A Miniature Star on Earth

Fusion reactors power the sun and stars. ITER aims to re-create that energy here on Earth by heating hydrogen gas to 100 million degrees C. In thi sinferno, hydrogen ions smash together, fuse into a larger ion-helium-and release energy. Physicists have already built reactors that can achieve fusion, but none has yet to produced more energy than it consumes.
If all goes as planned, ITER will change that. By building a better, more powerful reactor, scientists hope to produce 500 megawatts input. Fuel in the form of the hydrogen isotope deuterium is extracted from water, and the small amount of radioactive waste it yields decays to a safe level in decades. in contrast, today's nuclear fission reactors generate waste that can stay hot for thousands of years.
The project will take 10 years and cost $6 billion to complete, with the goal of producing fusion electricity by the middle of the century. There's just one holdup. As some people went to press, the international collaboration bacing ITER- China, the European Union, Japan, South korea, Russia, and the U.S. -was still arguing over where to build it. For the past year it has been split betwee sites in France and Japan, and no amount of negotiation seems able to break the impasse. It's an inauspicious start to a collaborative endavour second in scope only to the International Space Station.

Do you have a source? It sounds very interesting, considering the fact that many countries are working together in order to produce such a massive and expensive project. But what if the project were to succeed but later get out of control, would that cause immeasurable damage to earth and its living beings?

Originally posted by IKnowNothing
Do you have a source?

This might help:

ATSNN - SCI/TECH: EU and Japan Fusion Deal Continues

We really need to sort out energy issues or the youth of today will pay the price ....eg...me

Any idea on what happens when this minature star finally uses all its energy collapses? Is that even a possiblity or will it simply just cease to produce energy without collapse? I admit my knowledge in this field is limited but this sounds like a plausible side effect.

Phae

Originally posted by Phaethor
Any idea on what happens when this minature star finally uses all its energy collapses? Is that even a possiblity or will it simply just cease to produce energy without collapse? I admit my knowledge in this field is limited but this sounds like a plausible side effect.

Phae

My opinion is that it is a bad idea. Why ? Because it is too advanced in technology and we all know what happens to stars that run out of life and gain new life right? We get a supernova. So, this huge massive 12 story structure will more than likley kill alot. And also I think it will interfere with the earths magnetic field. Do you know how much magnetic power stars put off ?

They should becareful about accidently creating a Black hole...

Sometimes it is just not a good idea to mess around with mother nature. We have yet to really have a good handle on nukes and tend to reject harmless sources like solar and wind. I personally would not favor so much money put into something that we probably are just not ready for.

Originally posted by creamsoda

Originally posted by Phaethor
Any idea on what happens when this minature star finally uses all its energy collapses? Is that even a possiblity or will it simply just cease to produce energy without collapse? I admit my knowledge in this field is limited but this sounds like a plausible side effect.

Phae

My opinion is that it is a bad idea. Why ? Because it is too advanced in technology and we all know what happens to stars that run out of life and gain new life right? We get a supernova. So, this huge massive 12 story structure will more than likley kill alot. And also I think it will interfere with the earths magnetic field. Do you know how much magnetic power stars put off ?

What you and alot of people on this thread are forgetting is that stars are really really massive and in order to go supernova it would have to have 5x more mass then our sun, and that is massive. Even our own star cannot go Supernova it can only go Nova.

check out this link very interesting...

www.csmonitor.com...

[edit on 26-1-2005 by sardion2000]

[edit on 26-1-2005 by sardion2000]

Heh. This is NOT a star. ITER, sorry I don't have the link right now, is not at all the same thing. Fusion in stars happens because they're a massive cloud of gas that collapses in on itself due to gravity... eventually the pressure in the core builds to the point that fusion ignites, and balances out the contraction.

ITER is a tokamak design, basically a giant donut-shaped vacum chamber with lots and lots of superconducting magnets that produce a very strong magnetic field to contain the plasma. The difficulty with fusion on earth is that the plasma is very, very unstable, and is Maxwellian, which means that it is a result of heat. If it touches the walls, it quenches itself and dies out very quickly. The problem comes in the fact that after helium is formed, as it's a noble gas it tends to "slip" between magnetic field lines and escape the plasma, cooling it. So if one of these things f's up (and I'm not sure how it would...) you might get a blown out seal on the vaccum system, but no big ka-blammo.

doesn't this relate directly to the post you made in this thread, sardion?

www.abovetopsecret.com...'

Being a star...has to be classified as far from it.

Originally posted by Aether
doesn't this relate directly to the post you made in this thread, sardion?

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Being a star...has to be classified as far from it.

Yup exact same article as I find it to be the best attemp to explain the current progress of the field to date. If you have any other links please post em as the actual information may alley some fear people may have. The biggest problem with this technology is the Radiation it spews.

The radiation is relativley low, compared to fission, or even coal power plants. Easily contained, the only severely irradiated part is the blanket on the walls of the device... and this is actually beneficial, as some versions use it to produce the tritrium needed for the reaction. We shall see, but barring major reductions in world power consumption (hah, yeah right, but it's what we really need), fusion is our only hope for the long term.

Do you think scientists are finding a way to actually "create" energy? Because you know in Newtos law, "Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, it is simply transferred or transformed". So maybe they are trying to recreate energy. Would the explosion of such a thing be about the same of a nuclear powerplant exploding ?

Originally posted by creamsoda
Would the explosion of such a thing be about the same of a nuclear powerplant exploding ?

Read SilentFrog post it will answer your question. You want to know what a Fusion Bomb will do? Just look at an H-Bomb. Thats fusion, we've had that capacity for quite some time. The Russians even built a 100+ megatonne Fusion Bomb.

But as SilentFrog's post addresses this Tokamak design is radically different then that of a bomb.

[edit on 26-1-2005 by sardion2000]

Has this earth ever made "artificial plasma"? I dont exactly know what plasma is. When I think of plasma, I think of a gellatin like structure.

I think plasma is basically superheated gas. It forms around the space shuttle on re entry. I believe it is simple to create from what I understand.

Originally posted by creamsoda
Has this earth ever made "artificial plasma"? I dont exactly know what plasma is. When I think of plasma, I think of a gellatin like structure.

Here's a link, check it out don't really have time to esplain.

en.wikipedia.org...

with some video too

Originally posted by mwen
They should becareful about accidently creating a Black hole...

I don't believe we'll have to worryu about that!

A blackhole in the terms we know has a mass of a million suns, yet it would occupy very little space (comparatively).

Imagine this if you would.

If the Earth were to be compressed to the density of a blackhole, we would end up the size of a quarter (U.S. coin)!

So it would be difficult or should I say impossible for scientists to re-create the blackhole densities in laboratory, because of the infinitisimal size as the result.

We just haven't got the engineering or the energy to do such a thing!

Controlled fusion reactions, on the other hand, wouldn't be as dangerous as one would imagine.

To stop the reaction process, all on would have to do is "cool" dowm the reactor and the fusion process would cease!

well if i recall my high school physics correctly, plasma is created when you strip all the electrons from an element. when the shuttle re-enters the atmosphere it heats the surrounding untill the air molecules have givin up their electrons due to the heat. thats why radio signals cant get through, however since the way the is shapped radio signals can be received by satallites overhead and retransmitted to ground controllers

That is correct. Plasma is merely a superheated "soup" of atoms and electrons. Tokamaks thermally heat a tritrium-deuterium plamsma and contain it in a magnetic bottle.

As a quasi-random side note, were the earth to become a black hole, it would have to be reduced to a radius of... *whips out calculator* 9 e -54 meters. That is far smaller than the smallest physical length possible even with quantum mecahnics.