Fine progress for ITER.

Reflections on fusion history, current events, and predictions for the 'fusion powered future.
Hector
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Hector »

Like I said Carl time will tell which one of us is correct.
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Hector »

A couple of problems with doing breakthrough work inside government funded circles is that for example, DoE alternative fusion research is strictly Academic, that's their mandate by Congress. Nothing in the DoE research budget for fusion involves any attempt at achieving a power producing machine.

If that were to happen it would be by accident not a goal. All alternative fusion project funding from the DoE is strictly for accepted magnetic confinement concepts and some very minor funding for some other non-magnetic concepts, that's a fact. Call the director of the program at the DoE and ask him yourself like I did.

Power production is not the goal of any DoE funded fusion effort. It's simply curiosity that might bare some fruit towards achieving a power generating device.

If a breakthrough comes it will have to come from a non government funded source.

Someone is going to have to do the initial funding out of their pockets and ignore all the doomsayers and critics. It's that simple.
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Carl Willis
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Carl Willis »

You mean time will tell if YOUR prognostications are correct. I haven't made any.

You're obviously adamant about your views, but consider this: If and when the fusion energy nut is cracked, do you think anyone is going to look back on your pronouncements here--right or wrong--with a moment's interest? I know I won't. There's nothing to distinguish your opinion on the fusion future from a spring tide of similarly-unsupported editorial flotsam on the Intertubes.

You said you're working on a new IEC direction. Why don't you do something useful for a change and go open a thread to explain that?

-Carl
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Hector »

Sorry Carl I have no need for your kind of input on my concept.
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Carl Willis
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Carl Willis »

I only asked because you brought it up in your earlier reply to me. I take it you want to un-bring it up now?
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Hector »

No just don't have a need to get your input at this moment.
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Carl Willis
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Carl Willis »

OK, I understand. You can certainly become a contributor whenever you feel like it, but don't be surprised if, every time we get mired down in a throwaway discourse like this one, I keep pestering you with little tiny requests for the juicy details of the project you mentioned. I think that kind of discussion would garner a lot more respect than a rough-shod slurfest against scientists, academics, and ITER. Onward and upward!

-Carl
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Hector »

Carl I can respect that. My work is still in the preliminary stage so there is no working prototype, however the fundamental concept behind it is sound according to the people that I consulted with at UI, Purdue and at the University of Wisconsin.

I will talk about it in detail one of these days, but right now my research is in an area outside of fusion and is eating up all my spare time and resources. I can tell you that for aerospace applications Tokamaks are simply impractical and since the focus of my work is in the vehicular application field devices like an IEC or Polywell are about the only hope for a long term solution.
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by David Geer »

That sadly points out how badly corrupted the government and it's projects are these days. The funding should be for viable equipment and not simply academic experiments. If they were to work towards the goal and create a solution, then the funding for academics would be unlimited. But again, too many doomsayers and average minded folks are in charge of too much of this stuff for any real good to come of it all.

A few of the Veteran amateurs from here leading a team like ITER would more than likely produce a working net gain machine and more than likely, in a couple variations.

-David
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Chris Bradley
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Chris Bradley »

David Geer wrote:
> A few of the Veteran amateurs from here leading a team like ITER would more than likely produce a working net gain machine and more than likely, in a couple variations.


I wholeheartedly doubt that.

However, what I think an amateur could do [and I can't help that this will sound pejorative] is 'play the Court jester'!

This was not just the role of a comic, but one who would jest with the 'elephant in the room'.

ITER is a victim of its own nature - it is on too long a time scale, too great a political mission with too many administrations all feeding into it. But it is unlikely that it could be any other way. Both Russia and US have run down this route and it was too big a hurdle for them alone. A big multi-national project will never run smooth.

But in turn this gives such missions ambiguous aims and objectives. Attempting to observe this 'independently', I'd observe it seems impossible for groups of humans, exceeding certain size criteria, to fix and pursue clear objectives when they all have other and their own motivations and ideas on how to do it.

Back to the Court jester - this is a role which might, at the right moment, make just the right comment to get people to stop and question themselves over the objectivity of their own actions. A simplistic approach to a big project, posing questions for some of the project-wide matters without getting caught in the detail, is useful because very often it is hopeless trying to talk to individuals who have already chiseled out their own niche activity within the whole and have picked up so much 'momentum' that they are no longer capable of objectively taking stock of the project.

Many jesters were executed for raising matters too close to the truth!

I'd like to clarify that in my first post I did not at all seek to sleight or bemoan ITER. I support ITER as an engineering build, though I find it difficult to support its mission because that looks confused to me. I do so because even if a new invention enters public awareness that actually does fusion, it doesn't mean researching other ways of doing fusion should stop. Fusion has a very low specific power, so if you make a device small you make a device with low power. You'd have to parallel up lots of small devices to get useful power, so you should also want to investigate bigger ones, even if someone beats ITER to Q>10.
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First the Pregnancy...

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

...the the copulation?

Richard Hull writes:

"Fission is the delivery of a pregnancy. Fusion is a forced copulation in hope of an immaculate conception."

Pardon the momentary use of (implied) profanity but.... that's just f'ing brilliant.

No pun intended?

--PS
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Author of The Boy Who Invented Television: 2023 Edition – https://amz.run/6ag1
"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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ITER -v- IEC

Post by Paul_Schatzkin »

Yeah, I know... with HEAS coming around the corner I figure it's time I stuck my head in here and see what I've been missing while I've been off jousting at other windmills the past few months...

These discussions of ITER always catch my eye. I am of "both minds" about it.

I have previously expressed my own skepticism of those and similar big-budget efforts on occasion, here in the forums (fora?) and in posts to the front of the site. Every time ITER hits my "fusion" Google alert I hear a cash register ring and another billion dollars has gone up the magnetic confinement chimney.

So I agree with Hector's aspersions on the one hand, but I also concur with Carl's suggestion that dumping on legions of well-intentioned scientists and engineers is probably counter productive.

And for what it's worth, I've had more than my fill of people who profess to have brilliant, novel concepts but can only talk about them in the abstract ("I have an idea!") and never in the material ("...and this is the idea:...") See "Brown, Townsend" and all the smoke and mirrors that gather around that sideshow.

But the real reason I'm taking the time to make a post here is because I want to echo what Chad Ramey said:

"many ideas+ability to test ideas quickly=lots of data available for improvement"

...because that so succinctly underscores the whole reason this site is has been here for well over a decade now.

To me, just the fact that there is a coterie of individuals around the world who can actually produce fusion in their basements and garages is nothing short of astonishing, amazing, miraculous - chose your hyperbolic adjective. These people are actually observing and learning things from fusion. I tell friends and colleagues that I host a site for people who can create a "synthetic star" and jaws drop (or eyeballs roll back in their heads).

And so the body of knowledge about how fusion can actually be created and controlled, how it behaves when it is controlled and how such a reaction can be sustained, is valuable in ways that are impossible to measure (especially in the short term).

As I told somebody in a media interview recently, I am not handicapped by the kind of hard-boiled, hands-on experience that some of the senior members of this community possess, so I am not bound to the conclusion that "fusion is 20 years in the future and always will be." With my lack of experience, I still have room to dream...

So I am inspired by the curiosity and daring people like Chad, Taylor Wilson, and the other young Fusioneers who think about these things in their sleep and wake up with new experiments that further grow the body of knowledge here.

There really isn't much we can do about ITER and its ilk, that is how big institutions work. But I think it's true that the brilliant and disruptive ideas that drive civilization forward always come from the fringe, and the initial proof of concept is achieved for pennies on the dollars that monolithic institutions are endowed to spend.

And if it is to be, so will it be with fusion.

--PS
Paul Schatzkin, aka "The Perfesser" – Founder and Host of Fusor.net
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"Fusion is not 20 years in the future; it is 60 years in the past and we missed it."
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Richard Hull
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Re: First the Pregnancy...

Post by Richard Hull »

My small comment noted by Paul was no slight or slap at some supposed impossibilty of fusion for power use, but just a realistic statement that fusion is based on a rather difficult and distant set of probabilities causing a rare reaction that has no inherrently stored potential energy to yield a well understood energy producing reaction. The "immaculate conception" being self-sustaining ignition in spite of all the cross linked near improbables and seeming impossibles involved in the process.

Paul showed that he has been learning some details about fusion, even if by osmosis to see the simple beauty of the comparison I made. I even patted myself on the back on that one.

Not only are fission and fusion different in the physical, scientific sense, but they are diametrically opposed at a fundamental level only those familiar with many details of each can begin to appreciate. Amazingly, fusion was discovered about 14 years before fission, though it was not until the late 40's that anyone really started working on trying to get power from it in a way that they knew they could easily get from fission.

Even more amazing is that, in our universe, fusion had to occur before fission would ever be possible....At least in our current understanding of the physics. Oh yes, the fusion that made fission possible was 100% energy sucking, endothermic fusion.

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Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
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Chris Bradley
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Re: First the Pregnancy...

Post by Chris Bradley »

It's not an immaculate conception we need, it's an 'immaculate contraption'.
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Chris Bradley
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Re: First the Pregnancy...

Post by Chris Bradley »

Richard Hull wrote:
> fusion was discovered about 14 years before fission, though it was not until the late 40's that anyone really started working on trying to get power from it in a way that they knew they could easily get from fission.

..and even more confusingly, the first observed fusion reaction was p+Li7, resulting in a 'fission' of 2 x 4He - hailed as 'splitting the atom' rather than 'fusion'!
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Re: First the Pregnancy...

Post by Richard Hull »

There a vast gulf affixed between fission and fusion, regardless of what we think we observe in the processes.

In fission, seemingly dead material ( mater) does not require any input energy, yet can be merely macro-mechanically assembled and fully controlled to deliver, on demand, as little or as much energy as needed up to its net mass equivalent. (critical mass assembly) It is always an exothermic reaction or a net energy producer. We note the disolution of mater in this case into two nuclei, both huddling about the middle of the periodic chart masses

In fusion, seemingly dead material always demands that vast amounts of energy be applied or added to the dead material, plus, a number of special subatomic mechanical conditions must also be made to exist and then regardless of what we see happen, particle wise, we evolve a process yielding either net excess energy or net loss of energy, depending on whether an exothermic or endorthermic fusion has taken place.

The key differences are fission needs no input energy and is a 100% exothermic, energy producer. Fusion demands input energy in 100% of all cases and may or may not produce excess energy once the fusion occurs.

Richard Hull
Progress may have been a good thing once, but it just went on too long. - Yogi Berra
Fusion is the energy of the future....and it always will be
The more complex the idea put forward by the poor amateur, the more likely it will never see embodiment
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Re: First the Pregnancy...

Post by David Geer »

The CNO fusion reaction in a star is nearly self-sustaining in the right environmental conditions. We don't have the sheer resources to duplicate it but with the combination of other fusion and fission reactions, a sustainable fusion event occurs with these specific atoms.

Using exothermic and endothermic reactions is the only sure way to produce long sustainable energy output aside from standard exothermic nuclear fission reactors. Fundamentally different but mutually beneficial to eachother.

-David Geer
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by David Geer »

I was talking about amateur folks running on large funding without the board of directors and project guidelines getting in the way of scientific progress. I do believe the ITER project is a great scientific undertaking and they are learning a great deal about particle behaviors and engineering improvements.

A simplified goal with a complex and difficult road to reach it. Not what they have for the big projects now, where a single project has numerous goal objectives being mandated from higher authorities.

I guess the bottomline, is that, these projects funded by government or multi-national efforts need to be streamlined and not simply for academia.
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Chris Bradley
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Re: First the Pregnancy...

Post by Chris Bradley »

David Geer wrote:
> The CNO fusion reaction in a star is nearly self-sustaining in the right environmental conditions. We don't have the sheer resources to duplicate it .....
(....nor the gravitational field, it would appear...)


> but with the combination of other fusion and fission reactions, a sustainable fusion event occurs with these specific atoms.
I've posited here before that it is irrelevant to consider the 'CNO' cycle and all we need do is pick the fastest, most useful reaction in that chain. It takes an eternity for each step to happen for any quantity of these reactants that can be contained on earth.

The 'possibly useful' reaction CNO teaches us is the p+15N reaction, which seems only a little bit more unlikely than the p+¹¹B (and some folks talk that up as a walk in the park, so why not p+15N?).

But this is a thread about ITER, and magnetic confinement can never likely do any fusion for the so called 'advanced' fuels because there is too great a power loss from the plasma from higher Z thermal plasmas.

What you have to do to avoid losses in a thermal fusion plasma is decrease the plasma surface area (through which losses flow) to volume. There is no object within several light years of us with a smaller surface area:volume ratio than the Sun.

Hence, because the Sun is also suspended in a vacuum, this is why it becomes incandescent even though its specific power, by volume, is a couple orders of magnitude *lower* than the heat output of a mammal.
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Re: Fine progress for ITER.

Post by Chris Bradley »

There are such projects I'd put in that category and they still have problems: General Fusion, Focus Fusion and FPGeneration appear to surely fit into the 'non-academic' definition - I would tend to describe these folks as 'well-funded amateurs' (excepting the last who now appears to have run out of funding).

Then there are EMC2, Tri-Alpha, Helion Energy and others that are 'academic lead' but not with the 'Board of Directors' format you are describing as being the 'big hold-up'.

Then there are those amateurs who are doing/have built 'non-fusor' reactor configurations never before attempted by amateurs, such as FamulusFusion, Bee Research, Ed Miller and myself. In all these cases, I think I am right to say that funding and interfering Boards of Directors aren't the fundamental issues - other limitations come to bear, as they always would in any project (e.g., time, space, opportunities to disseminate).

So, on evidence, it looks more to be the 'problem' that is the limitation, not the organisation per se.
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Re: First the Pregnancy...

Post by Dan Tibbets »

Speaking of CNO fusion and fusion in general. The Sun is indeed a low power density fusion reaction. But, again remember that it is burning by the P-P reaction (except ~ 1 % by CNO). If it was burning D-D it would be ~ be fusing at a rate of ~ 10^15 times faster. If it was burning D-T it would be ~ 10^17 times faster.
In a heavier star the CNO cycle scales with temperature at ~ the 17th to 18th power. At seveal hundred thousand eV this could max out at ~ 1/1000 to 1/10,000 as fast as D-D fusion at similar temperatures. I am not sure how this compares from a density standpoint. With the density considered the fusion power output may actually be 100-1,000 times higher than a Tokamak burning D-T. In reality massive stars may be burning hydrogen by the CNO cycle at a rate ~ 10,000 to 100,000 times faster than the Sun. This doesn't consider the volume of the star or it's core so the output per unit volume of the core or total stellar volume to the photosphere is unknown.

If 15N or 15O (I think) is used without utilizing the slower CNO steps, the fusion rate could be ~ 100 times greater, or if my memory serves me ~ 1-2 orders of magnitude smaller fusion cross sections compared to D-D cross section at the same temperature of several hundred KeV.
In a reactor burning p-15N at several hundred KeV the fusion rate would be ~ 1/10 to 1/100 times that of D-D. This occurring within a massive star that somehow had an abundant supply of 15 N would burn with impressive fusion energy output. A massive star may burn through the available hydrogen (perhaps as much as 10-20 times the amount of hydrogen in the Sun's core) within ~ 1-10 million years by utilizing the CNO cycle. By utilizing the p-15N reaction without the rate limiting (and carbon recycling) slower steps, the star would burn through it's aviable hydrogen in as little as ~ 10,000 years. I don't know what the volume of the giant's core or total stellar volume would be, but I suspect a few cubic meters of this imaginary core would compete with terrestrial hypothetical fusion reactors- possibly beating Tokamaks, matching Polywells, and approaching DPF, and that is with hydrogen (and 15N) fuel. If D-D or D-T fusion was occurring in this starthe fusion energy density would be at least several orders of magnitude greater yet.

This addresses my pet peeve that many consider stars as feeble fusion reactors compared to terrestrial reactors. The comparison is meaningless unless fuel considerations are included, along with temperature, density and system considerations. For instance a Tokamak plasma might have a given volume, but the system including the magnets, shell and building all would need to be considered if you are comparing it to a star with it's reacting core and all of the overlying non reacting layers.

The biggest problem with 15N is Bremsstrulung X-ray radiation. As Bremsstrulung scales as the 0.75 power of the temperature and the square of the Z . Nitrogen with a Z of 7 would result in increased Bremmstrulung of 49/25 or ~ 2 times that with Boron. This does not consider the effects of excess hydrogen in the fuel mix, so the net effect may be more subtle. Also, the P-15N fusion cross section may be several orders of magnitude less than the P-11B cross section at similar temperatures. With an optimistic Q of ~ 5-20 for P-11B in a Polywell, I doubt P-15N could have a positive Q. But, if Dense Plasma Focus x-ray recovery methods are utilized (perhaps 80-90% recovery efficiency) perhaps some net useful energy might be squeezed out in a larger machine. But as other losses would increase with machine size, it might also require some other fusion magnifying effect like POPS.

It would be sexy if isotropically purified ammonia or even water could be used as aneutronic fusion fuel. Of course the same could also be said for D-D fusion (from water) if you don't mind those pesky neutrons, and it would probably be several orders of magnitude easier- relatively easier but still unabtanium thus far.

Dan Tibbets
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