Tests Results Show 'Artficial Sun' Is Reliable

A series of tests run by Chinese scientists on an experimental thermonuclear reactor have found "the artificial sun" is a reliable energy generating process.

Designed to replicate the sun's energy generating process, the Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak fusion reactor recently garnered positive results in tests being conducting at China's Institute of Plasma Physics, the Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

With tests set to continue until Feb. 10, the experiments will reveal exactly how far the project is from its final goal of creating plasma that can last for 1,000 seconds while giving off its own energy.


SOURCE:
PhysOrg.com

A very cool result in fusion research.
Further research into this will definately be a good thing.

Hopefully by the middle of this century this kind of research
will lead to the development of viable fusion reactors to help
us power our society with a clean abundant source of energy.


Comments, Opinions?

Chinese fusion experiments. Interesting...

Judging by the trouble physicists in the West have had trying to bring about a sustainable fusion reaction (scientists from several countries have collaborated on this for several years now) the Chinese probably have a very long way to go before anyone sees results from it. They should keep trying, though, and doubtless they will.

Originally posted by Astyanax
Chinese fusion experiments. Interesting...

Judging by the trouble physicists in the West have had trying to bring about a sustainable fusion reaction (scientists from several countries have collaborated on this for several years now) the Chinese probably have a very long way to go before anyone sees results from it. They should keep trying, though, and doubtless they will.

This is actually a consortium of a few countries, not just China (as far as I can remember).

Originally posted by ben91069

Originally posted by Astyanax
Chinese fusion experiments. Interesting...

This is actually a consortium of a few countries, not just China...

You could well be right. The 'Western' attempt, ie the Iter Project, is actually being done by a worldwide consortium that includes China. But I don't think the article quoted by the OP refers to Iter, which is being built at Cardache in France.

The partners in the project - the ITER Parties - are the European Union (represented by EURATOM), Japan, the People´s Republic of China, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA. ITER will be constructed in Europe, at Cadarache in the South of France.

[edit on 16-1-2007 by Astyanax]

Originally posted by Astyanax
You could well be right. The 'Western' attempt, ie the Iter Project, is actually being done by a worldwide consortium that includes China. But I don't think the article quoted by the OP refers to Iter, which is being built at Cardache in France.
[edit on 16-1-2007 by Astyanax]

Here is another article on the same event. This might clarify a little better. It is hard to tell how it is organized, but the test was done at a facility in SE China. They began these tests back in mid August as I recall, but I hadn't heard a word about it until now.

China View Online

Edit: Curiously the article states they tested it in Sept 06, when in fact the original articles stated they would begin tests around Aug 15. I will see if I can find the old article about that


[edit on 16-1-2007 by ben91069]

Originally posted by Astyanax
Chinese fusion experiments. Interesting...

Judging by the trouble physicists in the West have had trying to bring about a sustainable fusiont. They should keep trying, though, and doubtless they will.

NO.

Fusion power will never work the way they are trying.

they have been promising for 50 years now and now extended it by another 50 years.

there are 2 main reasons fusion reastors will never work is they are the wrong shape.

just imagine you trying to get a million degree hot plasma filament to stay in perfect shape like an elastic band.

the slightest imbalance and it kinks!

its just like trying to balance a pencil on its point. you cant.

also magnetic fields lose energy in a plasma.see paper below but the idiots in charge have black listed this physicist.

they are also not using electrostatic fields to compress the hot gas.

electrostatic fields use less energy and can be sustained for very long time periods.a electrostatic fields simply by having a large plates facing each other and a high voltage.if no charge flows between the plates that field will last for a very long time.

large magnetic fields can only last a FEW seconds at best and need MILLIONS of amps flowing through huge magnetic coils from thousands of capacitors!!

the directors in charge are morons and seem to lack ingenuity and unwilling come out of the rut they have put themselves in.

Its dominated by old farts who should all be fired for failure.

they should have chosen A SPHERE as the best shape for fusion reactions.

in a sphere you only have pressure towards the centre or pressure pushing outwards.

in a sphere you would try to compress the gas it inwards from all sides using high temps and fields.balancing the pencil on it point will not be a prblem then.

Interesting you should say that esecallum.

I completely agree with you, the use of the torus shaped confinemtent area i believe wouldnt work(for the reasons you have stated).

Im guess you have seen the "should google go nuclear?" video?

video.google.com...

Its about an hour and a half long so ill just explain the gist of it:

THe guy presenting this seminar was in the employ or cern and his team were researching a different method of producing sustainable fusion. His particular method was/is basically a cuboidal box with the corners cut off. He then used an electrostatic field to compess the fusion reaction inside into a ball (emulating the force of gravity which give stars themselves shape). He also a couple of different elements in the reaction (one of the heavy isotopes of hydrogen and boron gas i believe) producing the same reaction but without the stray neutrons that would be produced in the tocamak way.

Anywho his budgets were cut by the cern, simply because the Cern department would be embarrassed that they have ploughed so much in the way of funds and resources into the tocamak system and thusly didnt want to drop their pet project of decades. to This guy ended up getting funded by the navy for his research as the application of his system (which might i add is alot smaller in size compared to tocamak) would be alot of help with powering in a clean and reletivly safe way the warships of the future.

However the navy also had their budget cut for energy projetcs and so the project ran out of funding.


The reason this guy ahs gone to google to present his idea is because all he needs funds wise is 220mil to finish the advanced stages of the project.

Ironically Tocamak has used up billions of $ and is still doomed by its flaws.

Its worth watching the video i strongly suggest you do.

bum_phantom

Originally posted by bum_phantom
Interesting you should say that esecallum.

I completely agree with you, the use of the torus shaped confinemtent area i believe wouldnt work(for the reasons you have stated).

Im guess you have seen the "should google go nuclear?" video?

video.google.com...

Its about an hour and a half long so ill just explain the

bum_phantom

hey that video was FANTASTIC !!!

no i had not seen this video before.

it just seemed intuitively wrong that instead of trying to copy spherical stars that they were using circular rings of plasma which must wriggle like hell.
i mean in a torus shape the plasma can wriggle up and down in and out and sideways and all the directions in between.just too many degrees of freedom.

i dont understand why these people cant understand that? what is wrong with them?

50 years of failure and still they intend to persist for another 50 years with the same stupid design with that new monstrosity in france now.

In any other field they would have been fired long ago.

and the worst thing is they have hoodwinked the ignorant politicians into supporting this for another 50 tears by promising pie in the sky.

it seems to be nothing more than expensive job club for a few sub par clique of incompetants condemned to be stuck in a rut.

getting back to the video ..i found it fascinating that they had made so much progress in 15 years and all the machines they had built for testing and how they have now finally solved it.The most important is that these fusion reactors will be small and easy to build and produce no radioactivity.

i really want them to succeed and get their finance...could people like Richard Branson o Bill Gates not be shown this or persuaded to back this?

i have downloaded the video ,converted to mpeg2 and may upload it to bittorrent as it deserves wider desemination.

i think we should try to get other people who can back provide funding to invest in it and spread the word by net,phone,email,word of mouth and write to politicians.

Quote: origionally posted by esecallum
i dont understand why these people cant understand that? what is wrong with them?

50 years of failure and still they intend to persist for another 50 years with the same stupid design with that new monstrosity in france now.

In any other field they would have been fired long ago.

and the worst thing is they have hoodwinked the ignorant politicians into supporting this for another 50 tears by promising pie in the sky.

Exactly my friend. These "old school" scientists were/are simply to embarrassed to admit that the whole torus design was and always will be flawed. Thats why the guy who came up with the design in the video was banned from publishing papers by the DOE (apologies for my last post i meant DOE when i said CERN, brain fart i guess), so that these scientists didnt get fired for incompetance.

The most astounding part is the comparative price tags. How can anyone justify several billions of dollars when when this 'new' concept would only cost around 200 mil!!!!!!

Lets hope a big corporation like google/microsoft/virgin (preferably virgin or google) take this design on. it would change so much about the world for the better i hope.

how can we develop a technology after something that might just be a product of our imagination? the sun is merely believed to be powered by nuclear fusion, even though countless 'anomalies' indicate this model is either incomplete or simply flawed.

let's see:

• Neutrino Count experiments did not yield the expected results
  
• sunspots appear darker than the photosphere, indicating a cooler interior
  
• convection would alleviate vast differences in temperature
  
• far too many traits of the sun are attributed to magnetism
  
• in cosmology, magnetism is a uinversal cop-out
  
• solar cycles are very hard to explain using the fusion model
  
• observations outside the solar system revealed even more anomalies, such as flattened stars, sunspots covering a entire hemisphere, variable stars and survivers of novae...
  

so, what if we're chasing a mirage? a bigger hammer is not going to keep a fragile nail from breaking, is it?

see also:

www.newscientist.com...

short transcript in case the link above is dead: www.team-ninja.com...

Just what we need the power of the sun in a humans hand...
If we didn't ruin our ownselves we wouldn't need to spend millions and billions on these projects. We could leave that up to Future Generations.

How is fusion technology a product of ruining ourselves?
It's simply mankinds desire to advance.
We can do just fine with the technology we've got. But we will allways be wondering what it would be like with other ideas.

Granted, we've screwed nature quite a bit... but most of us aren't dellusional about it, and do understand that we have to artificially sustain ourselves. But power production is a totally different topic.

Originally posted by antmax21
Just what we need the power of the sun in a humans hand...
If we didn't ruin our ownselves we wouldn't need to spend millions and billions on these projects. We could leave that up to Future Generations.

Fusion power isn't dangerous in the slightest. Barely any radiation, no waste. In the event of the reactor "melting down" (for want of a better description) all you'd get is a big bang. Granted, not very good if you within 500m of the reactor, but then, better than everyone dying within 1000 miles!

Are you a nuclear physicists? If something like this got into the wrong hands and they could cause havoc....If a gun in one persons hand can take a life, the supposed "power of the sun," IMO, can do a lot worse.

Fascinating indeed.

With the creation of robots (i.e. when they are more superior to humans, etc.)
Now with artificial suns...we are now god.

Question is, who made version 1.0
(Human 1.0, Sun 1.0)

Serious question, Im curious...the way its going (how we make synthetic drugs, sythetic materials...thing that come from nature, but were not here before...we are changing things around us. Maybe not immediately, but I still wonder about the beginnings and how all that is now will play a role in the future, and how the future will be affected by what we do now.)

Peace

dAlen

Originally posted by antmax21
Are you a nuclear physicists? If something like this got into the wrong hands and they could cause havoc....If a gun in one persons hand can take a life, the supposed "power of the sun," IMO, can do a lot worse.

No, but I have a sound understanding of what these people are doing.

Fusion already has been weaponised, it's called the H-bomb. In fact, that was much easier than harnessing the bloody thing for useful power generation.

All that is in the centre of the reactor is a ball/donut/whatever shape is the real theory, of plasma. All plasma is, is an ionised gas, but in this case, it is also rather warm. The actual mass of the plasma isn't a great deal. If there was a breach, the plasma would cool rapidly, due to the expansion, probably incinerate what was around it, losing energy, expand further and eventually dissipate rather quickly.

It seems to me that you have no idea of what Fusion is and are panicky because of this. The particular design of current fusion reactors is not useful as a weapon.

Originally posted by antmax21
Are you a nuclear physicists? If something like this got into the wrong hands and they could cause havoc....If a gun in one persons hand can take a life, the supposed "power of the sun," IMO, can do a lot worse.

we already have the atomic bomb, so this point is moot. fusion power is a very desireable technology, the question is whether the current avenue of research is promising or not. read: whether favorable reports can be trusted this time around

PS: wrt. your gun analogy, can you imagine a situation where a 'gun in one person's hand' could save a lot of lives ?

[edit on 19-1-2007 by Long Lance]

I dont understand how so many people can get so worked up over scientific revelations. It would seem quite a few people run their mouth without a basic understanding of the processes involved.

just as stumason stated above me we've been using fusion and plasmas(which essentially is all that fusions is;the bonding of plasmas to make a different element) for decades for various applications from making large smoking craters to cutting/joining metals and anodising. Also soon a propulsion system.

Infact making a productive energy source is indeed one of the more difficult uses to fusion weve been working on.

As for some magic doomsday weapon plasmas in an atomosphere tend to cool down and re-attach to the rest of teh componant atom a foot or so after being produced(look at plasma torches used to coating metals/ceramics)

I'm sorry but I do not remember any type of weapons saving any lives....Weapons are meant to be used to kill. Do not use Philosophy.

Let me ask you what are weapons for? to kill
Would you not argue that if a weapon is used for the sole purpose to kill is it not then killing lives? Yes
If it is killing lives then no lives are being saved, is this correct?
YES!

okay, every scientific breakthrough the military and governments will find applications of warfare. FACT.
Being a soldier im potentially on the recieving endfor alot of these shiny new weapons.

However there are always the productive uses for scientific breakthroughs as there will always be destructive applications.

For instance:
On the same deductional lines we shouldnt have figured out how to fly and create aircraft. Why?
Because aircraft are then made to drop payloads of explosives on faraway lands reducing cities to rubble and ending many lives.

But we then would have the means to travel quickly and "efficiently" to other countries for productive reasons, holidays, business negotiations etc.

To me it just seems like alot a of scare mongering, and in general the fear of the unknown which is encoded into the nature of man.

maybe we should use the evolved abilty to rise above and not be controlled by our atavistic traits. Maybe then we can progress as a species.

phantom.