Ever seen a fusion reactor?

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eskin
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Ever seen a fusion reactor?

Post by 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
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Post by Nanohedron »

Whoa.
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Post by djm »

And I thought uilleann pipes were complicated! :D

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Post by Nanohedron »

djm wrote:And I thought uilleann pipes were complicated! :D

djm
I wonder if a plasma toroid could replace the bellows...
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Post by Tony »

Max Fenstermacher?
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Post by Doug_Tipple »

Hi Michael,
What ever happened to cold fusion reactions? I've heard rumblings that the idea is not dead.
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Post by jsluder »

Sure, I've seen a fusion reactor...

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Post by emmline »

Ok, here we go:
wikipedia wrote: 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.
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Post by chas »

emmline wrote:Ok, here we go:
wikipedia wrote: 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.
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Post by fel bautista »

Michael- very cool pictures <rather HOT> pictures
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Post by Joseph E. Smith »

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

Hmm, first step towardsImage??? :D
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Post by flanum »

hhmmmmm....Image

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Post by I.D.10-t »

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

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