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from the insert-tab-τ317.25α2'-into-slot-σ902.44β9' dept.
Scientists Start Assembling the World's Largest Nuclear Fusion Experiment:
Fourteen years after receiving the official go-ahead, scientists on Tuesday began assembling a giant machine in southern France designed to demonstrate that nuclear fusion, the process which powers the Sun, can be a safe and viable energy source on Earth.
The groundbreaking multinational experiment, known as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), has seen components arrive in the tiny commune of Saint-Paul-les-Durance from production sites worldwide in recent months.
They will now be painstakingly put together to complete what is described by ITER as the "world's largest puzzle".
The experimental plant's goal is to demonstrate that fusion power can be generated sustainably, and safely, on a commercial scale, with initial experiments set to begin in December 2025.
[...] Some 2,300 people are at work on site to put the massive machine together.
"Constructing the machine piece by piece will be like assembling a three-dimensional puzzle on an intricate timeline," said ITER's director general Bernard Bigot.
"Every aspect of project management, systems engineering, risk management and logistics of the machine assembly must perform together with the precision of a Swiss watch," he said, adding: "We have a complicated script to follow over the next few years."
[...] It could reach full power by 2035, but as an experimental project, it is not designed to produce electricity.
If the technology proves feasible, future fusion reactors would be capable of powering two million homes each at an operational cost comparable to those of conventional nuclear reactors, Bigot said.
[...] The ITER project is running five years behind schedule and has seen its initial budget triple to some 20 billion euros (US$23.4 billion).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:37PM (1 child)
Experimenting inside a simulation would only work if the following both hold true:
1. You know exactly the laws to encode in the simulation.
2. You have enough computational power to run the simulation at sufficient detail and accuracy and to run it as many times as you need to iterate and find a design that works.
Remember that we're talking about a hugely complex machine with many electrical and mechanical components with at its heart a magnetic field containing a highly compressed and energetic blob of plasma consisting of an incomprehensibly large number of fundamental particles, many of which behave in ways we still do not fully(!) understand.
Since we do not have a perfect theory on how the laws in our universe work together, any simulation we create will by neccesity be an imperfect model of reality. Of course such models can still be useful, depending how accurately they can approximate reality. One reason to do real physical experiments is exactly to get data on how plasma behaves under various conditions, so that it can be integrated in future models.
Another reason for physical experiments is that supporting technologies such as superconductors and metallurgy also need to be developed in tandem. A model showing you the perfect fusion reactor design is not much use if nobody knows how to make the parts for it.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:40PM
Not really. Plasma physics, at the microscopic level, is understood very well. Numerical integration can be performed with sufficient accuracy.