ITER: International Nuclear Fusion Reactor 40 Years from Now
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By on May 4th, 2009 |
The world’s most expensive and exotic experiment was thought to be CERN. Few people know that the EU, US, China, and Japan have billions of dollars to construct the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) that would use nuclear fusion instead of fission, like all nuclear power plants do today.
Nuclear fusion has long been experimented but never yielded more energy than it was fed with. Basically, nuclear fusion involves heating very lightweight hydrogen atoms to about 100 million degrees Celsius — or about 10 times the temperature of the sun.
Keeping into account that ITER has an estimated deadline of about 40 years, and remembering the recent inventions in room temperature nuclear fusion, it seems a little bit too exaggerated to think about present technologies wanting to be followed and implemented 40 years from now. The important thing is all these nations, including South Korea, India and Russia, have realized that such a big energetic project cannot be built by only one nation. What we have to do nowadays is make things work, and do that in a timely manner, not with plans half a lifetime into the future.
Nuclear fusion may be the ultimate energy resource, but it has to be implemented on smaller, more inexpensive scale to keep the future developments and upgrades alive.
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May 5th, 2009 at 2:27 am
Here is a small energetic experiment that can be done by one nation that could lead to fusion in 5 years.
Why hasn’t Polywell Fusion been fully funded by the Obama administration?
May 5th, 2009 at 9:45 pm
Awesome, really nice work.
stuffs like these are of g8 imp
keep up the good work.