That is equivalent to saying, ” I will stop smoking, save all that money and buy a car.” Theoretically possible, but in real life it never happens

This is an example to me of a dysfunctional government when items are tied together in a package rather than considered individually.

I don’t know the right answer but would have a difficult time with this if I were in that situation.

e.

Tritium is produced through the forced fission of lithium when bombarded by neutrons. By surrounding the reactor with a layer of lithium, you can produce new tritium using the apparent waste products of the reaction.

Similarly, that energy that is removed from the reactor makes the plasma far easier to handle. If all the energy from the reaction had to be removed by conduction/transport alone then there would be no material I know of to stand up to the requirements.

The current pressing problems are materials development (which is a second, equally massive project going alongside ITER) and plasma stability. There are a number of issues that need to be resolved before fusion could possibly be sustained beyond a few seconds, but these things are being worked on and studied in current reactors.

So long as we can be sure that ITER won’t tear itself apart things should be good to go once it is built.

Most of the energy goes into a neutral particle which would end up heating water to produce steam to run a turbine, which is the overall idea of a fusion reactor. Still, a significant amount of the energy produced in the fusion reaction results in a 3.5MeV alpha particle which deposits it’s energy back into the plasma, resulting in a self-sustaining burning plasma. Ideally, a plasma which exists for month-long shots, all the time producing 14 MeV neutrons (whose energy is used to power turbines) while only using D-T fuel pellets is certainly a reasonable energy source.

LC

p + Li_7 — *Be_8 — 2He_4, * = unstable,

which involves a beam of protons on lithium in some state, such as a solid foil that the beam scans. I am aware of some problems with this, but at least all the energy is in charged alpha particles.

At any rate it looks as if HEP is critical condition list.

Lawrence B. Crowell

ITER was postponed, believe it or not, because of the Iraq war:

The US has been against the French option because of France’s opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq.

With the money spend on Iraq one could build an ITER every 6 weeks or so

Also, apparently the budget for FY2009 should see a $200 million dollar increase in funding to US Fusion research, covering the ITER costs as well as some extra. This also includes ~$9 million to be used to clean up the NCSX (http://ncsx.pppl.gov//index.html) project which was recently cancelled. Hopefully more funding will come in the future and we can finish the project.

62.5M/162G=0.4‰

Excuse me while I go weep in my beer.

Too bad about ITER, which seems like a great project.