Specialty Chemistry Forums > Nuclear Chemistry and Radiochemistry Forum
Tokamak produces radioisotopes
pcm81:
--- Quote from: Enthalpy on June 18, 2018, 09:21:05 AM ---
--- Quote from: pcm81 on June 17, 2018, 08:58:57 PM ---What you ae suggesting is still allot more expansive per neutron if yo do the math.
--- End quote ---
Can you show us your maths? The SNS has already cost 1.4G$, while the tokamak I suggest is 1000 times smaller than the existing ones.
--- End quote ---
To make fusion work you need He atoms moving at very high speeds. The tokamaks contain plasma in a torus. The speed going around the torus is fixed by energy needed to sustain fusion. If you make torrus smaller you are increasing centrifugal force needed to keep plasma inside the torus. There is a reason why LHC is 16.6 miles in diameter. You can't just say: "Let's make a tokamak that is 100x smaller in every dimension".
MIT is trying to create a small tokamak, but it's still much bigger than what you are suggesting: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3028113/sustainable-it/mit-takes-a-page-from-tony-stark-edges-closer-to-an-arc-fusion-reactor.html
Here is another article talking about smaller tokomak: https://physicsworld.com/a/smaller-fusion-reactors-could-deliver-big-gains/
And once ain, the idea is not bad, it is possible to have stable fusion in a smaller reactor; but we have to invent a way to make much stronger magnetic fields.
Enthalpy:
--- Quote from: pcm81 on June 26, 2018, 10:56:06 PM ---To make fusion work you need He atoms moving at very high speeds. The tokamaks contain plasma in a torus. The speed going around the torus is fixed by energy needed to sustain fusion. If you make torus smaller you are increasing centrifugal force needed to keep plasma inside the torus. There is a reason why LHC is 16.6 miles in diameter. You can't just say: "Let's make a tokamak that is 100x smaller in every dimension".
--- End quote ---
Sorry to be so direct, pcm81, but you ignore the topic: about every of your sentences above contains a basic misunderstanding, which I won't comment individually. I'd suggest to you not to be affirmative on subjects you ignore.
P:
I saw a youtube video a couple of years back about magnetic bottling and plasma containment in tokamaks using modern supermagnetic materials. It was presented by the Russians who were confident that their new materials would shield a tokamak and give it the fields it needed to contain a plasma on something of the kind of scale that would fit on a lab bench. I can no longer find the vid - I do not know if was just boasting and fibs or propaganda or a serious breakthrough, but they seemed confident of cracking it soon.
It reminded me of the Mr Fusion, blender sized device, used at the end of Back To The Future.
pcm81:
--- Quote from: Enthalpy on June 27, 2018, 04:54:28 AM ---
--- Quote from: pcm81 on June 26, 2018, 10:56:06 PM ---To make fusion work you need He atoms moving at very high speeds. The tokamaks contain plasma in a torus. The speed going around the torus is fixed by energy needed to sustain fusion. If you make torus smaller you are increasing centrifugal force needed to keep plasma inside the torus. There is a reason why LHC is 16.6 miles in diameter. You can't just say: "Let's make a tokamak that is 100x smaller in every dimension".
--- End quote ---
Sorry to be so direct, pcm81, but you ignore the topic: about every of your sentences above contains a basic misunderstanding, which I won't comment individually. I'd suggest to you not to be affirmative on subjects you ignore.
--- End quote ---
Don't be sorry about being direct. I got tough skin. I survived grad school in Russia... with lions and tigers and bears... and snow; oh my.
Back to the subject at hand. It all boils down to inventing a super conductor that can do the job. What I vaguely remember from my superconductivity course at moscow state (13 years ago) is that temperature as well as strong magnetic field have adverse effect on super conductivity. In a tokomak you are trying to have something very hot, plasma, reasonably close to something very cold, super conducting magnet. Meanwhile by making the unit smaller you are increasing the magnetic field strength requirement. All this is putting a tall order on super conductor used to make a magnet. There are other issues like stability of plasma, leakage etc etc etc, most of which can probably be overcome if we can just invent the magic super conductor.
Oh, and as far as costs are concerned. Tokomak in europe is running north of $15bln so the $1.5bln for spallation source is chump change in comparison.
EDIT:
Don't get me wrong, i am all for fusion research and if you can design a working system, which actually does what you describe, that would be a great news for the world, because you would have also invented the technologies to power the world. I recall my undergraduate nuclear physics instructor doing a calculation on energy content of sea water. As i vaguely recall 1 gallon of sea water, if fusion was possible, has the same energy content as 400 gallons of gasoline used in combustion. So yeah, you would probably get Nobel prize in every category that year if you could invent the technologies required to make possible what you are proposing.
wildfyr:
pcm,
I feel that I should remind you that Enthalpy's concept isnot for doing fusion for energy, but rather for element synthesis. Its an entirely different branch of fusion reactor technology.
--- Quote ---As a neutron source instead, the machines would
Not try to produce any energy, even less net energy;
Receive only deuterium (2H or D) without the scarce 50% tritium (3H or T);
Be 10×10×10 times smaller than Iter with the same operating conditions:
Φ=1.2m and 50kW input and 20M€ (...err);
Emit neutrons to irradiate fertile material like 98Mo.
--- End quote ---
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