Interested in Nuclear Fusion?

GREAT.
On ANOTHER watchlist now. ..

Funny thing, the MIT logo on his power point as well as some text left a ghosting image on my monitor when looking at a solid grey color.
Only stayed for a few minutes, thought IPS screens didn't have a burn in.

Oh yeah, i thought about that point as soon as I posted last
Then again, this is why this topic is tagged as Policy & Tech
Governments are so petty they will not commit to such a high extent, even if it means the betterment of mankinds living.

In fact, having a massive grid, with mutual contributions would mean huge reactors like the one ITER is building become actually useful for everyday consumers. That project, once finished, will probably be able to deliver a vastly higher amount of power than the foreseen 450MW thanks to advances in superconductor coils. That means, it will be more than able to supply power to smaller countries in europe, and adding it to a shared grid helps keeping that power under use, all the time, and not limit its usefulness to 1 or 2 countries. As long as it helps you burn less coal and avoids you having to resort to interrupt rivers and building dams (biodiversity flood damage), im all for it, but it means a huge political mess. The EU is the only entity I see having a slight chance of success with that idea

Im still on the fence about wind power though. I know it works at night, but the power it generates per turbine is wildly variable. When you have a whole farm of these, you have to adapt the gearing and the propeller rotation to match the minimum common denominator, in order to generate a coherent voltage, therefore locking you down to rather low power outputs, unless you create several farms at diferent locations. At least, that is how i am currently informed of their functioning, I may be wrong.

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ITER by size, is not that big of a powerplant. Just want to make that clear.

Wind turbines are commonly called Wind Energy Converters (WECs) arround here.
Focusing on your last paragraph:
Most common WECs installed in the last 4 years in my area have an output of 4 to 8MW per unit. The company Enercon has gear-free WECs in use since a while. WECs after their internal step-up systems output constant voltage variable current to the central transformer station making rpm of individual WECs a non-issue.
"Low power outputs" is funny because not true. There are parks that deliver 20MW from 8 WEC but also parks that deliver 600MW from 90 WECs.

Adapting gearing is not an option at the torques we are talking here. You got a constant gear, no clutch, no shifting. The pod can turn to match the wind direction and the blades can turn to stay within optimal RPM. Windfarms have the advantage that they can go full output within as little as ten minutes. No other plant type apart from photovoltaic and geothermal can achieve that (Every type of power plant to use water takes at least several hours to weeks to do that).

"Smaller countries" by size or GDP? Denmark got at least one offshore windfarm going and is building at least one more. The difference between Denmark and Germany in that regard is the one took the money and did it (Denmark, I salute you!) and the other planned 113 farms with enough capacity for northern Germany to run on, boosted the industry, got more than 4,500 jobs in the ready to then have the "Energiewende" (=Energy turnaround) declared a failure by some fucking stupid politician killing of about 4,200 of the before mentioned jobs. Here is a list of the farms that are in operation:

I am not a supporter of dams either. They last about 50 years, after that, you got a giant russian roulet.
Interrupting a river turns it from ecosystem river to ecosystem lake, not the best trade but not the worst either.

Back to ITER:
They can´t change technology half way through. They got 2 or 3 of 52 (not sure) coils done allready. Changing the technology now would mean a huge waste of time and money. The support systems are designed to handle 700MW peak performance, the mechanical to electrical conversion systems are designed to handle 540MW peak performance and are pretty standard General Electric turbines with Siemens generators if I am informed correctly (pretty sure on the turbines, not so sure on the generators, might be GE aswell).

BTW:
I really like this thread. A lot of nice and thoughtful posts here. Keep it up guys!

Im just reading the wiki article on Energiewende, and im just, im lost for words man
Sounds like a very well thought out policy, especially considering how power hungry industrial germany is.
How come they declare it a failure, when the technology is so far advanced? Energy sector lobby? I thought you guys had that issue already figured out?

Now reading about latest wind turbines, you are correct, 8MW per turbine holy fk.
Assuming this technology is available for commercial use already, it only comes down to licensing fees and to design a project to capitalize on this , which is what Energiewende is supposed to do at a state, municipal and even citizen level, to democratize energy generation.
Damn, I didnt know wind was so far advanced, im quite pleased to have been educated on the matter
http://www.windpoweroffshore.com/article/1408329/first-8mw-turbine-installed-offshore

I just wish my god damn country could learn that from you guys. In comparison, we south americans (save maybe brazil) are in the technological dark ages, because it's still profitable for a few to keep it that way.

Regarding ITER, dont get me wrong: yeah its huge in size, not in energy gain. Not to say that it will always be that way, though. If they manage to acquire data on plasma stability, they might tweak the magnetic field config to optimize for lower intensities. Just throwing out ideas. They surely are bound to found ways to improve the existing theory too, allowing engineers to implement system under better, more refined equations. Perhaps design new materials more effective and resistant under neutron bombardment, who knows.
At any rate, I urge you to watch the entire tech talk i linked. The technologies there are quite significant in terms of optimizing a fusion reactor, for commercial use. I know that ITER is not a commercial project, but a scientific one, but it will regardless benefit from developments on the engineering side of things which is MIT's area of expertise. Developments in those two fields may also help CERN too.

edit 1: lots of typos 8)

The Energiewende was declared a failure because the German power grid is 50 years old on average. It can not handle national distribution and is in fact the oldest and most expensive thing this technology wasteland has running (Still least down time of all other European countries). It was designed and build at a time you had local power plants and only had to bring the lines arround the city so some suburb had power.
Now we got high capacities in the north and west but demand in east and south. Something the grid can not handle. The major redesign and rebuild/upgrade would cost billions the German government and economy are not willing to pay.

Germany status report:
Gas lines: Got upgraded and build in late 2000s. Top notch network with ling distance pipelines and clever networking systems.
Water: To keep up with German standarts, this network is at any time top notch.
Power grid: Aging mess that takes huge summs of money to keep alive.
Internet: Forget it! Slow, failes at times, not even available at any place! Germany just missed this completly.
Cars: Still figuring this electric car thing out. Got 60km range now driving 30km/h clap clap clap....
Roads: Autobahn! F YEAH! Building on the half the time to prevent any bumbs in them so the stick the German driver got up his ass does not get pushed in any deeper.
Bridges and Tunnels: Could do with some love. Still better than US tunnels and bridges... somehow.
Railway: Getting better! "On time" is still black magic but we will get there! (note: Someone figured out the Autobahnen are great and now uses long-distance coaches, German Railway is pissed because it was not their idea. At the same time: Everyone complains that there is not enough railway for everyone.)
End Germany status report.

Edit: Moar typos then you!

Old grid? Dude you dont have to deal with our long ass country, Germany's rather compact
We have to cover about a 1/4 of the whole damn continental length.
From our northernmost point to the southernmost islands near antartica, we need to run @500kV over 4200km. Of course the state couldnt afford it, and we had to sell our souls to international capital ventures (1984, under military dictatorship), but today with a socialized energy economics plan (like your Energiewelde) things are starting to look better now that there is more awareness on corruption and energy monopoly. Very slowly though - thanks lobby!

Seems we have the opposite on most items of the Status Report
Our internet is quite decent, since the national infrastructure only needs to run one fiber giant line across the country and ramifications to provincial capitals that then redistribute on last mile (most of it is fiber, smaller towns only get copper)
But our roads, bridges, gas lines... they suck, super old and hard to mantain. Water supply is good in the south, but the northern desert makes water there almost like poison. And we dont have a railway, its just there as a token, nostalgia infrastructure, barely usable on shorter routes.

@electric cars: on that point, BMW has some amazing hybrid engines. Super expensive, but if they manage to make it mass-produceable, we have a revolution in our hands. Most people assume electric cars have low ranges and speeds, but look at Tesla's 0-60 times and top speed. We just need to find a way to make that tech more affordable. IMHO, the near future should be hybrid, until we can have cheap and reliable fully electric cars

Distributing power to 83 million people is not as easy as it seems, even if the country is barely 1100km north-south. People get upset when you do anything here. Some major problems would help to stop the whining...

The new superconducting tech could be a disruptive technology here it will put traditional heavy power out of the question if its correct and this can be done, small town size local power 1000Mw or multiples.

Cheap power will allow all sorts of new technology to be built mass production of complex material, I'm thinking mass production of diamond fibre, This will in turn allow low weight space launch vehicles etc.

These are just some of the knock on effects if possible, cheap power would be more of a revolution than computing or anything else so far. look what a change steam power did, I think it would be as great a change again.

Too good to be allowed, political forces will limit this, I fear.

FBI here, please tell us more :)

Toshiba isn't interested in anything nuclear anymore. :p

Speaking of Japan. They have this ultra efficient nuclear reactor, or something along those lines that they are trying to get up and running again. They shut it down in the first place because it wasn't profitable. ( and of course because of Fukishima ). I'll find the article about is, as I haven't heard the story in a while and may be wrong on a few points.

I think you have a better overview or are you just as in the dark, only need to know acolytes is it ?

One of the things with Fusion power like this is that apart from the knowledge of how to sustain and control the plasma (the magnets / superconductors) all the rest is readily available materials steel, compute power, water etc
lithium not sure how much of that we have, probably enough though.

As we get better magnets the size of a fusion reactor is decreasing and there is plenty of Li for reactors. Look how much we put in batteries :)

So looks like there is the possibility of cheap power or at least no shortage if we want to make it happen, relatively clean to, i think the professor said that the "activated" steel is only a problem for 10 years and can be stored in a shallow buried site safely.

Sometimes I think we wait until the last straw before we actually try hard to do something. Government poured money into getting to the moon because Russia. Otherwise no one would have gone.

China's pollution is really bad and going to get a lot worse as it people consume more energy per person. So there heavily building renewable power.

Trump did say he wants to upgrade the US infrastructure but I think he is ok with coal for now.

Im in Australia and our government is happy with coal and petrol for something like 20 more years. Some old coal plant are shutting down but I dont see a huge investment in our power generation. Nuclear is a big no no here.

Yes, seems to be the way of things.
/Rant: In the UK we are going to spend or borrow (fake money from banks) 4 x the cost of the Large Hadron Colider 20 times price with interest payments from tax, to build a faster train that will only benefit a few that will be able to afford to use it regularly. /Rant