kmguru
Staff member
Energy of the Stars, With No Emissions
A consortium of governments will build a groundbreaking fusion power plant in France for a price in excess of €5 billion. After decades of discouraging setbacks, plasma physics has made jaw-dropping recent progress. Could it save the world?
Something went wrong during reactor experiment number 23,995. The fusion process started, continued for a second, but suddenly broke off. Before it collapsed the plasma in the reactor chamber began to vibrate, and microphones transmitted a squealing sound to the control center.
"The plasma probably had too much contact with the chamber walls," physicist Arne Kallenbach surmised, "and then underwent a sudden drop in temperature. That happens fairly often. Unfortunately, the plasma is pretty unstable, particularly during the phase when it is being heated up."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,599211,00.html
The "Asdex Upgrade" reactor, at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, near Munich, uses microwave components to heat plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius -- several times the heat of the sun.
A consortium of governments will build a groundbreaking fusion power plant in France for a price in excess of €5 billion. After decades of discouraging setbacks, plasma physics has made jaw-dropping recent progress. Could it save the world?
Something went wrong during reactor experiment number 23,995. The fusion process started, continued for a second, but suddenly broke off. Before it collapsed the plasma in the reactor chamber began to vibrate, and microphones transmitted a squealing sound to the control center.
"The plasma probably had too much contact with the chamber walls," physicist Arne Kallenbach surmised, "and then underwent a sudden drop in temperature. That happens fairly often. Unfortunately, the plasma is pretty unstable, particularly during the phase when it is being heated up."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,599211,00.html
The "Asdex Upgrade" reactor, at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Garching, near Munich, uses microwave components to heat plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius -- several times the heat of the sun.