MACARTHUR Project
Earth's Alternative and renewable sources of Energy with military Applications
"Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy." --Carl Sagan 1991--
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Harnessing the Energy of the Stars
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Sustainable Fusion for dummies!
Fusion Presentation: wwwofe.er.doe.gov
The Fusion Debate The politics of Oil and MAD Dependency
What is Needed
"To get isotopes of hydrogen to fuse into helium and released energy, they must be heated to very high temperatures (100,000,000ûC) to get them to collide with sufficient energy to overcome the Coulomb barrier and fuse together. These hot ions must be held together for a long enough time at high enough pressure to allow enough fusion events to occur to recover the energy needed to heat them and to confine them."
"Similarly, there will be no fission products formed to present a handling and disposal problem. Radioactivity will be produced by neutrons interacting with the reactor structure, but careful materials selection is expected to minimize the handling and ultimate disposal of activated materials."
"There are two major research and development efforts underway for fusion. These are magnetic confinement fusion, where the hot plasma is held within a "magnetic bottle" at high enough temperature and pressure for a long enough time for fusion to occur, and inertial confinement fusion where a small amount of fusion fuel is symmetrically heated and compressed by intense energy beams, such as lasers, so that fusion conditions of high temperature and pressure are achieved for a brief instant while inertia holds the fuel together. In addition, FED members have interest in non-mainline fusion approaches, including electrostatic confinement and "cold fusion." also see this site
"Magnetic fusion experiments use plasmas comprised of one or more of the isotopes of hydrogen. For example, in 1994, PPPL's Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR) produced a world-record 10.7 million watts of fusion power from a plasma comprised of equal parts of deuterium and tritium, the fuel mix likely to be used in commercial fusion power reactors. NSTX is a "proof of principle" experiment and therefore will employ deuterium plasmas only. If successful it will be followed by similar devices, eventually including a demonstration power reactor, burning deuterium-tritium fuel." lithium?
Summary: The abundance of raw materials, their wide distribution, and the environmental acceptability of fusion are augmented by the expectation that fusion energy will be an economical source of electricity generation. "
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The Australian Fusion Research Group
Breeding Tritium | Environmental impact?
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what is Tritium: source: University of Waterloo. "Tritium, a radioisotope of hydrogen with the gross atomic mass of 3.014, is considered an important and versatile radioisotope among twenty five hundred radioisotopes discovered mainly by nuclear transmutation reactions during the last sixty years. A radioisotope can be depicted by its atomic number or chemical symbol and by its mass number that indicates the total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus of the radioisotope. Thus tritium can be depicted as hydrogen-3. Together with two other stable isotopes of hydrogen (hydrogen-1 and hydrogen-2), and with isotopes of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorous and sulfur, tritium provides a powerful tool for understanding chemical, biological and geochemical transformations. Tritium has also found widespread uses as a tracer in medicine, agriculture and industry. " |
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"The DOE Fusion Energy Sciences Program is exploring multiple paths for optimizing fusion systems, taking advantage of both the strong international program in magnetic fusion energy and the strong DOE Defense Program�s effort in inertial confinement fusion. As in other fields, the advancement of plasma science and technology requires facilities in a range of sizes, from the largest devices that press the frontier of high temperature plasmas to smaller experiments suitable to begin the exploration of innovative ideas for fusion optimization. The very largest facilities may require international collaboration, while the smallest are natural for university-scale investigation. Specific questions of plasma science and fusion technology set both the required number and the required scale of the experimental facilities in the program."
An Assessment of the Department of Energy's Office of Fusion Energy Sciences Program (2001)
How's it going to fit in the political Budgetary scheme?
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Budgetary Outlays for Fusion related research FY 2003
Status of recent fusion advancements
Nerds Inc.
The global gyrokinetic code (GTC)(Z. Lin, T.S. Hahm, W.W. Lee, W.M. Tang, R.B. White, Report PPPL-3302, (May, 1998).) has general geometric capability, including numerical equilibria, and is being applied for the first time to study transport in realistic stellarator fields. With the self-consistent turbulent fields switched off, GTC can be used as a very fast guiding--center code to study 3D neoclassical transport, with statistics good enough to use a full Maxwellian distribution. With the self-consistent fields turned on, it can provide some of the first numerical results on turbulent transport in stellarators. The code is also to be applied to self-consistently computing the radial ambipolar field. These capabilities will be illustrated by applying GTC to the NCSX quasi-axisymmetric stellarator concept now being developed. "
source: American Physical Society (aps)
Colonization: | SPACE: |->"NASA launched WIND in 1994 as part of the Global Geospace Science initiative and the International Solar-Terrestrial Physics Project. WIND's task is to provide plasma, energetic particle and magnetic field data for magnetospheric and ionospheric studies of the Earth, as well as to investigate plasma processes occurring in the near-Earth solar wind.--
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