Ever seen a fusion reactor?

[eskin]

Photos from my tour of the DIII-D National Fusion Facility located at General Atomic here in San Diego.

http://www.pbase.com/eskin/tokamak

They’re doing research on containing and stabilizing plasmas for fusion based energy production at 230,000,000 degrees K.

Big science!



Cheers,

Michael

[Nanohedron]

Whoa.

[djm]

And I thought uilleann pipes were complicated!

djm

[Nanohedron]

@djm

And I thought uilleann pipes were complicated!

djm

I wonder if a plasma toroid could replace the bellows…

[Tony]

Max Fenstermacher?

Wasn’t he kid in elementary school who ate roastbeef sandwiches on peanut butter and jelly… every day??

[Doug_Tipple]

Hi Michael,
What ever happened to cold fusion reactions? I’ve heard rumblings that the idea is not dead.

[jsluder]

Sure, I’ve seen a fusion reactor…

[emmline]

Ok, here we go:

@wikipedia

A tokamak is a machine producing a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) magnetic field for confining a plasma. It is one of several types of magnetic confinement devices and the leading candidate for producing fusion energy. The term tokamak is a transliteration of the Russian word ??? which itself comes from the Russian words: “??? ??? ? ??? ???” (toroidal chamber in magnetic coils, tocamac). It was invented in the 1950s by Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm and Andrei Sakharov.

And if the plasma breaks free of its toroid does it start sucking up citizens?

whoa. The Russian characters didn’t compute, did they? They were there, I swear.

[chas]

@emmline

Ok, here we go:

@wikipedia

A tokamak is a machine producing a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) magnetic field for confining a plasma. It is one of several types of magnetic confinement devices and the leading candidate for producing fusion energy. The term tokamak is a transliteration of the Russian word ??? which itself comes from the Russian words: “??? ??? ? ??? ???” (toroidal chamber in magnetic coils, tocamac). It was invented in the 1950s by Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm and Andrei Sakharov.

And if the plasma breaks free of its toroid does it start sucking up citizens?

whoa. The Russian characters didn’t compute, did they? They were there, I swear.

Never fear . There are loads of plasmas not contained nearly as well as those in tokomaks. I saw a talk by a guy from the company Eskin toured (pretty cool, BTW, Michael) about plasma light sources for making computer chips (there are many other companies involved in this research). If these plasma sources don’t fly, your computers won’t be as fast in the future.

There was an article in the NYT a few years ago about the possibility that the AGS (particle accelerator) at Brookhaven would reach energies present in the Big Bang, and that it might set off a NEW big bang. never mind that accelerators at Fermilab and CERN had already reached energies almost an order of magnitude higher. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t an April Fool’s thing, I think it appeared in November.

[fel_bautista]

Michael- very cool pictures pictures

[Joseph_E_Smith]

Wow. Say, I think I know Max from somewhere. He has a very familiar face.

[Tyler]

Hmm, first step towards

???

[flanum]

hhmmmmm…

DOH!

[I.D.10-t]

The German’s are just hoping to devise a way of keeping track of their keys.

[Rod_Sprague]

There is an easier way to do it; http://fusor.net/. I’m going to build my own reactor shortly. [Don’t worry, it will be properly shielded!] I think I may have even figured out how to reach practical breakeven. I will keep you all posted.

Rod

[Daniel_Bingamon]

@Doug_Tipple

Hi Michael,
What ever happened to cold fusion reactions? I’ve heard rumblings that the idea is not dead.

Maybe lukewarm fusion would react a little better than cold.

How about bubble fusion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubble_fusion