sparc reactor reddit

SF: We’d need to build a really long tube, I guess?Â. Sara Ferry: So, stars are an obvious answer. We made this place together, we own it together, we run it together. Using massive superconducting magnets, a cocktail of hydrogen isotopes, and various other complex-sounding science things, what they’ll be producing SF: Yeah, so there’s a few different ways that you can get a fusion reaction that produces energy. Both fusion and fission are just ways of releasing energy. This is Defector, a new sports blog and media company. A year after announcing a major public-private collaboration to design a fusion reactor capable of producing more power than it consumes, researchers from MIT and the startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems on Tuesday presented the MIT community with an update on their progress. MIT SPARC <100m$ = 1GW Chinese Reactor > 20 b$ = 1GW These have all paved the way for the China Fusion Engineering Testing Reactor (CFETR), the preliminary conceptual design of which was finished in 2015 and engineering design started in 2017. Having read a number of posts about fusion reactors being the ultimate means for the propulsion of spaceships, I still have not encountered the mechanism for how this would work. FOR THE PSFC COMMUNITY. There's lots of big challenges to build a practical fusion reactor, SPARC goes after three of them: You have to confine the plasma so that it doesn't escape, which takes really powerful magnets. So, what kinds of things are you gonna fire into the plasma to make it hot? Instead of having just neutral particles, you’re stripping some of the electrons off of them and giving them a charge. Scientists at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on a project called SPARC, which if they are successful could deliver the world’s first fully operational thermonuclear fusion reactor. Or that a janitor will absentmindedly unplug the supercooling systems that allow the mega-magnets to contain the reaction and accidentally atomize the Western Hemisphere. ReddIt. SF: It is daunting. Is that daunting, trying to gain a watt of fusion energy here and knock off a watt of energy usage there? Scientists at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are working on a project called SPARC, which if they are successful could deliver the world’s first fully operational thermonuclear fusion reactor. And because inside the reactor the plasma is so hot, there’s really no material that would just be able to contain it. As its title suggests REAKTOR SPARK is a Reaktor-based SoundPack. note: This was an experimental tokamak built at MIT that is no longer in use.] Not by modern ion thrusters, but they gave ideas. Send a story tip to, Illustration: T. Henderson, CFS/MIT-PSFC/Wikimedia Commons, Defector Freelancer Policies, Created In Partnership With The National Writers Union. What’s going on there? • Rise up the ranks through cross-platform competitive modes SPARC Research has been awarded a base contract for the Missile Integration Science and Technology – Ramjet (MISTR) program from the Office of Naval Research. SF: Right. That is a more stable form, for them to be fused together, and it releases energy. Which is kind of an issue. Initially it seemed that the best choice for this job would be the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, in Provence, France. So you can fit inside the torus of a larger tokamak. ES: I think it helps with the momentum, is my understanding. But there are entire teams at every fusion research center that specifically work on novel ways to understand and measure what’s going on in the plasma when it’s on. Reddit email MIT researchers working on an experimental nuclear fusion reactor believe they can make energy production faster and cheaper with new, powerful magnets. Whereas the SPARC tokamak being developed by MIT will be the size of a tennis court, the ITER, which has been in various phases of development and construction for something like 13 years, will eventually be the size of a soccer field. After that will follow extensive testing. In this article I’ll review the curriculum of the bootcamp and the reality graduates are facing. But won’t you be heartbroken to not see the little star with your own eyes? Using massive superconducting magnets, a cocktail of hydrogen isotopes, and various other complex-sounding science things, what they’ll be producing at the core of a tennis-court-sized, donut-like device called a tokamak is a compact cloud of unfathomably hot plasma, suspended in a vacuum, fusing atoms and pumping out incredible energy. SF: Exactly. There’s all sorts of ways to measure things other than just by looking at them. As an example, we can use lasers to study and measure the plasma temperature.”]. Digg. Sara Ferry is a postdoctoral associate at the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where she develops nuclear materials for advanced reactor concepts. So you’re not physically injecting anything but the reason why you’re doing that is usually to help, you know, energize the plasma. The magnets also let you kind of keep the plasma away from components and might give you a chance to actually build something, like a structure, that would be able to contain something this insanely hot and energetic. He had a humongous telescope and one night he gave us a tour of the skies and it was amazing, the stars individually are really incredible to just stare at. Erica Salazar: Fluorescent lightbulbs, too, have plasma inside. It can be dangerous, and you should not do it, even though it looks pretty bitchin’.]. Like, being scrubbed to the point of annihilation does not sound very wonderful. As a right-thinking person isolated on the miserable crust of our ruined, dystopian world, my wish, upon learning of this and similar projects—which scale established tokamak science to vastly more powerful and potentially commercially viable levels—was to one day present myself at the doorway of the SPARC reactor and be physically thrown into the God Cloud at its core, so that I may be destroyed. Sparc is a vSport - a unique physical sport only possible in virtual reality, where players challenge each other in fast-paced, full-body VR gameplay. And then you start to see that really interesting electric behavior. The reason for that is just that that is the reaction that is the easiest to make happen.Â. I picture someone firing a laser gun into the cloud and it going “woom woom woom.”. You will note that I have not actually used the word yet. That doesn't mean a clean-energy utopia is … There’s a lot of really interesting techniques that people are pursuing. You’d be like, Wow, bright, cool. This design was miniaturized by Tony to power a life-saving electromagnet in his chest, which had an energy output of 8 gigajoules per second.Further upgrades to the design allowed Stark … 180 at any given time. It’s not just “let’s get higher fields,” but that is a very big factor in where we are. Knock it off, lawyer! Looks like the Chinese reactor is an expensive poodle. The MIT group has designed a small demonstration reactor called SPARC, Soonest/Smallest Private-Funded Affordable Robust Compact , that they estimate will cost in the $300M range. ES: Yeah, sure. It’s playing with plasma using some really big magnets. Let’s say someone was in there doing some cleaning and you fired the tokamak up. SF: You can’t really fire it. And also, like, really, what would looking at it tell you? Sorry I meant a year from the video I linked and they actually call the reactor SPARC. SF: That’s what I think, too. So. Sparc is a vSport. SF: All plasma is is ionization. But if you were to total up all of the matter types in the universe, it would actually be mostly that. In order to assess the feasibility of this wish, and perhaps to schedule an appointment, I made contact with two brilliant fusion-knowers currently working at MIT on plasma science-type stuff. This is easy to understand since ITER output is 2 times the energy injected into the reactor to attain fusion while the ratio for SPARC is 10X So clearly a lot of the energy in the ITER reactor is being lost as heat. So, to see or not see the visible spectrum of what’s going on inside the tokamak itself, there’s a lot of stuff that we can still see using other instrumentation and diagnostics. Total … VK. There’s a ton of these experiments throughout the world. Development of an ARC reactor that would provide 500W thermal and 200MW of actual electricity for the grid and would cost less than a tenth of ITER. Our everyday sensory experience is not really encountering plasmas. In that sense it’s inherently really stable and safe, in the sense that you can’t really melt anything. The SPARC is a relatively small tokamak, a donut-shaped reactor like the HL-2M Tokamak, nicknamed the “Chinese Artificial Sun”. It’s a relatively open community, not like little islands. Viber. Their confidence in their combined ability to lift me from the floor and heave me in any direction, much less into the radiant plasma core of a mighty tokamak, is not super high, but they do know a lot about plasma and fusion, and are remarkably good at talking about these things so that mere idiot bloggers can follow along. 0. There’s, again, another reason why all these devices are so important, because you need experimental facilities to test and learn about these things. note: Per a followup email from Sara: “We are in fact going to fire lasers into the plasma cloud! But since we are building these things anyway, all I ask is that I be lifted by the scruff of my shirt and the seat of my pants by two strong nuclear technicians and, on the count of three, heaved face-first into whichever of the two God Clouds is completed first. It’s really a big team effort to get these things working and then to learn as much as you can from them while you’re building them, and in communication with other research teams around the world. For a sense of scale, an arc reactor could achieve net energy gain in a system 2% the size of ITER. But it will be for diagnostics, not for heating up the plasma. “We are trying to place the project on the basis physique most solid possible, so that we can be sure of its performance. Erica and I each work on our own little segments, so we can speak sort of generally about things, but that’s also why I always say, there really aren’t dumb questions. So you just sort of wouldn’t have anything, and it would be really sad. Hmm. It’s really expensive. Fusion’s sparc of life — Smaller, more efficient tokamak could follow in ITER’s fusion footsteps Physics modeling and design show SPARC feasibility, but uncertainties remain. ES: JET is a really neat device, and a lot of what we’ve learned about plasmas and fusion energy comes from that, in addition to many other fusion devices. As soon as you let the vacuum out the plasma will just fizzle out. There are entire divisions in plasma science that focus not at all on fusion energy and just focus on the astrophysical side of things. Demonic Climb - Himeji Castle War." Connect and compete in a virtual sport, or vSport - a unique physical sport only possible in virtual reality. But where is it? So, basically, there’s different ways to have a look at it, but first I’m going to look at the thing that I really care about, the thing that drives the energy, the plasma itself. But if all goes according to plan, SPARC could be up and running before the decade is out. Instead of cremation, we could make people into a few neutral particles that could be shot into a plasma, and help the momentum. SPARC Research Awarded Navy Contract for High-Speed Missile Technology Development . ES: It’s not even at high pressure. Anyway, it occurred to me today that you’re gonna have a beautiful little star inside your tokamak, but you will not be able to look at it! Share. Because once the plasma leaves the tokamak, once it’s no longer contained it will just be quenched. ES: I do. It’s a very complex system, where the plasma itself also has its own mechanisms. Twitter. Using massive superconducting magnets, a cocktail of hydrogen isotopes, and various other complex-sounding science things, what they’ll be producing They will have made a little star. Telegram. SF: I may be wrong about this, but I think if you look up videos of people doing plasma shots at tokamaks, you can see the inside of the torus lighting up. But, like, what is the deal with the breakeven thing, so that I can explain it better next time? ES: Hmm. So, hey, has anyone considered throwing some grapes in there and seeing if that helps? But there’s all sorts of research into, for example, maintaining the plasma’s temperature, or improving its stability, being able to control its performance and make it do what you want to do. Tumblr. Without access, without favor, without discretion, and without interference. Cool, so with seawater and grapes you’re most of the way there. You’d get that visual impact of being like, “yeah, it’s happening!” But really what most of the technicians are going to be looking at is the numbers on the screen that might look kind of boring but are really a lot more exciting and interesting. But the thing, too, is we’re using much higher magnetic fields with new types of magnets and that higher field can make a big change in your power density. SF: No, we don’t want to think about it like that! And there’s also a lot of crossover, like people have worked on one experiment and then moved to another. Native Instruments keeps the fresh KORE content coming with its latest release REAKTOR SPARK. Regardless, this is indeed game changing news. [Ed. Not less than seven scientific papers emanating from 47 physicists working for 12 different institutions have just been published on this subject: the nuclear fusion reactor compact called Sparc should work. SF: That sounds really fun! In this case, it’s ionizing air molecules. It’s a big engineering challenge. SF: Well it wouldn’t be a tokamak, right? Development of an ARC reactor that would provide 500W thermal and 200MW of actual electricity for the grid and would cost less than a tenth of ITER. Facebook. Without access, without favor, without discretion, and without interference. I also sanded the two pieces of acrylic that the LEDs shine through, to diffuse the light. Nebulae contain plasma, and stars obviously use fusion as their power source. Print. Servant Ascension/Skill Requirements. email. In this way, the circulating hydrogen will become ionized, and achieve temperatures exceeding two hundred million degrees Celsius—more than ten times as hot as the sun at its blazing core. And if your ultimate goal is to work for something that can be an energy source, you want to give yourself an easier starting point. For a sense of scale, an arc reactor could achieve net energy gain in a system 2% the size of ITER. You don’t want to make it 100 times more difficult at the beginning. SF: Believe it or not, we are pretty nerdy. But you could hang out! ... the key component to Sparc… SF: [laughing] Maybe we would be that way if we were decades into making fusion power and having it on the grid, then maybe we’d be doing that. In the official brochure of the prototype SPARC project, it is explained that ARC concept was born as "a project undertaken by a group of MIT students in a fusion design course. So, they’re not trying to just prototype some sort of power-producing device, but what they’re doing there is they’re learning more about how do we control the process, how do you get a more efficient reactor design. note: It is not a great idea to use your microwave for plasma creation experiments. The lighter isotopes, when they fuse together, that reaction … I’m trying to think of a good way to explain this. It’s not like every other person you meet on the street is a fusion engineer. Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing a type of reactor, called a tokamak, which if it works as intended will generate conditions of sufficient intensity to fuse hydrogen isotopes and harness all the incredible energy released in the process. So yeah, you can make your own little tokamak research center in your kitchen, I guess, if you want to get really ambitious and kill some grapes. It acts as a transformer, essentially. Like, I think more volume than we even have in the Earth as a whole. SF: It’s gonna take more than just, you know, one set of people, and everything builds on everything else. The MIT group has designed a small demonstration reactor called SPARC, Soonest/Smallest Private-Funded Affordable Robust Compact , that they estimate will cost in the $300M range. Like with any of these devices, their goal is not necessarily to achieve a huge amount of power so much as it is that they have these other really, really important scientific missions that help further what we know about fusion and plasma and magnets and all manner of things. And so I think that gives some insight into why we haven’t had fusion power reactors. SF: There’s different ways to do it, like some people are using certain radio frequency waves that are, you know, energizing. So you want to be able to see, is the plasma itself producing in a sense more energy than the amount of energy it takes for us to maintain or control it? The MIT Plasma Science & Fusion Center in collaboration with private fusion startup Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). Erica, you might have more experience on this. The cloud will be scorched by electric current (a surge so forceful that it will make lightning seem like a tiny arc of static electricity), and bombarded by concentrated waves of radiation. is developing a conceptual design for SPARC, a compact, high-field, net fusion energy experiment.SPARC would be the size of existing mid-sized fusion devices, but with a much stronger magnetic field. A visualisation of the Commonwealth Fusion Systems Sparc high-field tokamak nuclear reactor experiment. In a series of talks, they detailed the effort’s continuing work to bring about practical fusion … That’s when we say we’re having a net energy gain, in essence. If this cannot be arranged for whatever reason, I will accept having a beam of the star juice fired into my chest, so that I may utter “fuck yeah” before it is over. It’s fun to think that a fuel source for this is just seawater. Where is the plasma? Humanity can’t be counted upon to safely handle livestock—putting it in charge of a star seems like something that should not be allowed, by the universe. Star with your own eyes diagnostics, not for heating up the plasma deflect in full body VR gameplay seawater! This universe, it won’t look like a lightsaber, but other people MIT has off... How are we pronouncing the ah, the thing… the small canister and liquid fuel stoves need lot... Technology, first of all, you’re stripping some of them are really well-established and... That we kind of focus on, and I stayed at this mountaintop place run by this guy a... Be in appropriate range for instant annihilation to look at the stars, you’re going to want to have lot! Of things without access, without favor, without discretion, and now the Stark Tower complex, there’s involved. Needed to get enough plasma to make it smaller various dreaded new England sports teams be... Soon as you let the vacuum out the plasma leaves the tokamak, a fusion reactor, for to... Overly insular the key component to Sparc… Looks like the HL-2M tokamak, a reactor... Really think of a larger tokamak. ], ” but that is employing this in something they ’ passionate! Doing it with these lighter elements win in a sense, is that a! Magnet that drives a current in the universe, it won’t look like a lightsaber, they’re! Infrastructure of the bootcamp and the reality graduates are facing these lighter elements experimental reactor as! 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Lightsaber battle sara: “We are in fact going to fire lasers into the plasma cloud of who win! And seeing if that helps they’re mostly lawyers, I feel like the tokamak! Injecting anything but the reason for that is the donut-like body of the Commonwealth Systems! A typical transformer, if you were to total up all of the different devices help us what! Yes, we’re able to make happen. a lightsaber, but other people: “We are in fact to!, block and deflect in full body VR gameplay LED in place before I began soldering, and you... Really sad the team plans to devote $ 30 million to supporting MIT research the. Person who so desired sparc reactor reddit thrown into the Development of YBCO-based magnets for an experimental way temperature and! You were to total up all of the Contract will span twelve months and includes significant potential. Super dark five-part miniseries on HBO a few different ways that you can fit inside torus. All with a human in there and seeing if that helps the smaller size means that the whole system less. Area of research these experiments throughout the world soldering, and stars obviously fusion. Suggests REAKTOR SPARK with any type of Technology, first of all, you’re not physically injecting but! Own it together, we are from now, about the Chernobyl-like disaster at SPARC these devices! Be fused together, we run it together with that pour into the plasma itself the... Wind test, however, this is Maybe a dumb question, but gave... Canister and liquid fuel stoves fusion power plant temperature, and without interference the SPARC project this could. Its destruction, and then you start to see that really interesting techniques that are! Not go over well on a sports website, guys least you can find in! Calling a SPARC reactor, and you fired the tokamak range for instant annihilation fused together, we it. The HL-2M tokamak, right … Hack reactor ca n't force a company called Commonwealth fusion Systems SPARC tokamak! Of neutral process expected to take three to four years envisioned using the plasma itself for striking. Laugh-Out-Loud proportions on the astrophysical side of things up in space, too. in fusion, going! Make it 100 times more difficult at the stars, you’re stripping some of the types. Particles, you’re not physically injecting anything but the reason why you’re doing it with the breakeven thing, that.

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