Miklos Porkolab | Worldwide Progress Nuclear Fusion Energy
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- Опубліковано 23 лип 2024
- Professor Miklos Porkolab is an internationally recognized physicist, known for his work in both experimental and theoretical plasma physics. Since 1995 he has been the Director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) and the Head of the PSFC Physics Research Division. He graduated from the University of British Columbia (BASc in Engineering Physics, 1963) and obtained his Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 1967. While at Princeton University in the early 1970s, Porkolab carried out pioneering experimental and theoretical research in the area of nonlinear wave-wave and wave-particle interactions and parametric instabilities. His current research interests include advanced tokamak physics research through heating and current profile control with RF waves, and a study of turbulence and transport in tokamaks. Porkolab is a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Nuclear fusion is the source of energy that powers the stars in the universe. It is a nuclear reaction of light nuclei (isotopes of hydrogen) fusing into heavier ones (helium) once they collide with sufficiently high speeds to overcome the repulsive Coulomb forces of like charged particles. This releases enormous amounts of energy through the conversion of mass (0.7 % of the original mass) into energy. In practice to achieve such a high temperature "plasma furnace" while maintaining its burn for long time durations has been an extremely challenging scientific and technological problem. The most promising approach is the so-called tokamak concept. Such a device consists of a toroidally shaped vacuum chamber, surrounded by magnetic coils and the plasma is initiated by inducing an electric current in the plasma which also creates its own magnetic field that helps to confine the plasma. I will review the enormous scientific and technical progress made in the last few decades in fusion research, its present status, including the building of a multi-billion dollar scale burning plasma experiment (ITER) as an international activity, and finally will discuss some of the technical challenges that remain toward realizing a demonstration fusion power plant.
Sponsored by the Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department (www-ners.engin.umich.edu/) as part of the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Project Seminar and NERS colloquium.
Great speech! Deserve way more views, since public awareness is the key to make fusion happen. The more vocal the public is about desiring fusion power plants, the more investors and governments may take action. Relying solely on the academic and government research sectors would be too sluggish. We humans should grasp the timely opportunity to resolve the climate change crisis at least.
Very specific and good details
I'm astonished that people here are so against projects like ITER when world governments spend trillions of dollars on "defence" budgets every year. THAT is what should be cut in favour of research that will allow viable human expansion into space and reduction of fossil fuel usage, both for the sake of the environment socio-economic improvement for us all.
+MediaFilter You say that like ITER isn't *the* major road block to commercial fusion energy. If ITER is spectacularly successful in achieving its stated goals it will have succeeded in demonstrating to the world that fusion is inherently uneconomical and not worth pursuing, as well as defunding dozens of national fusion programmes with fast turn arounds that were making rapid progress using dozens of disparate machines. We made progress faster than Moore's law (on increasing the triple product) until the point we became serious about betting on ITER and defunded fusion research.
@@soylentgreenb why can't we do both?
it would require us to talk to our elected representatives about it, but we do in fact have more than enough money to fund both paths.
Please feed my uneducated mind. Would it possible to contain h helium which we're running low on? Thank you.
yes, but since the amount of hydrogen it takes to produce a given amount of energy is so small, and the helium waste is so small, the helium we would be producing with a whole planet worth of these reactors would hardly impact the amount of helium we have left.
along with that, the niobium-tin superconductors run on liquid helium coolant to keep them 4°K, and some of that is going to escape to the environment, much much more than the reactor is going to be producing.
a solution to this could be using "high temperature" superconductors which run at 30°K, the rare earth barium copper oxide strips, which can be cooled with liquid nitrogen. we have a LOT of nitrogen to spare (the atmosphere is 70% nitrogen)
the good thing about these high-temp superconductors is that they can actually produce a magnetic field that is about twice as strong as the niobium-tin.
I would recommend checking out the Dennis Whyte talk at Palo Alto Research Center about MIT's new project ARC / SPARC, if you wanna learn more about this exciting new technology.
I'm not interested in ITER when it comes to fusion. That is the least valuable project if you want to produce power. I'm interested in a-neutronic fusion, or what Lockheed martin is trying to do, or dense plasma focus fusion. If people were allowed to keep more of their money there would be plenty of funding to develop fusion. ITER is worthless project for generating power, it is a giant thought experiment for studying fusion particles.
Focus fusion is really interesting, but I don't know if they will solve the density problem. Have you seen the arc design by mit? Iter is obsolete already, and they are just burning the fusion money in giant heaps. I wish they would redistribute that money towards more deserving projects.