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Oh yes I take ITER as good news, but it still leaves us 20 - 40 years from a... well I wanted to write a commercial fusion plant, however that might be a trifle optimistic.

Lets say we are at best 20-40 years from a functional prototype of a commercialy viable plant.

ITER is very much a test, any way you bend it. DEMO is waiting for ITERs outcome. Of course ITER will work, tokamaks have operated since the 1960s, that is like claiming a rocket will almost certainly fly. Yet we still stand in awe when it does.

It took 50 years from Einsteins nearly blind-guess prediction of a physical phenomenon to fission power plants. 50 years from the Orvilles hops to jet passenger planes. 58 years from Ciolkovskys crazy drawings to a man in space. In my grandfathers lifetime we went from horse-drawn carriages to the SR-71.
In my lifetime we have gone from landing on the moon to almost maybe landing there again some time.

We are slowing down or the going is getting more difficult.

There have been smaller examples successfully run (such as the HSX, but this is the largest/most powerful yet. It's just hoping, but here's hoping the 7-X will outshine (literally and figuratively) the results from Tokamak super-budget science.

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yeah, even a very high-strung fusion configuration such as a Tokamak wouldn't do much if it went out of control... iirc, the plasma inside a flourescent light is ~45.000 degrees C, but the density is so low that it can be contained in a thin glass tube with no problems.

Also, it's only a couple of months until we get the polywell "WB-8" report, at which point they will hopefully get a lot more funding and achieve breakeven before everyone else .

Tags for this video have been changed from 'nuclear, fusion, tokamak, plasma, magnet' to 'nuclear, fusion, tokamak, plasma, magnet, scientific american' - edited by my15minutes

Holy fuck, KP! I would gladly give you a dozen star points for this alone, if I could. The 'comments' alone are gold.

This was my first sifted clip, and I still absolutely love it. The build-up to the momentous climax (ehehe) electrifies me every time I watch it, even now.

I miss gluonium, who left under bad circumstances, but I also wonder about other sifters (raven, mlx, crittter, oxdottir, to name a few) who just seemingly... disappeared?

>> ^dag:
Fusion reactors seems like one of those technologies that will be 20 years away from reality ... forever.
Latest stuff I've read about the tokamak is they still take in more energy than they produce. (though I enjoyed the cameo of a lookalike in Iron Man)
So it's not a matter of smaller fusion reactors- it's building ones that actually work as an energy source.


That's dependent on the temperature of the surrounding environment. If you build it on titan and use liquid methane from titan's ocean as coolant, you save a huge amount of energy on keeping the superconductors cold enough to superconduct. If the coolant fluid from outside was below the transition temperature of the superconductors, this would vastly improve the efficiency of the tokamak. Inventing superconductors with higher transition temperatures would allow a similar improvement. The biggest amount of waste in the tokamok is from the fact that you have a huge heat/radiation source surrounded by superconducting electromagnets that have to be kept at 50 Kelvin or below.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Fusion reactors seems like one of those technologies that will be 20 years away from reality ... forever.

Latest stuff I've read about the tokamak is they still take in more energy than they produce. (though I enjoyed the cameo of a lookalike in Iron Man)

So it's not a matter of smaller fusion reactors- it's building ones that actually work as an energy source.

Awesome! I'm especially pleased that this means there's another great podcast I can subscribe to.

I'd suggest taking nuclear, fusion and tokamak out of the tags (because a search will already find these words in the title) and add in "scientific american". It's one of those identifiers, like "TED talk" or "David Attenborough", that can get people's attention because they associate those names with quality.

Congratulations on getting your first published post -- NOW!

The DIII-D reactor at General Atomics in San Diego is a respectably large tokamak fusion reactor with ohmic heating, ion-cyclotron and electron-cyclotron resonance heating and neutral beam injection. Typical experimental parameter space achieves a lawson criterion confinement better than most other fusion reactors and on par with the now decomissioned TFTR but not as good as JT-60 or JET, not to mention ITER. Recommended wiki article: "List of fusion experiments" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fusion_experiments