Assembling the world’s largest nuclear fusion experiment is now an engineering problem.
There’s a six-decade-long theory that backs nuclear fusion and its promise of near-limitless energy. Practical steps are being taken to investigate the technology’s industrial viability.
In the future, thermonuclear reactors (one famous iteration is known as a tokamaks) could power the world, but scientists and engineers are laying the groundwork for them now.
The thermonuclear fusion reaction takes place in a plasma of Deuterium and Tritium heated to millions of degrees Kelvin, creating Helium-4 (a stable, non-radioactive isotope of Helium containing two protons and two neutrons in its nucleus), freeing a neutron, and releasing energy (17.59 MeV). Deuterium (a stable but rare isotope of Hydrogen containing one proton and one neutron in its nucleus) is produced by starting with ordinary water (H2O), from which the heavy water (D2O, water that contains a larger than normal amount of the Hydrogen isotope Deuterium) can be separated by the Girdler sulfide process and/or distillation. Tritium (a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen containing one proton and two neutrons in its nucleus) can be produced in special heavy water reactors and it is used inside a nuclear warhead as a source of neutrons required for its detonation. Canada, South Korea, Romania, Argentina, China and India can make tritium available to the fusion community.
The thermonuclear fusion reaction takes place in a plasma of Deuterium and Tritium heated to millions of degrees Kelvin, creating Helium-4 (a stable, non-radioactive isotope of Helium containing two protons and two neutrons in its nucleus), freeing a neutron, and releasing energy (17.59 MeV). Deuterium (a stable but rare isotope of Hydrogen containing one proton and one neutron in its nucleus) is produced by starting with ordinary water (H2O), from which the heavy water (D2O, water that contains a larger than normal amount of the Hydrogen isotope Deuterium) can be separated by the Girdler sulfide process and/or distillation. Tritium (a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen containing one proton and two neutrons in its nucleus) can be produced in special heavy water reactors and it is used inside a nuclear warhead as a source of neutrons required for its detonation. Canada, South Korea, Romania, Argentina, China and India can make tritium available to the fusion community.
The ITER Project, currently under construction in France, close to the village Saint Paul-lez-Durance (Bouches-du-Rhône department), is the largest fusion power project that benefits from huge resources. The expected cost of ITER has risen from $5 billion USD to $20 billion USD, and the timeline for operation at full power was moved from the original estimate of 2016 to 2025 (first plasma).
The acronym ITER used to be interpreted as the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which is still the case, but now it’s also referred to by its Latin meaning: “the way”.
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| ITER began in 1985 as a Reagan–Gorbachev initiative |
The scientific cooperation emanated from talks in 1985* between Soviet Secretary-General Gorbachev, French President Mitterand (Paris, October 2, 1985) and American President Reagan (Geneva, November 19, 1985). Planning commenced in spring 1988 at Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Garching, as host laboratory. Till winter 1990 about 50 physicists and engineers from Europe, Japan, the former Soviet Union, and the United States worked on the ITER concept and submitted the design for the test reactor in December 1990.
*It is important to remember that another collaborative project in fusion, called INTOR (never achieved), had started in June 1973, in Washington D.C. as a Nixon-Brezhnev initiative.
The ITER Organization is funded by 35 countries (EU-28 plus Switzerland, China, Japan, India, the Republic of Korea, Russia and the US).
*It is important to remember that another collaborative project in fusion, called INTOR (never achieved), had started in June 1973, in Washington D.C. as a Nixon-Brezhnev initiative.
The ITER Organization is funded by 35 countries (EU-28 plus Switzerland, China, Japan, India, the Republic of Korea, Russia and the US).
Signed in 2006, the ITER project agreement continues to be on track with the organization announcing in 2018 that 50% of the work on the project was complete.
As the Cadarache 180-hectare facility is prepared, the equipment, components, and techniques necessary for the ITER’s tokamak to run are steadily coming in.
The complex has entered its first phase of assembly, and the ITER reactor is expected to deliver its First Plasma by December 2025.
After ITER - the machine that will demonstrate the technological and scientific feasibility of fusion energy - DEMO will open the way to its industrial and commercial exploitation in the mid-2050s.
After ITER - the machine that will demonstrate the technological and scientific feasibility of fusion energy - DEMO will open the way to its industrial and commercial exploitation in the mid-2050s.
(ANSA) - La Spezia, 2017 November 20 - An Italian supermagnet destined for the ITER experimental fusion reactor in southern France left the La Spezia site of ASG Superconductors for the local port from which it will be shipped to Porto Marghera near Venice. Cadarache-based ITER aims to demonstrate the feasibility of the energy of the future, imitating the processes that happen in stars. The giant coil is the fruit of collaboration between Italian industry, the alternative energy group ENEA and the EU's Fusion for Energy (F4E) agency. ASG Superconductors is owned by the Malacalza family. The new magnet is the biggest ever made in the world.
France, 2018 April 13 (Reuters) - Four massive parts for an international nuclear fusion project arrived in southern France after a four-month journey from their production site on the Yangtse river in China.
The four vapour suppression tanks, each weighing about 100 tonnes and measuring eight by nine metres, were delivered to the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) site in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, French authorities said.
Canada has signed (Apr. 2018) a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the ITER organisation to explore how Canada can participate in the project to construct the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.
The reactor in Greifswald, Germany, was switched on in 2015, suspending a helium plasma for the first time. It then also managed to suspend a hydrogen plasma in 2017. It is a collaboration between the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics and the Wigner Research Centre for Physics, both in Germany.
The Wendelstein 7-x is the largest stellarator fusion device in the world - dubbed the “dark horse in fusion energy research” and costing €370 million ($404 million) to build - rivalling the standard tokamak fusion reactor that was developed by Soviet researchers.
In february 2016, the federal chancellor Angela Merkel pushed the red button on the Wendelstein 7-X stellarator, and kicked off a reaction countdown that heated up hydrogen with the power of 6,000 microwaves. The plasma was sustained for just a fraction of a second. The experiment was heralded as a success.
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| Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) Bucharest |
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| Drobeta Heavy Water Plant |
The findings suggest that Romania is capable of providing a total of 6.2 kg of tritium to ITER over its 20 year operation, generating a potential revenue of $186 M (USD). Opportunities associated with the supply of Romanian helium-3 are also considered as a hedging option, which has the potential to generate $120 M (USD) in the case of zero tritium sales.
In september 2017, Rosatom Director-General Alexey Likhachov visited the construction site of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, which the Russian state nuclear corporation said has now entered the "full-scale practical implementation phase". Rosatom also announced that it has sent the latest batch of six trailers with high-current busbars for the power supply systems of ITER's superconducting magnet.
"In the centre of this device you've got the highest temperatures in the universe and two metres out you've got superconducting magnets with the coldest temperatures in the universe".
United States blocks Iran from fusion megaproject. Iran has been poised for months to ink an agreement to join ITER in a limited capacity. “It was all moving well, until President Trump took office,” says Ali Akbar Salehi, president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran here. An ITER official who requested anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity confirms that the United States is blocking Iran through its seat on ITER’s governing council, which must approve Iran’s participation unanimously. Bringing Iran into ITER was expected to be straightforward. The long delay, European and Iranian officials say, casts a pall on other scientific collaborations expected under the nuclear deal. An ITER council meeting later this month is expected to take up the issue.
Sebastien Balibar, a leading French nuclear physicist, has cast doubts that the EU-funded project will ever come into being: "We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don't know how to make the box," he told the Wisconsin Scientist in 2006.
The ITER organization should be sued for lies about the cost and performance of this nuclear reactor. ITER is a masterful illustration of the madness of this world !?
Source: https://blogs.mediapart.fr/antoine-calandra/blog/040518/iter-et-la-fusion-nucleaire-une-accumulation-de-mensonges-depuis-le-debut
The dark side of the nuclear fusion
The dark side of the nuclear fusion
and the risks of scaling down the sun
(the thermonuclear bomb, the neutron bomb and the danger of nuclear weapons proliferation)
The thermonuclear bomb (also called hydrogen bomb or H-bomb), is a weapon whose enormous explosive power results from an uncontrolled, self-sustaining chain reaction in which isotopes of hydrogen combine under extremely high temperatures to form helium in a process known as nuclear fusion (for its peaceful application, click here).
On August 12, 1953 the Soviet Union detonated RDS-37, a thermonuclear (“hydrogen”) bomb at the Semipalatinsk test site in northern Kazakhstan. Work on the super-bomb had begun in 1946, three years before the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. The project was organized by the First Chief Directorate under Lavrentii Beria, Minister of State Security (MGB). It was headed by Igor Kurchatov (1903-60), a physicist who had been appointed scientific director of the Soviet Union’s nuclear project in 1943.
A neutron bomb, officially defined as a type of enhanced radiation weapon (ERW), is a low yield thermonuclear weapon designed to maximize lethal neutron radiation in the immediate vicinity of the blast while minimizing the physical power of the blast itself. The neutron release generated by a nuclear fusion reaction is intentionally allowed to escape the weapon, rather than being absorbed by its other components. The neutron burst, which is used as the primary destructive action of the warhead, is able to penetrate enemy armor more effectively than a conventional warhead, thus making it more lethal as a tactical weapon. The concept was originally developed by the US in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was seen as a "cleaner" bomb for use against massed Soviet armored divisions. As these would be used over allied nations, notably West Germany, the reduced blast damage was seen as an important advantage. It has been claimed that it is possible to conceive of a crude, deliverable, pure fusion weapon, using only present-day, unclassified technology.
The danger of nuclear weapons proliferation. Unlike what happens in solar fusion - which uses ordinary hydrogen, the earth-bound fusion reactors that burn neutron-rich isotopes have byproducts that are anything but harmless: energetic neutron streams comprise 80 percent of the fusion energy output of deuterium-tritium reactions and 35 percent of deuterium-deuterium reactions.
The open or clandestine production of plutonium 239 (a fissionable isotope that can be used to make a nuclear fission bomb similar to that produced with uranium-235) is possible in a fusion reactor simply by placing natural or depleted uranium oxide (containing more than 99.284% uranium-238) at any location where neutrons of any energy are flying about. The ocean of slowing-down neutrons that results from scattering of the streaming fusion neutrons on the reaction vessel permeates every nook and cranny of the reactor interior, including appendages to the reaction vessel. Slower neutrons will be readily soaked up by uranium 238, whose cross section for neutron absorption increases with decreasing neutron energy.
In view of the dubious prospects for tritium replenishment, fusion reactors may have to be powered by the two deuterium-deuterium reactions that have substantially the same probability, one of which produces neutrons and helium 3, while the other produces protons and tritium. Because tritium breeding is not required, all the fusion neutrons are available for any use - including the production of plutonium 239 from uranium 238. The bomb which was dropped at Nagasaki was a plutonium bomb.
Source: https://thebulletin.org/fusion-reactors-not-what-they’re-cracked-be10699
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| After all, blowing up the world ten times over was a fusion fantasy of the Cold War ... |
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