https://www.iter.org/construction

began construction in 2010

will attempt to create a true fusion reaction using hydrogen 10,000x hotter than the surface of the sun, contained by super magnetics it will essentially create a sun on earth that will be powered using hydrogen from salt water.

Cooperation from 35 countries including Russia, China, India, Korea Japan and the US

they tried that in spiderman 2 didnt work out to well.....

Despite the movie, this isn't the work of a one mad scientist - it's a whole bunch of them.

Seriously, they talked about it on CNN today on Fareed Zakaria GPS - video from the site looks like it's about 1/2 completed.

This post was edited by card_sultan on Sep 6 2015 12:55pm

yea haha i wonder how the world will be when it is done and works the way we want it too..obv these changes wont happen over night

well if it works - they say it will provide carbon free/radiation free/pollution free energy for a million years

and unlike the movie - it can't sustain itself outside of the containment sphere it's created in for more than a second

IDK haven't found the problem with the idea yet, but I'm sure there is some downside - maybe we'll become slaves to it, maybe it's a portal for Demons to pour forth or maybe it's just an awesome idea and project.

whats the heavy water to power ratio?

http://www.iter.org/video/7

Not sure fusion reactors even use heavy water as a cooling system

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER

Cooling systems[edit]
The ITER tokamak will use three interconnected cooling systems. Most of the heat will be removed by a primary water cooling loop, itself cooled by water through a heat exchanger within the tokamak building's secondary confinement. The secondary cooling loop will be cooled by a larger complex, comprising a cooling tower, a 5 km pipeline supplying water from Canal de Provence, and basins that allow cooling water to be cooled and tested for chemical contamination and tritium before being released into the Durance River. This system will need to dissipate an average power of 450 MW during the tokamak's operation. A liquid nitrogen system will provide a further 1,300 kW of cooling to 80 kelvins, and a liquid helium system will provide 75 kW of cooling to 4.5 K. The liquid helium system will be designed, manufactured, installed and commissioned by Air Liquide.

The ITER fusion reactor has been designed to produce 500 megawatts of output power while needing 50 megawatts to operate

the building costs are now over US$14 billion as of June 2015, some 3 times the original figure.[7] The facility is expected to finish its construction phase in 2019 and will start commissioning the reactor that same year and initiate plasma experiments in 2020 with full deuterium-tritium fusion experiments starting in 2027

This is a nice video about fusion and the History of ITER



This post was edited by card_sultan on Sep 7 2015 12:46pm

Fusion reactors would need to use the heavy water as a power source as its more densly packed. If they can build a much smaller version be awesome. Land req are huge yet power yield is compatarable to coal. Nuke still provides more power i believe however this is still a significant step forward.

This post was edited by kalelvszod on Sep 7 2015 02:19pm

I know in typical fission nuclear reactors, they use heavy water not only as a coolant but as well as a moderator to help in thermonuclear reaction. Since a fusion reactor would use plasma as a thermal source instead of nuclear rods + heavy water, it is theoretically much safer and since the hydrogen based elements combined are Deuterium (Heavy hydrogen) and Tritium (hydrogen-3) , no uranium is used and a country (such as Iran) would have no need for processing things that could be used to make a bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power#cite_note-ReferenceA-15

Accident potential[edit]
There is no possibility of a catastrophic accident in a fusion reactor resulting in major release of radioactivity to the environment or injury to non-staff, unlike modern fission reactors. The primary reason is that the requirements for nuclear fusion differ greatly from nuclear fission: fusion requires extremely precise and controlled temperature, pressure, and magnetic field parameters for any net energy to be produced, and a far smaller amount of fuel. If the reactor suffered damage or lost even a small degree of required control, fusion reactions and heat generation would rapidly cease.[164]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power

Energy capture
There are several proposals for energy capture. The simplest is using a heat cycle to heat a fluid with fusion reactions. It has been proposed to use the neutrons generated by fusion to re-generate a spent fission fuel.[14] In addition, direct energy conversion, has been developed (at LLNL in the 1980s) as a method to maintain a voltage using the products of a fusion reaction. This has demonstrated an energy capture efficiency of 48 percent.[15]

http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=104&t=3

How much electricity does a nuclear power plant generate?
As of November 1, 2014, there were 100 operating nuclear reactors at 62 nuclear power plants in the United States. The Fort Calhoun plant in Nebraska has one reactor with the smallest generating capacity1 of 502 megawatts (MW).

As of 23 April 2014, the IAEA report there are 435 Fission nuclear power reactors operating in 31 countries



So a small fission nuclear plant would output 500 - 1000 mw while also needing and producing many toxins and radiation , fear of meltdown, nuclear waste, refined uranium, (could be used to make a bomb) while a fusion reactor might only produce 500 mw, all those dangers are gone. See the advantages yet?

This post was edited by card_sultan on Sep 7 2015 03:52pm