can you imagine how much the ballance of power in the world will change if they succed?

Not much. The ITER require all discoveries be shared with every signatory, and no mathematical model allows the energy production from this type of reactor to be inexpensive. Tokamaks running deuterium/tritium reactions are just not cheap; we're talking hundreds of tons of superconducting magnets just to keep the thing from frying from the inside.

Since electrical power is rather 'sticky' (transporting it across continents is very expensive), it's probably not going to really change things for most second and third world countries until inexpensive reactors can be created. Tokamaks aren't going to do that, and even many second generation reactions won't be economically viable for most countries.

gattsuru

teh world's largest corporations will all fail and then lulz will ensue.

gothamdarkknight

@jkr2: Thanks. In other words, we won't be seeing hyper-drives, etc, anytime soon, if ever. Unless, of course, someone from M31 or M101 visits us with the technology.

apeguero

@jkr2: like what? like reversed aging of you and the vehicle??

jp182

Well, fusion reactions lasting several minutes have been done for a long time. They're just not self sustaining. One of the more promising routes is magnetic levitation of the reactor.

heroineworshipper

For all those asking when this will make it into iphones and such, you are idiots. There is a world of difference between a generator and a battery. This breakthrough is for the former, not the latter. Generators create energy out of raw materials or kinetic motion, while batteries store that energy for later.

If you want longer battery life or a real sultion to the fuel crisis, look towards ultracapacitors. Pretty much instant charging, nonpolutant, 100,000 year life expectancy, and an energy density that will pass lithium ion within the next 2 decades.

labrats5

@apeguero:
physics says you can move faster than the speed of light (tachyon), just that you can't go at the speed of light. So going faster than the speed of light would require a "quantum jump" to leap past the light speed barrier, but once you did that, supposedly you'd start experiencing time in reverse (localized to your craft), which could have some really nasty side effects.

jkr2

Remember when they said that electricity generated by fission reactors would be so cheap that there would be no need for electric meters? That was considered to be unlimited energy as well!

GiltProto

Ok, so how long until we can build these to the size of a pocket watch using spare car and missile parts and use them to power exoskeletons?
>_>
But really, despite the fact that it would defy the laws of physics to have an unlimited energy source, making one would be fine if it works out somehow. The major problem for any unlimited, or at least long-lasting, energy source is going to be funding; it'd be bad business for the current energy industry if something like that were ever to come to fruition.

Blah8

@Somadis: Unlimited Power could power an engine to allow us to travel the universe. Although I wouldn't like to go on that trip. It will be useless to us unless we can somehow figure out how to travel, if not faster than, at least at the speed of light, or find or make our own worm holes. Otherwise, think man. The fastest man-made object is the twin Helios Probes which reached 150,000mph at closest approach to the sun. That isn't even close to the speed of light (670,616,629.4 miles per hour), which, if we ever figure out how to reach that speed, would take us over 4 years to reach Proxima Centauri (V645). The closest galaxy, The Canis Major Dwarf, discovered in 2003, is 25,000 light years away so it would take us about that long to reach it at that speed. We could travel to the sun at that speed in a little over 8 minutes which is cool. So we could use it to cruise around our little corner of the Milky Way but that's about it I would think.

Unlimited energy will do us jack unless we can build an engine that can beat the speed of light, which according to current physics laws, is impossible. Hell, it's impossible to even reach the speed of light according to Einstein.

apeguero

Wow, all this from the country that brought you "cloning."

Carni77

@mhlaxp:
umm, I was making a joke, that if we had unlimited energy, we'd just blow ourselves up and end the human problem on earth. I don't take my joke seriously though.
@vorstellung:
I was just going to say "coming to an iron man near you" but you kind of beat me.

jkr2

@Nastro: Quick question... Does being an dumb asshole come naturally, or do you really have to work hard at it?

johnnyabnormal

Isn't that the thing in Ironman's chest?

vorstellung

I know it doesn't matter but are they North Koreans or South Koreans?
Unlimited power does that mean that we will one day travel the Universise

Somadis

the coolest part of the news is that it's beign done at South Korea.

can you imagine how much the ballance of power in the world will change if they succed?

so fun!

laio

For all the IDIOTS crying "what if" we spent the money on iraq on this type of experiment you fail to realize that the biggest threat to nuclear experimentation is the RADICAL LEFTIST ENVIROMENTALIST. This isnt a cake walk either fools, before you throw in the usual illogical heart wrenching BS, do us all a favour and do more THINKING than FEELING. In other worss READ a book or do some research about the topic before resorting to the usual emotional BS.

Nastro

@mhlaxp
I lol'd.
<3 the 8-12'ers

bemused0

@scarbrtj: don't knock it til you try it

Weihovah

Imagine what US could've achieved in this crucial human endeavour had it not "invested" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

United States funding of ITER project stayed as planned until the 2008 Appropriations Bill refused to provide funding, even at the request of the Bush Administration, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. It's not a matter of money to make, nor of conventional Democrat-Republican squabbles.

The matter is not something that can be solved by tossing endless amounts of money at it. It's a research project; building six times the number of KSTAR-equivalent plants would not be particularly useful in discovering information faster given the basic construction times.

I'm also not convinced it's really a crucial endeavor; there are almost certainly more cost-effective, albeit riskier, fusion power designs. No single one is likely crucial.

gattsuru

@snakepliskin: When your truck is electric. Sorry.

pardyhardy

Where are the cute female Korean models that usually show up with these articles.

BiZarRroBALlmeR

@generalsean:
@jkr2:

I mean, sure, unlimited energy sounds great, but we'll probably just use it all up. Or get sick of it, like those unlimited soup and salad deals at restaurants.

@gattsuru: And fusion is a joke compared to the near complete energy-to-matter conversion that comes with a matter-antimatter reaction. Fortunately, I have a plan. Since antimatter is identical to its normal matter counterpart moving backwards through time (seriously, do the math) all we have to do is send something really massive back in time and have it run into something on the way. And then kind of hope that the resulting explosion, instead of destroying the known universe, will just power our SUVs. It's shown a lot of promise in focus groups, testing particularly well with the crucial 8-12 demographic.

mhlaxp

I hope they perfect this. So bad.

pardyhardy

Fusion power research is a marathon that's been going on since the 50's. This is not some miraculous breakthrough. This is the kind of thing that means we'll have fusion power in the year 2060 instead of 2062.

lifterus

Limitless energy... to clone all the dogs they want?

scarbrtj

First, there's no such thing as unlimited energy, at least assuming the current laws of thermodynamics are accurate. Fusion does not defy those laws, the energy comes from matter conversion, and eventually will run out, albeit at such a point that we wouldn't care.

The type of fusion that Tokamak plants such as KSTAR are working towards is not so nice; while KSTAR is just working with hydrogen-deuterium mixes, the final plant is supposed to use deuterium-tritium mixes. While it's easy to start, it's both neutron-heavy and requires difficult to produce materials. It's going to be rather expensive when it does start working.

Finally, KSTAR only generated first plasma, not a new type of plasma; one other plant has done this before.

gattsuru

Imagine what US could've achieved in this crucial human endeavour had it not "invested" in Afghanistan and Iraq.

/weeping

ANoel

@mhlaxp:
"I fail to see what problems unlimited energy would solve."
the human problem.

jkr2

@mhlaxp: God Mode

generalsean

I fail to see what problems unlimited energy would solve.

mhlaxp

Lightsabers anyone?

evangelistc01

now we'll all have a good reason to buy hyundais and kias

Weihovah

Not to be too much of a scientist about this but everything has limits, especially this. (My boundless love for bacon being the only known exception)

The Lab

Does this means iPhone's battery life would be improved? :D

Mike918

We might be closer to unlimited energy, but I bet the energy companies will still charge you a arm and a leg for it.

Emiat

I still don't understand how they will generate electricity from a Tokomak reactor. (too lazy to pull up wiki)

ripfire

When can i get one in my truck?

snakepliskin

That's fucking great!

liquidsoapdispenser

@jkr2: Not quite. The existence of tachyons would present relativity with serious but not necessarily insurmountable problems of infinite creation energies and causality paradoxes, e.g., alteration of history. No compelling theoretical arguments preclude their existence and eventual discovery; however, experimental searches to date for tachyons have failed, and the limits set by those experiments indicate the it is highly unlikely that they exist.

Physics sure is neat, huh?

mhlaxp

@jkr2: @mhlaxp: Wouldn't tachions violate casuality if one were to use them?

apeguero

@mhlaxp: @apeguero:
nope, tachyons, if they exist would view the universe in reverse, but would interact w/ the universe from our point of view as forward moving. And again, if an object were to move faster than the speed of light, all time reversal effects would be localized to the craft. Now of course the time reversal experience wouldn't be like it's existence in reverse, not even close. Really the only difference would be that entropy effects would be in reverse, and all chemical reactions would have a reversal of direction. Physical interactions work perfectly well in reverse. Remember that an object experiencing a reversal of time would not make the universe to reverse time. It's not particularly complicated after a good amount of time of consideration. But again, this is all theoretical, and all that means is it may or may not be true.

jkr2

"2 sec can last 50 years on cars usage" that kind of effect =D

Thats madness!

shanzi

@mhlaxp: I've got my hopes on a Pasta /Anti-Pasta reactor. Total energy conversion with just a hint of garlic.

GenericWhiteGuy

limitless power should be given only to those who do not want it.

the1sen

@lifterus: but the world is supposed to end in 2012.

the1sen

@jayhawk11: i find it unlikely, and laughable, but hey, the Mayan's knew something we don't, evidently.

[www.usatoday.com]

WWJD?

the1sen

@the1sen: What? That means we only have three more Jesus Phones until the end times!!!

jayhawk11

@the1sen: What Would Jobs Do, indeed :-P

Haha, I'm actually familiar with the Mayan ideas about 2012, or at least the general concept. Seems much ado about nothing in my book. Gotta love people trying to make a buck by capitalizing on our fear of the apocalypse.

jayhawk11

@shanzi: NO!
...
THIS! IS! KOREA!

chizelord

@chizelord: Things Iove about Korea: The soju over there will knock you on your ass. That, and being fed a huge, raw, red ginsing root can cure almost anything. If there's something I like less? The bathrooms smell so bad you'll puke the spicy sea snake you just ate with some friends. OR, fighting for the check...sneaky maneuvers!...followed closely behind being asked if I am a G.I or told that I look like Tom Cruise.

johnnyabnormal

"Imagine what US could've achieved in this crucial human endeavour had it not "invested" in Afghanistan and Iraq."

Well, I don't know...The US spends something like $20k per high school student annually and there are still idiotic comments like this on Gizmodo, so I guess throwing money at a problem doesn't always work.

FY9

@johnnyabnormal:
"start actually start conserving " = See?! Proof of my public education failing!

Duke: The lights are growing dim
Otto. I know a life of crime has led me to this sorry fate, and yet, I blame society. Society made me what I am.
Otto: That's bullshit. You're a white suburban punk just like me.
Duke: Yeah, but it still hurts.

johnnyabnormal

Does this mean we might see an Iron Man one day?

mr_dimsum

@FY9: What is with the recent rash of misunderedumucated RINO giz comments hinting at slashing funding for schools? Like, DUH! No child left behind!! Er....um...uh huh....*drools on self*

News flash: Yes, the Iraq war is a pathetic f@*king joke. So are the last 7 years. Republican politicians today are the opposite of "conservative" and can't hold a candle to Goldwater values. The current douche bags have trashed our country and left us and our kids with the bill, plus the Chinese interest. Of course throwing money at something doesn't work: Just look at all the pathetic debt we've racked up "liberating" Iraq:

[www.nationalpriorities.org]

So, before any more idiots demonize ANoel, maybe they should look at 300% inflated gas prices at the pump, the price of bailing out greedy, de-regulated failed mortgage companies, absurd Exxon profits, no-bid private contractor defense scams, bridges to nowhere in Alaska, etc. ad nauseam. Understand the scope of how screwed up that bullshit is before comparing any of those wasteful, disgusting costs to the measly funding left over for educating our excessively stupid kids.

In my book, the bottom line is: If you're going to call yourself a conservative, you better get your ass in gear and start actually start conserving something!

Otherwise, you're just a FAKE.

johnnyabnormal

@labrats5: Re: "you're all idiots", Don't be an ass. I'm pretty sure they're JOKING. I laughed. I think that was the point.

Amen-Ra

As an answer to the money sent to the Iraq war (which I do not support), the US is already funding several different projects on fusion. Two of the biggest are ITER and NIF (at NIST). It's just that the Koreans made a breakthrough, that's all. Also, on fusion, it's "virtually" unlimited, but only in theory. You would need tritium (deuterium is a bit more available in natural water, though it is a bit difficult to extract), but tritium does not occur naturally anymore (it only has a halflife of around 13 years, so all tritium is exhausted).

Even if fusion sounds great at the moment, I don't think this is the time to be fiddling around with it. Technologically we are not prepared for it -my personal opinion- (ITER for example, at the current technology level costs 10bn euro). I think we should focus on renewables and conserving energy.

zeusalmighty

The avalanche has already begun.

It is too late for the pebbles to vote.

strider_mt2k

Well if bears approve I'm sure as heck, Colbert will not like this one bit, sir! :(

Fuzi Lojak

@mhlaxp: Easy. One of these times they run this experiment, that super-duper particle cannon in Switzerland (the one we're worried will make a tiny black hole) will be running and BAM - space/time ripped like so much wet facial tissue.

Oh, well, I had a good run.

Jim (The Canuck One)

I also think this is cool.

Blaze6181

This is pure madness i tell ya..
The koreans better do their stuff.. or else. we'd being sucked or blasted. LOL

shanzi

Unlimited power corrupts unlimitedly? But I won't care about fusion until I have a laptop battery that can go 24 hours on a charge with out gimping the performance settings. Or a cell phone battery where the talk time is measured in days not hours. At this point I'll take an 10 hour battery for my laptop and an iPhone that I could forget to charge overnight every once in a while.

thechansen

Woah, a 249ms fusion reaction. That could be enough to power 1000 homes :O ...for 2 minutes

Jitty

"It's a new form of plasma that can be used to generate electricity in a manner similar to conventional nuclear plants but with far less radioactive waste."

Yes, it's similar to conventional nuclear power, in that it is *exactly the opposite*.

Thanks for playing.

lurgy

@johnnyabnormal: Repo Man hehe.

frigg

Woah, a 249ms fusion reaction

There was no fusion reaction at KSTAR. They only generated plasma, with a net loss of energy. The difference is not trivial: plasma can be made with a microwave, while even the simplest fusion experiments require fairly specialized equipment (although fusors are getting cheap).

KSTAR's not supposed to be a working power generation plant. It's a research plant, like every other current ITER plant.

gattsuru

This should be a huge boon to the proton pack, ghost trap and ectoplasmic containment unit industries.

se7a7n7

You would need tritium (deuterium is a bit more available in natural water, though it is a bit difficult to extract), but tritium does not occur naturally anymore (it only has a halflife of around 13 years, so all tritium is exhausted).

Tritium is created naturally on a daily basis; send a fast neutron in the right place, like what happens in the upper atmosphere, and you'll have fresh tritium instantly. The short half-life means that you're not going to extract the stuff from the atmosphere in any meaningful supply, but it's easy enough to produce elsewhere. Nuclear fusion reactors make the stuff accidentally. It's common enough that you can find tritium glow-in-the-dark watches and rifle sights.

Starting, containing, and keeping active the reaction is complex. Getting fuel for it, not so much.

The more relevant problem is that deuterium-tritium, deuterium-deuterium, and lithium to tritium processing is all neutron-producing. Possibly dozens or hundreds of times as neutron-producing as current fusion plants, for the same amount of actual energy.

That's really, really not good. Normal materials aren't designed to be blasted with neutrons. At best, the stuff crumbles and falls apart regularly, resulting in downtime, repair costs, and potentially vented plasma and tritium. In practice, the combination of ionizing radiation and neutron activation turns your cement radioactive. Not fun.

Because neutrons don't interact magnetically, the only real way to pull energy from them is to toss them through a fluid until they bounce off enough of the fluid's components to stop. That requires ridiculously large systems, which get irradiate regularly.

It's still better than fission power, but it's not good enough to supplant normal power generation. For that, we'll need something aneutronic, and unless schemes like the polywell reactors are successful (in which case, we're talking effectively free energy thanks to proton-boron fusion), it's a long way til we can do that on a large scale.

gattsuru

@frigg: I know...the whole movie is a giant quote!

johnnyabnormal

I hope they have more luck with their fusion than they did with their "cold fusion." That'll be cool, not cold.

gravitation

@ANoel: The US has funded this sort of research for years. Nice try on politicizing good tech news though.

@Somadis: How can it possibly not matter? Oh, you're in that 8-12 year old demographic aren't you? Cootchy cootchy!

@johnnyabnormal: "Republican politicians today are the opposite of "conservative" and can't hold a candle to Goldwater values."

Amen brother!

@zeusalmighty: "we should focus on renewables and conserving energy."

You make it sound like we're not doing that now. Yay ethanol!

GadgetPlay

@GadgetPlay:

"Yay ethanol!"

Wait a sec, didn't you say you were from Nebraska?

johnnyabnormal

Uh...Giz? Can you wipe 2/3rd's of these comments?

FrankenPC

Wouldn't it be awesome for the Koreans to break that nut? If only the states spent as much as the koreans do on such research. Or maybe they do - but it simply never gets spent on the right things... makes me wonder.

totoro

Wouldn't it be awesome for the Koreans to break that nut? If only the states spent as much as the koreans do on such research. Or maybe they do - but it simply never gets spent on the right things... makes me wonder

The United States helped fundthis! KSTAR is a research reactor, and part of the ITER project. We were one of the seven countries funding it up until 2007, and the underlying technologies are, in many cases, only available because the ITER agreement involved the United States sharing information.

Oh, and the US's own, non-ITER reactors have already been making plasma since the 1980s. KSTAR's use of superconducting magnets is a great research project, but this isn't going to break anything new, only test things before the ITER itself goes up in France. Even that's not certain to have a real big net energy production for years.

gattsuru

I want to see supercharged plasma. Do it again!

aaj111

Is this the same Korea that built that fugly hotel?

[www.esquire.com]

BiZarRroBALlmeR

@vorstellung: Yes. And I WANT one too!

Klappstuhl

why oh why do giz write 'similar to conventional nuclear plants' when in fact normal plants are fission (splitting up atoms) and fusion is the exact opposite! they are meant to be a technology blog x

tarzan69

why oh why do giz write 'similar to conventional nuclear plants' when in fact normal plants are fission (splitting up atoms) and fusion is the exact opposite! they are meant to be a technology blog x

For the same reason people might talk about hydrogen-oxygen thermal plants as being similar to coal-thermal plants. While the heat's generated from different underlying processes, once you've got the energy (whether from tokamak or from nuclear boiler), you've got to use a neutron absorbing fluid to convert momentum into heat, after which you need to use an electrical generator to turn heat into electricity.

gattsuru

@BiZarRroBALlmeR: No, this is the other one.

Airport_Whiskey

@gattsuru: yeah, agreed, even though tritium does not exist in large enough quantities to be extracted in large numbers.

The idea in ITER is to keep infusing the plasma with tritium produced directly from the insulating walls of the tokamak, but I don't really know how that is a viable solution.

In a nutshell, well said.

zeusalmighty

@totoro:
This is also how they cloned the dog.

gothamdarkknight

wow so much idiots.

a) This is not unlimited energy

gothamdarkknight

We've done fusion, now it's a matter of doing it efficiently.

Con Seannery

@ANoel: Even thought it was a good investment. Well, of course putting it in the subprime morgage market would have helped a lot of you guys keeping there houses. but... missed my point.
@FY9: 20k US, yeehaa. that's a fortune. Nearly 3 months in harvard doing the MBA. It's good a country always will need low class workers.... hmm, think missed my point again.

krom

@krom: What the hell are you talking about? Clarify please.

johnnyabnormal

goku and vegita already fused.

jimbut

This is the holy grail of cheap energy production. Not to mention the first step towards a working flux capacitor.

All that said, it stands to reason technologies such as what this could ultimately deliver, almost limitless cheap energy for all will not see the light of day so long as the US is the main storehouse of global economic/military power. So long as there is any one single nation as a storehouse of global economic/military power. For those who have power (in all forms) they very rarely like to see it diminished, diluted, democratized or shared.

sharmanova

I came here to make a clone joke, but it would just be a copy of one of the ones posted above.

bagumpity

Bears?

jdavispara

@jkr2: No, it would appear that you're moving backwards in time relative to your position.

If the light from a clock is traveling away from the clock at "c" and you travel in the same direction away from the clock at exactly "c" then the image on the clock will remain unchanged forever as long as you're at the same speed. If you travel away from the clock faster than "c" then you will see light that left before you did in proportion to your acceleration and velocity.

Simply put, if you are moving away from the earth at the speed of light it will not appear to rotate, if you move away faster than the speed of light, it will appear to rotate backwards because you're passing light reflections from before you left... which would be a helluva thing to see.

s0crates82

Should Korea even be allowed to play with big boy toys yet?

heylookitscook