Just a soupçon of science for today

If you have an inquiring mind and like to be surprised, take a look at Science Daily.  Here are the titles and links to 4 of the articles available now:

• Acid-Wielding Worms Drill Through Bones
• Printing Living Tissues Made of Sugar (another use of 3D printing)
• Lizard-Like Robot Uses Tail to Land On Feet
• New Light Shed On Explosive Solar Activity -- "Extreme solar activity can lead to severe space storms that interfere with satellite communications and damage electric power transmission grids on Earth."

Looking at the last article, about solar activity, reminded me that I've been wanting to know how the quest for power generation by fusion is going.  Fusion promises to produce power cleanly, with no radioactive waste for disposal or threat of reactor meltdown.  But developing a reactor that produces more energy than it uses has been a problem.

This site ITER  ("The Way" in Latin) gives some very good information about fusion. ITER is an actual device; the demo is being built now. Take a look at the 60 years of progress page:

Steady progress has been made since in fusion devices around the world. The Tore Supra Tokamak that is part of the Cadarache nuclear research centre holds the record for the longest plasma duration time of any tokamak: six minutes and 30 seconds. The Japanese JT-60 achieved the highest value of fusion triple product—density, temperature, confinement time—of any device to date. US fusion installations have reached temperatures of several hundred million degrees Celsius.

 Achievements like these have led fusion science to an exciting threshold: the long sought-after plasma energy breakeven point. Breakeven describes the moment when plasmas in a fusion device release at least as much energy as is required to produce them. Plasma energy breakeven has never been achieved: the current record for energy release is held by JET, which succeeded in generating 70 percent of input power. Scientists have now designed the next-step device—ITER—which will produce more power than it consumes: for 50 MW of input power, 500 MW of output power will be produced.

Fusion research has increased key fusion plasma performance parameters by a factor of 10,000 over 50 years; research is now less than a factor of 10 away from producing the core of a fusion power plant.

-- Marge