STAR GARDEN - humanity's first self-sustaining fusion reaction

STAR GARDEN - humanity's first self-sustaining fusion reaction

bldgblog.blogspot.com

An artificially excavated limestone pit in the south of France will soon host star-making technology, New Scientist reports. "If all goes well," the magazine explains, in a few year's time the pit will "rage with humanity's first self-sustaining fusion reaction, an artificial sun ten times hotter than the one that gives our planet life."

Reaching that point, however, requires an ambitious reformatting of the entire site, seemingly the very limit of landscape architecture: a kind of concrete gar

(visit the link for the full news article)

I'm not sure if this is actually a real project in France. Part of me wants to believe it's fake? I need the help of ATS in researching this. Can anyone find more information? It it an actual real project it would be very interesting, would it not? Creating a sun on Earth, sounds dangerous.

bldgblog.blogspot.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

I know anybody can put up a website, but iter.org seems to be real (or a good practical joke). If i may quote one of the comments from your source blog:

Anonymous said...
Yes? Really? Let us create a source of energy which burns 10 times hotter than our sun and house it on our planet upon which all life implicity depends on our sun burning roughly one time as hot as our sun.... and that it stays waaaay over there. Its ok we have limestone...And robots. Genius. Who oversees and allows these...endeavors ?

The forefront of Fusion reaction research and testing was in France with a host of international cooperation. There is a location, in LA if I remember right, where they will be doing essentially the exact same thing. Using lasers and bouncing them back and forth on mirror / focal points culminating on one point at the end that contains an element that once hit, would create a fusion reaction.

Recent advances in Laser technology has brought us a lot closer to Fusion power becoming a feasible source of energy. The Lasers are now hot / strong enough to initiate a fusion reaction.

However, like CERN and the black-hole dilemma, I am kind of nervous to be creating something that is 10x hotter than our own sun. If we were meant to have that type of heat on the surface then we would have been born on the surface of the sun instead of Earth...

I am getting the feeling that at some point in the far future alien students sitting in a class room, studying ancient civilizations, will be discussing how the primitive life forms on a planet once called Earth wiped themselves out by recreating a sun and blackhole on the surface of the planet lol.

They always said that we'd end up blowing ourselves up - well guess this won't only come true - they even plan it!!!

Not long now for our Crazy World BOOM

reply to post by Xcathdra


here ya go bud
national ignition facility IL

they fire the worlds largest lasers at a fuel pellet the size of a BB,
it is a deuterium (hydrogen with one neutron) mix

xploder

ITER is very old news. Wiki. Although, the progression of their plans is new, and welcomed to the forum. (Yes? Yes.)

However, they aren't going to be up and running any time soon.

Construction of the facility began in 2007, and the first plasma is expected in 2019.[6]

Just a few years away. Man, time goes by fast...

Brilliant - lets just hope nobody figures out how to make it into a weapon. Hah!
Looks and sounds legit. But I am a bit suprised to see how fast the science has moved over the past few years, thought the scientific community was still somewhat devided on the pratical application of this technology - guess I must have missed a memo.

French phycisist Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, said, "We say that we will put the sun into a box. The idea is pretty. The problem is, we don't know how to make the box."
This remark is a few years old, but still. I have my doubts that this is possible. Just sounds to good to be true!

This seems to be real.

Here is an article from Oak Ridge .gov site:

n 2007 a fusion research team led by Fred Jaeger and Lee Berry of Oak Ridge National Laboratory achieved a performance of more than 87 trillion calculations per second, or teraflops, on the Cray XT4 Jaguar supercomputer at the National Center for Computational Sciences. The simulation provided insight into how best to heat an experimental reactor scheduled to begin operating in 2016 in Cadarache, France. The ambitious project, named ITER, is a coalition comprising the United States, the European Union, Russia, India, South Korea, China and Japan formed to provide the collective funding and scientific expertise needed to develop commercial fusion power plants.

ITER will use antennas to launch radio waves carrying 20 megawatts of power into the reactor, the equivalent of a million compact fluorescent light bulbs. The waves will heat the deuterium and tritium fuel to fusion temperatures—or more than 400 million degrees Fahrenheit. The deuterium and tritium form plasma, a state of matter created when gases become so hot that electrons get energized and fly off their atoms. As conceived, the radio waves would drive currents that help confine the plasma. Jaeger's simulations will contribute to understanding how to make the most of the wave power in both heating and controlling the plasma.

.gov site

If you don't know about oak ridge, and your on ATS... you should:

Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is a multiprogram science and technology national laboratory managed for the United States Department of Energy (DOE) by UT-Battelle. ORNL is the largest science and energy national laboratory in the Department of Energy system.[1] ORNL is located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, near Knoxville. ORNL's scientific programs focus on materials, neutron science, energy, high-performance computing, systems biology and national security.
ORNL partners with the state of Tennessee, universities and industries to solve challenges in energy, advanced materials, manufacturing, security and physics.
The laboratory is home to several of the world’s top supercomputers and is a leading neutron science and nuclear energy research facility that includes the Spallation Neutron Source and High Flux Isotope Reactor. ORNL hosts the Titan supercomputer; the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, the BioEnergy Science Center, and the *Consortium for Advanced Simulation of Light-Water Reactors.

wikipedia

Surprising DOE approves something 10 x hotter than the sun but not zpe,
given that the potential dangers are almost the same

Ammusing that already we have people trotting out the "sounds dangerous" comments. The LHC was supposedly going to create these micro-black holes, that the fearmongers insisted posed a risk to us all, since they would surely consume the earth and all her attendant creatures and people. Of course, anyone who had been paying attention to the simplest part of the physics involved realised almost immediately that there was no realistic chance of that.

Again, we have an experimental project, that has been so thorougly theorised that the finest minds in science have made thier case to the finest minds in accounting, and recieved funding from someone to build this space, and construct the apperatus of thier experiment. Just THAT investment means that the mathematical, and theoretical elements of the experiment are complete, and all that needs be done now, is a practical test to ensure the validity of the thinking behind it. At this point, for insurance purposes, the risks have probably been assessed by persons better qualified than us to do so, and have been deemed to be so insignificantly tiny, that they pose no more realistic threat than does a padded room.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out though. One wonders also, if it is proven that containing energies as powerful and greater than those of our warm and friendly neighbor, is a realistic prospect, wether this capacity for containment might allow humanity to construct a deep space engine using a captive star as a power source. It opens up a series of very interesting possibilities.

SPIDERMAN 2.

doctor octoganapus BLAAAAAAAAA

we are all doomed lolz

With so much nuclear waste in the elevated fuel pools, the nuc policies are outright stupid and unsafe. Thorium reactors can "reprocess" the "spent fuel" - otherwise, a leak in the pool or a power failure to the pumps and we get another meltdown like Fukushima. And its not worth waiting for fusion either - somethings got to be done with that waste. We can't just shut down the nuc plants either - or they go boom.

Originally posted by TrueBrit Again, we have an experimental project, that has been so thorougly theorised that the finest minds in science have made thier case to the finest minds in accounting, and recieved funding from someone to build this space, and construct the apperatus of thier experiment. Just THAT investment means that the mathematical, and theoretical elements of the experiment are complete, and all that needs be done now, is a practical test to ensure the validity of the thinking behind it. At this point, for insurance purposes, the risks have probably been assessed by persons better qualified than us to do so, and have been deemed to be so insignificantly tiny, that they pose no more realistic threat than does a padded room.

The problem being the finest minds in science and economics still don't understand everything about our own sun, let alone creating a new one.

That and the potential consquence is our entire planet being vapourised.

But hey, they still flipped the switch knowing that the Atomic bomb could possibly do the same, so I doubt that will stop anyone now.

Its an awesome idea, but I think some caution is warranted and justified.

Originally posted by Mads1987
Brilliant - lets just hope nobody figures out how to make it into a weapon. Hah!

Just to let you know they already have its called a hydrogen bomb.
Instead of using lasers to start the fusion reaction they use a nuke.

reply to post by Cecilofs


I am all for caution, but there is a difference between the caution that prevents disaster, and the flailing paranoia that such experiments always cause in those too ill informed to understand the simplest principles of the science around which the experiment they are crapping themselves about revolves.

Surely you can understand how fustrating that is for those who want us where we BELONG along the scientific and technological timeline (that is at least forty years ahead of where we are now, colonising Mars, the Moon, and any solid object not so irradiated that we cannot even land on it).

Originally posted by TrueBrit

Surely you can understand how fustrating that is for those who want us where we BELONG along the scientific and technological timeline (that is at least forty years ahead of where we are now, colonising Mars, the Moon, and any solid object not so irradiated that we cannot even land on it).

aLLEGEDLY THE LOCKHEEDS BLack ops prpjects are more than 50 years advanced than the
everyday science and technology we see

Originally posted by TrueBrit
reply to post by Cecilofs

 

I am all for caution, but there is a difference between the caution that prevents disaster, and the flailing paranoia that such experiments always cause in those too ill informed to understand the simplest principles of the science around which the experiment they are crapping themselves about revolves.

Surely you can understand how fustrating that is for those who want us where we BELONG along the scientific and technological timeline (that is at least forty years ahead of where we are now, colonising Mars, the Moon, and any solid object not so irradiated that we cannot even land on it).

Two things here: I completely agree that there is an aspect of unjustified paranoia that goes along with these things. I also completely agree that we should be "ahead" of where we are now. I long for those things too.

I think the mistake you are making is assuming we know wtf we are doing, when we really don't. There is nothing simple about a fusion reaction and even the experts don't know everything about it.

So I guess we just need a balance between healthy caution and gung-ho enthusiasm. Not that I can say where that balance lies.

reply to post by Cecilofs


I think there is a fundamental truth that all of us who appreciate the efforts of the pioneers in contraversial or "dangerous" research and experimentation down the years, have to remember, and to remind others of at all junctures.

There are two ways that our species can continue to exist from this point. We can EITHER move forward, or attempt to remain in place along the scale of our mental and technological evolution. While less immediately dangerous, than risky experiments, stagnation has its own terrible pitfalls.

And make no mistake, the extremism that the human race exhibits in its every action, will not allow for a mid point, will not allow for a trip into the grey between these positions. It would be a denial of human nature to resist progress in fields such as this.

I guess it all boils down to this. If we want a future, we have to strive for it, mindful, but not fearful of the danger, because the only other option is for humanity to continue down the route of self consumption, disunity, and disharmony. I know which I would prefer, given a choice.