesday November 03 2015, @08:38AM (#257858)

    How about not needing huge pressure vessels, since molten salt thorium reactors work at atmospheric pressure? That alone enables far smaller and safer reactors. Maybe you meant that this is possible with pure uranium reactors too? In that case, my question is; why isn't that being done?

    Another huge advantage of thorium is not needing to enrich the fuel, which makes it much easier and cheaper to produce.

    All negatives of uranium, like Fukushima style meltdowns, are the same in thorium.

    The LFTR design is supposed to be walk away safe. Care to explain why that is not the case?

    --
    If I run into the term "SJW", I stop reading.
  • (Score: 2) by iamjacksusername on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:52PM

    by iamjacksusername (1479) on Tuesday November 03 2015, @02:52PM (#257947)

    I always thought building fast breeders at existing reactor locations would make a lot of sense. Yucca Mountain is no longer viable; most reactor waste is stored in concrete pods at the reactor sites. Focusing new reactor construction on existing reactor sites would solve two major political and environmental barriers to new reactor construction.

    1. By building breeders at existing locations, the "waste" fuel from existing reactors would have a short trip to the breeder location, reducing potential transport security (proliferation) and accidental contamination... e.g., a train full of waste de-railing in a populated area.

    2. Selecting new nuclear sites is a political non-starter. Re-using existing sites would make it much more likely to see construction in my lifetime.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday November 03 2015, @09:00PM

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Tuesday November 03 2015, @09:00PM (#258132) Homepage
    Don't traditional uranium reactors burn uranium-235 or uranium-238? And thorium reactors produce uranium-233 in their decay chain?
    OK, it's theoretically possible to hop between the u-235 chain and the u-233 one, but fission happens very readily with 233, so thorium does not generally follow the same set of reactions, output, byproducts, and waste materials as u-235. So they aren't essentially the same.
    --
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