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| Fusion power in France! ...In 10 years, maybe | Aug 29, 2013 11:18 PM PDT | url |
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Added 1 new A* page:'Critical phase' for Iter fusion dream is a recent BBC article about the internationally funded "ITER" ('International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor and Latin for "the way" or "the road",' according to Wikipedia) experimental fusion reactor under construction in southern France, "receiving the first of about one million components for its experimental reactor." The creation of the components by various agencies around the world has been more troublesome than initially anticipated, and the operating target date of 2020 is looking pretty shaky at this point. ITER's "rough overall budget" is supposed to be about 15 billion euros (just under 20 billion USD)--although I guess that might have to go up considering the delays.
Still, fusion power! In southern France! Might happen some day! ITER's reactor is a "tokomak" design; "tokomak" is "the Russian word for a ring-shaped magnetic chamber." 28 incredibly powerful magnets will be tasked with creating a magnetic field of sufficient strength to contain plasma reaching over 200 million degrees Celsius, "conditions hot enough to force deuterium and tritium atoms to fuse together and release energy." Previous experiments with a tokomak at the JET ("Joint European Torus") (<- there's a really cool photo of the reactor's interior there) reactor in the UK have achieved fusion, but took more energy to produce than they generated; ITER, on the other hand, is supposed to be able to create ten times more energy than it takes to operate--up to 500 megawatts, quite a bit more than JET's 16 megawatt fusion record set in 1997 (which took 24 megawatts to generate); for the sake of comparison with fission reactors, the world's largest nuclear fission reactor plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, can produce 7,965 megawatts from its seven reactors combined. (A 6.6 magnitude offshore earthquake, the second largest to hit a nuclear plant, took Kashiwazaki-Kariwa offline for 21 months starting in 2007, but the radiation leakage was insignificant (the 2011 offshore quake that caused a tsunami and extremely significant radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan was magnitude 9.0).)
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I just noticed that there are a bunch of James Bond movies on Netflix's streaming service. And that they're being removed on September 2nd. >_< Guess I'll just try to squeeze in as many of the Sean Connery ones as I can before then...although maybe I'll do that Lazenby one first, I think I've only seen that once before.
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