Of Interest archive

The giant orange magnets were built decades ago to confine hydrogen nuclei in the quest for fusion energy. But since 1998, Jan Egedal, a plasma physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, has used the magnets, from a massive, doughnut-shaped tokamak, to simulate magnetic fields in the thin wind of charged particles streaming from the Sun. Egedal hopes to learn how the solar wind transfers energy.   Read more here

French utilities EDF and GDZ Suez are planning to install between 1,000 and 1,500 underwater turbines in the English Channel by 2030. The turbines would sit at the depth of 50 metres in "Raz Blanchard", one of the strongest tidal currents in Europe off the city of Cherbourg.   The expected electricity production is in the order of 1 Gigawatt, the equivalent of one nuclear reactor.
  Read more (in French) here

The sun unleashed a monster eruption of super-hot plasma Friday in back-to-back solar storms captured on camera by a NASA spacecraft.
The giant sun eruption, called a solar prominence, occurred on 16 November at 1 a.m. EST (0600 GMT), with another event flaring up four hours later. The prominence was so large, it expanded beyond the camera view of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which captured high-definition video of the solar eruption.   In the video, a colossal loop of glowing red plasma erupts from the lower left of the sun, arcing up and out of frame as it blasts away from the star.   View and ead more at : http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49867380/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.UKiJSOTAc04

Seventy participants from 16 countries and international groups gathered at the University of California at Los Angeles under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in mid-October to formulate the early stages of a roadmap for the worldwide magnetic fusion program. This "IAEA DEMO Programme Workshop," the first in an annual series inaugurated this year by the IAEA, focused on key issues for demonstrating electricity generation from fusion on an industrial scale, and identified opportunities for international collaboration.   Read more at: http://www.pppl.gov/webonly.cfm?doc_id=1334

Hotter than the centre of the sun, the hydrogen plasma—suspended in a magnetic field in the ANU's H-1 heliac device—rotates at 1km per second.

The cloud of hydrogen ions, heated by radiowaves, is not dense enough for the initiation of nuclear fusion, but scientists are using the facility in research aimed at tapping the energy of the nuclear reaction that powers the sun.

Fuelled by hydrogen from seawater, fusion power plants would be game changers, harnessing boundless clean energy to generate electricity.

Read more at: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/innovationchallengeold/enthused-with-fusion-team-targets-what-drives-the-sun/story-fnaqfjos-1226504051972

On a breezy day in 2009, action star Arnold Schwarzenegger, then governor of California, took to the stage to dedicate the National Ignition Facility (NIF), the world's most powerful laser. "I can see already my friends in Hollywood being very upset that their stuff that they show on the big screen is obsolete," the governor quipped in front of the recently completed facility, which uses lasers to squeeze fusion energy from a tiny pellet of hydrogen fuel. "Fusion energy may be exactly what will power future generations on the globe," he added.   Fast-forward three years and the script is somewhat different: the lofty hopes of Schwarzenegger and other politicians who attended the ceremony that day seem less realistic. At the end of September, officials at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, where the NIF is based, announced that the facility would miss a crucial milestone to produce ignition — releasing as much energy from fusion as is supplied by the lasers.   Read more at : http://www.nature.com/news/ignition-switch-1.11748

Helium-3 is part of the solar wind that has buffeted the solar system for billions of years. Since the moon has no magnetic field or atmosphere to speak of, helium-3 atoms aplenty have become embedded in its surface.

What makes helium-3 potentially important is that it's an ideal fuel for nuclear fusion, which some believe could generate enormous amounts of clean, cheap energy. Just 40 metric tons of helium-3—about what would have fit in the cargo bays of two of our now-defunct space shuttles—could supply the world's electrical needs for three months, giving helium-3 a value of about $14 billion per ton. A million-plus tons of helium-3 are thought to litter the lunar surface—about $13.6 quadrillion worth.

Read more at: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/articles/43454/straight-dope-how-much-is-the-moon-worth/

The terrible and awe-inspiring power of thermonuclear reactions in mankind's Cold War past may translate into a much-needed supply of inexhaustible energy for the future. Much work still needs to be done, however, as the "genie" of thermonuclear energy will require a strong and reliable "magic lamp" to contain and control its explosive power. Scientists from around the world continue to work together on this very problem.

Read more at: http://rbth.ru/articles/2012/11/14/a_magic_lamp_for_the_thermonuclear_genie_20089.html

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory launched a new era of scientific supercomputing today with Titan, a system capable of churning through more than 20,000 trillion calculations each second—or 20 petaflops—by employing a family of processors called graphic processing units first created for computer gaming. Titan will be 10 times more powerful than ORNL's last world-leading system, Jaguar, while overcoming power and space limitations inherent in the previous generation of high-performance computers.

Read more at http://www.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20121029-00.

Very rarely is a research area as dependent on 3D-measurement technology in the set-up of its major experiments as fusion plasma physics. When one realizes how highly complex these systems are and how deeply industrial 3D laser measurement technology, and in particular the mobile variants—highly-developed laser trackers, scanning and photogrammetry systems—have become interwoven with this research area in the meantime, one can imagine what the systems are now capable of  achieving.

Read more at: http://www.qualitymanufacturingtoday.com/display_eds.cfm?edno=9054888

Researchers from KVI (Groningen, The Netherlands), Missouri University of Science and Technology (Rolla MO, USA) and CONICET-Universidad Nacional del Sur (Argentina) are studying charge exchange collisions between highly-charged ions and alkali atoms. These studies are directly relevant to the ITER Tokamak fusion plasma program not only for diagnostic efforts which are based on visible light emission after charge exchange, but also to heat-delocalization in the divertor region of the reactor in order to prevent burn-through.

Read more at: http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-4075/labtalk-article/51215

When he was 14, Wilson built a nuclear-fusion reactor. Then, a bomb-sniffing device that impressed even the president. Now 18, the prodigy is skipping college and using a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to try to crack the riddle of harnessing energy from nuclear fusion—a feat that plenty consider impossible.

Read more: theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/taylor-wilson/309132/

Researchers who specialize in stellar evolution have long known that the inner planets are in danger. The trouble starts in the distant future when the Sun's core runs out of hydrogen fuel for nuclear fusion. To keep the fires burning, the sun will begin to fuse hydrogen outside the core, in a layer closer to the stellar surface. This will turn the Sun into a red giant, at least 200 times wider than it is today. Mercury, Venus, Earth and possibly even Mars could be engulfed.

Read more at: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2012/25oct_friedplanets/

Researchers around the world are working on an efficient, reliable way to contain the plasma used in fusion reactors, potentially bringing down the cost of this promising but technically elusive energy source.   Researchers at the University of Washington, claim that a new device, dubbed the "Mug Handle," could help contain and stabilize the plasma. Their findings were presented at the recent 24th annual Fusion Energy Conference in San Diego.   The new equipment looks like handles on a coffee mug—except they attach to a vessel containing a million-degree plasma that is literally too hot to handle.   Read more at: http://www.washington.edu/news/2012/10/11/mug-handles-could-help-hot-plasma-give-lower-cost-controllable-fusion-energy/

Moving beyond the country's, and the world's, existing energy menu, which is still by far dominated by abundant and relatively cheap fossil fuels, is hard, whatever your preferred path.   To use a sports analogy (and setting aside, for the moment "stasists"—locked into the status quo), the debate tends to break down to those pushing the ground game, investing in deployment of today's non-polluting sources like wind and solar, and those pursuing tough, but potentially game-changing advances in technologies like nuclear power. For decades, nuclear fusion has been the equivalent of the Hail Mary pass.
Read the full column at: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/with-tight-research-budgets-is-there-room-for-the-eternal-promise-of-fusion/

New version of "InterFaces" (French) is out.   Find it at: http://www.itercad.org/Interfaces/Interfaces40.pdf

Keen photographer Julian Siret from Special Techniques Group at JET was surprised to find a sculpture inspired by his workplace at a hotel on a recent holiday, and snapped this striking image of the piece, by local Oxfordshire artist David Harber.   Read more at: http://www.efda.org/2012/10/the-art-of-fusion-science/

The fission reactions that drive commercial nuclear reactors around the world and create around 20 percent of power in the United States have a major drawback—namely, radioactive waste that takes thousands of years to decay into safer materials.   But a hybrid nuclear reactor designed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin could turn this waste into wealth by using fusion and fission technology to convert the waste into clean-burning nuclear fuel.   Read more at: http://www.readthehorn.com/news/campus/65722/nuclear_trash_to_nuclear_treasure

July 2012 was the hottest month ever recorded, and 2012 is becoming the hottest year since record-keeping began in the nineteenth century. Global climate change is here now; it is not only a harmful problem for future generations. And it is bound to grow worse if we continue to ignore it, to deny it, or to devise ineffective mitigation measures that cannot possibly overcome it.   We must adopt a "de-carbonization" strategy that can replace the main sources of greenhouse gases, including fossil fuel producers, energy generators, and transportation industries, with "clean" GHG-free alternative technologies.
  Here are nine clean replacement technologies that could help.   Read more at: http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2012/10/17/confronting-climate-change-9-clean-replacement-technologies/
 

"There's always been this sense that fusion is fifty years away," Saskia Mordijck says, but she adds that the horizon for safer and more efficient fusion-based electricity in our homes is really, truly getting closer.   Mordijck, a research assistant professor based in the Computer Science Department at William & Mary, has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue her investigation of fusion energy. She says most people are only vaguely aware of how fusion works and therefore have little idea of the advantages is offers over "traditional" nuclear power.   Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2012-10-safer-efficient-fusion-generated-electricity-horizon.html#jCp