well maybe we are heading to our doom when they initiate the startup sequence
but if they could develope cold fusion then the results wouldn't be that bad, then this fusion reactors explode
it is possible you can bye bye earth hello space

TBM-Fan

Ignition is easy. It's been done all over the place. Sustained and contained power is freakin impossible.

FrankenPC

Hundreds of millions of degrees? Billions of atmosphere pressures? Enormous electric and magnetic fields?

I hope they have lots of safety measures, because it sounds like if they turn this thing on, not only will it melt and crush their equipment, but also magentize every cell in their bodies.

Margatron

alcohol and lasers?

Elasticity

yes yes yes and more yes. controlling destructive power is the quickest way to utopia or Armageddon! I CAN'T WAIT !

invaderbacca

sweet! fusion. finally.

pevans34

Uh-oh. Spiderman 2 flashback.

smartboydan hates college

I'll just be impressed if this thing stays online long enough to produce some kind of result.

Jrsy is the dude, playing the dude, disguised as another dude

@Margatron: Nope. That is the beauty of fusion. If you loose the magnetic field(containment field) and the heat just evaporates and there is no radioactive by product.
The problem has been how to hold in the heat for a extended period of time and power the containment field with less power than you produce. If it works you get almost limitless free energy. Minus the start up cost of course.

fastm3driver

@smartboydan hates college: The thing I loved the most about Spider Man 2 is the following: Dude invents a fusion reaction. Awesome, fantastic, everyone loves him. Dude ALSO invents robotic arms driven by an actual artificial intelligence that hooks into his OWN nervous system. Uh. Who cares? Nobody.

Pope John Peeps II

best of luck with this. I think this project is probably a million times more important than the experiments carried out by the LHC. Let's just hope it doesn't blow off half the planet.

Phenostar

@Pope John Peeps II: I so called that! The Stuff Octavius used for his Robotic Tentacles could have also been used to make awesome Prosthetics for Wheelchair-Bound People.

( Or advanced controlls for Iron Man :D )

Klappstuhl

What exactly happens to a free neutron? Without a proton bonded to it, it would be useless mass...

hammertime1994

this is waaaaaayyy over due. something bad always has to happen to find alternate sources.

krazyphaze

@Pope John Peeps II: Dunno if I want to be in the same hemisphere as one of these.

Phenostar

@Phenostar: Can I vote that all large-scale science experiments involving words like "energy" "tremendous" "explosion" "power" be conducted in Washington DC? Y'know, just for the prestige of it, and all.... yah... that's it....

Pope John Peeps II

@Margatron: HAha. From MST3K

"The bars are magnetized."
"And if your hands were metal, that would mean something."

Pope John Peeps II

so it'll take how long before we get one in the states? (that is if it does what it's supposed to...)

B.Zanetti

See also:

[en.wikipedia.org]

KinOfCain

So this experiment takes place in America?

Ok, that's fine with me then.

(MUAHAHAHAHAAHHAAAAAA!!!)

Klappstuhl

@Klappstuhl: Check linked article, takes place in Britain.

Phenostar

Ideally, something like this could change the world. The containment issue has always been the main crux of fusion. I just wonder the socioeconomic ramifications of such a world-changer.

mykalt45

..."Lasers use power 10,000 times greater than the entire National Grid, but delivered in a fraction of a second."

Watch your lights dim when they turn on this baby!

MrfixitRick

Uh oh! They wants our heavy waters to make clones!

Lol, this story reminds me of that episode of Stargate where the planet they visit is at war and they trade heavy water to them so they can power their machines, which turns out to be a mass cloning facility.

Kakkoister

If this destroys the planet, I am gonna be so pissed. I just did some landscaping!

jamstigator

I don't think containment is the issue, they've managed to contain fusion in hydrogen bombs of course and they worked. I think the bigger issue is exactly how much energy a fusion reaction delivers. While a fission event of say U-235 can release 184MeV of recoverable energy, a deuterium-deuterium fusion I believe is somewhere in the arena of 20-30MeV. The issue is that the energy required to initialize a single fusion reaction is (for now) far greater than the energy released.

Just look at the diagram, the lasers use 10k times the grid to get this going, it would have to fuse the entire pellet's worth of of H-2 and H-3 to make this even worth one shot and even then, how much of the energy would have to be converted to not only pay back the energy costs to start it but to actually get an energy profit from it?

In theory it could work but all of this happening simultaneously in a matter of seconds could become a clusterfuck of energy release not easily managed.

And of course the concept of cold fusion which is amazing is to initialize a fusion reaction with little to no energy required (based on the assumption or perhaps well known fact that fusion happens in nature all on its own) and that would certainly be a breakthrough, this however is a gamble it seems.

sisedi

@Klappstuhl: iron man doesn't need robotic arms...he can fly!

laxman15

@smartboydan hates college: lol i was going to write a comment saying something like, "Clearly, someone hasn't seen Spiderman 2, yet." But you beat me to the punch!

RiceBandit

OH IT IS SOOO ON!!!

LHC vs HiPER!

BRING IT!!!!!!!

Poon

@Margatron:

"but also magentize every cell in their bodies".

Really? No more Cyan, Yellow or Black, everybody will be magenta-only ? That's gonna be a very sad world.

geodesigner

doesn't the energy to power the lasers kind of mess this up though?

giyad

How come nobody noticed that is says "100 milli-" Degrees Celsius?! Somebody didn't study their SI prefixes. And if I may be the grammar nazi, it should be 100 M°C, or 100 megadegrees Celsius: no disjunction between prefix and unit and a space between number and unit.

FiveseveN

and if it doesn't return any energy to the grid... how long will I be in the dark? I hAs goTz nO SoUlar.

Namster

That central chamber looks strangely familiar.

CaseyG

They are only dropping in a pea sized amount of fuel. If it even works it would not release enough energy to destroy the container it is housed in let alone the planet. sisedi had it right with the current problem being that it takes more energy to sustain it that they get out of it. The current goal is to make it sustainable with the longer term goal of acually getting more energy out that they put in. Current esimates for reaching a useable sustained fusion reaction are on the order of 30 to 50 years from now at the earliest. While this is exciting scientific research it is still at its earliest stages.

Uncle Remus

@Margatron: Freak accidents make superheroes...Where do I sign up?

NervousFireStarter

temperatures of hundreds of millions of degrees! billion atmosphere pressures! enormous electric and magnetic fields! All used to..... boil water. WTF. Talk about inefficiency. We're taking state of the art technology and using it to boil water to spin turbines... something that's been done for ages (coal and nuclear come to mind). It's too bad there isn't any way to harness all the energy produced without the intermediary step.

TamarPolydeuces

Why do so many people on here (and elsewhere) assume that every science experiment is going to mean the end of the world?

Why are so many people so certain that the apocalypse is just around the corner? Humans have wrongly (obviously) been thinking this way for millennia but each generation always assumes that it's going to happen in their lifetime. Is this due a kind of perverse egocentricity - they're certain that the really big shit is going to happen during their watch?

It's particularly disturbing that so many people on a tech blog seem to hold these Luddite views. Ok, I know that most of them are just saying shit for the sake of it, but there's definitely some people on here who are at least slightly worried about the LHC.

Anyway, I'm going to go out and ride my bike. Oh, wait! Bikes are man made machines. What if this causes the world to end! Arghhhh!

LittleJon

@fastm3driver:

So you are talking about Magnetic Containment Fusion - big magnetized donuts (!) containing plasma for extended periods of time. The new European $10 billion project ITER is an example of this. Hope is to start building reactors in 15 years or something.

This stuff is Laser Fusion. Laser fusion is more like a toy that allows the US to keep track of all its H-bomb physicists: Bomb physicists will stick around if you give them fun toys to play with, it turns out. To make laser fusion a reasonable energy source, well, let's just say cold fusion is a better bet. And cold fusion is a hoax.

gStar

@giyad:

Well the idea is this thing makes so much power, it powers the lasers that run it and then some. This will finally stick a fork in the stupid windmill and conservation crowd who would have us put bricks in our toilets to use less power.

Aturayd

Ummm... haven't all the laser inertial containment fusion experiments to date just been cover for H-bomb research that couldn't be done under the test ban treaties?

MykePagan

It is inevitable at some point that our understanding and technological advancements will evolve to a point where we will be able to fully harness the power of these types of experiments. It wasn't so long ago in our history that people would have thought you mad/crazy if you declared we could power the world harnessing the power of nuclear reaction.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether we harness that power for good or evil.

The discovery of anti-matter particles at CERN promise to provide near limitless supply of power if we can harness them- as yet we are unable to generate enough of that matter. We may never be able to, but I wouldn't bet against it considering the ingenuity of the human race and our advancements in science and technology.

Consider this.

In 2000 the US generated 1,968 billion kilowatt hours of electricity by burning 1,260 million tons of coal and producing 2,710 million tons of waste. This includes 1,058 million tons of carbon dioxide that occupies 40 trillion cubic feet or 273 cubic miles.

By comparison, an anti-matter power plant would use 40 kilograms (88 pound) of anti-matter to generate the 1,968 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and produce only 176 pounds of waste.

The mass ratio between the power plants is 30 billion to 1 (2,710 million ton/176 pounds).

Or it could make the most powerful, destructive bomb known to man.

jimbowyer

Wow! Just like Sim City 2000... You have a bunch of energy issues until you build a fusion reactor. Duh scientists! This technology is hardly revolutionary, it has been in place for a long time in my city. Get with the times bitches!

thetunecatt

Seems like all of these really important scientific breakthroughs involve the possibility of Armageddon.

It would be nice to wake up to some news, and read "Scientific Breakthrough, infinite energy discovered, 100% safe, uses kittens."

unibrow4o9

Can't this kind of thing potentioally screw everything up. I mean there could be some huge explosion from it and billions of degrees?? How could you contain that? I don't know about this....

Adisah

@unibrow4o9: There is no chance of Armageddon from fusion power! It can not self sustain. In the event of a failure the fusion reaction will just stop.

LittleJon

This fusion will still fuck up our planet. No pollution? Well, tell me what the hell are we going to do with that helium?

Soon everyone will start to talk with pitch voice. Ok, maybe not because helium is quite stable chemically and will not react with oxygen, it will just flow into outer space.

kris2lee

"Rise and shine, Dr. Freeman, rise and shine..."

Kuijs

"produce limitless clean energy and save humanity from self-destruction"

you can't save humanity by giving it a limitless energy source - just look what the oil has done.

ypctx

I thought this was going to be about a laser containment field surrounding a micro sun. The lasers would forma cage around the micro sun distorting time and space. A physicist theorized that the spinning laser beam would cause a temporal disturbance this could in tern hold the micro sun so that it doesn't hit the sides of the container melting everything.

What ever happened to Google Fusion?? We should get that running again. Does google back things so that they disappear??

rurena

Just don't use the lasers to cook a house full of popcorn. The professor will get real mad.

fsusmithc2

@smartboydan hates college: All that without ANY protection!! AHAHAH! laughable! A mini sun that doesn't burn everyone in the room.

Ariel_Wollinger

@sisedi: A hydrogen bomb is pretty much the antithesis of containment. Wouldn't do much good to drop something on your target that didn't explode.

Gann

@TamarPolydeuces: You'd rather open a hole in one side of the pinch bottle and have a magnetohydrodynamic generator making electricity from plasma flux? Might be nicer not to do it on the surface of the planet.

JBanister

@hammertime1994: Free neutrons can lead happy, fulfilling lives until they encounter 74 cm of absorptive alloy, then it's back to drudgery, bonded into a nucleus.

JBanister

@smartboydan hates college: "Yeah... They did it in Superman III."

racermd

@TamarPolydeuces: My thoughts exactly. A direct conversion of fusion energy to electricity is the kind of ground shattering development we need to kick our petrol habit.

Gann

But will it fly a car?

EricAlder

@TamarPolydeuces:
Unfortunately most nuclear reactions (fusion or fision) do not give off free electrons to create a potential difference and have a flow of electricity.
They are mostly heat and radiation.

We do not have dilithium crystals yet....

aec007

Hey wait a minute. It's one thing if they do this and melt most of France creating a big black smoking tar pit/crater. They're doing this in the UK. I guess I better hurry up visit London before they flip the switch.

eljefewatson

@B.Zanetti: We already have a similar research facility. Although ours doesn't yet have a way to reclaim energy and is strictyly for research. [lasers.llnl.gov]

Krowyn

Sweet. Helium is produced! Everyone will have funny voices. Seriously though the worlds helium supply is finite and running out so this is good news if they can produce a large quantity of it. (Gaseous helium is light enough to leave earths atmosphere.)

Oh and clean energy forever would be nice too.

RyaninCalgary

isnt that what powered cities in trigun, lol

moose_knuckle

lets put it in simple terms: you use high power lasers orders of magnitude greater than the surface of the sun for a split second to create this cool fusion reaction....just to boil water? heh we gotta find a better way to harness atomic energies.

JasperAkon

@FrankenPC: Impossible is nothing...yeah i just got payed to say that...not really my life is pretty sad.

Mike918