Biffer wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 8:51 pm
Wow. That’s fantastic. We might finally be on the route to achieving proper fusion generation.
It feels almost too good to be true. A 22 minute reaction is an amazing result.
Something I follow with great interest. I worked at JET in the early nineties, a 1/2 second pulse was celebrated with champagne in those days!..
The figures were mind blowing, JET was built in Culham as it was close to Harwell, where a lot of the research was being conducted, and 3 miles from Didcot power station. Pre pulse, Didcot would ramp up all 4 turbines to over saturate the network, this still didn't have enough capacity to sustain a pulse without affecting domestic power supply so JET had 2, 5,000 ton flywheels spun up to 3,000 rpm to power the plasma, the network supplied power for the containment field. If left to freewheel, those flywheels would've taken 3 weeks to stop, 2 pulses would've taken them to nearly static.... They were experimenting with twisting the plasma to get more energy in to it then, one day, like an elastic band, they put too much twist in and the plasma beam jumped out of the containment field and hit the top of the Taurus, lifting it by 2mm. Considering plasma has no physical state, it lifted the Taurus (@10,000 tonnes) and the foundations it was set into, was a squeaky bum moment. The double walls were 6ft thick, the roof was tin sheet. If it went bang, it was going up, not out.. Everything metal on site was earthed, in damp weather, the fences around the main power transformers would be arced onto when they pulsed the Taurus...I was there before they started injecting Deuterium so was able to walk inside the Taurus, all fascinating stuff...
Biffer wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 8:51 pm
Wow. That’s fantastic. We might finally be on the route to achieving proper fusion generation.
It feels almost too good to be true. A 22 minute reaction is an amazing result.
Something I follow with great interest. I worked at JET in the early nineties, a 1/2 second pulse was celebrated with champagne in those days!..
The figures were mind blowing, JET was built in Culham as it was close to Harwell, where a lot of the research was being conducted, and 3 miles from Didcot power station. Pre pulse, Didcot would ramp up all 4 turbines to over saturate the network, this still didn't have enough capacity to sustain a pulse without affecting domestic power supply so JET had 2, 5,000 ton flywheels spun up to 3,000 rpm to power the plasma, the network supplied power for the containment field. If left to freewheel, those flywheels would've taken 3 weeks to stop, 2 pulses would've taken them to nearly static.... They were experimenting with twisting the plasma to get more energy in to it then, one day, like an elastic band, they put too much twist in and the plasma beam jumped out of the containment field and hit the top of the Taurus, lifting it by 2mm. Considering plasma has no physical state, it lifted the Taurus (@10,000 tonnes) and the foundations it was set into, was a squeaky bum moment. The double walls were 6ft thick, the roof was tin sheet. If it went bang, it was going up, not out.. Everything metal on site was earthed, in damp weather, the fences around the main power transformers would be arced onto when they pulsed the Taurus...I was there before they started injecting Deuterium so was able to walk inside the Taurus, all fascinating stuff...
I was in a few years back when they were working on the Torus for the final runs of the JET reactor. We could see inside from a distance because they were working on it. Really cool.
Harwell are starting to build a 20 petawatt laser to do the kind of nuclear ignition experiments they’ve been doing at Lawrence Livermore in the USA. The current petawatt laser has more energy in its billionth of a second pulses than the entire UK electricity network.
And contracts are being awarded for building STEP in Nottinghamshire as we speak.
Biffer wrote: Wed Feb 19, 2025 8:51 pm
Wow. That’s fantastic. We might finally be on the route to achieving proper fusion generation.
It feels almost too good to be true. A 22 minute reaction is an amazing result.
Something I follow with great interest. I worked at JET in the early nineties, a 1/2 second pulse was celebrated with champagne in those days!..
The figures were mind blowing, JET was built in Culham as it was close to Harwell, where a lot of the research was being conducted, and 3 miles from Didcot power station. Pre pulse, Didcot would ramp up all 4 turbines to over saturate the network, this still didn't have enough capacity to sustain a pulse without affecting domestic power supply so JET had 2, 5,000 ton flywheels spun up to 3,000 rpm to power the plasma, the network supplied power for the containment field. If left to freewheel, those flywheels would've taken 3 weeks to stop, 2 pulses would've taken them to nearly static.... They were experimenting with twisting the plasma to get more energy in to it then, one day, like an elastic band, they put too much twist in and the plasma beam jumped out of the containment field and hit the top of the Taurus, lifting it by 2mm. Considering plasma has no physical state, it lifted the Taurus (@10,000 tonnes) and the foundations it was set into, was a squeaky bum moment. The double walls were 6ft thick, the roof was tin sheet. If it went bang, it was going up, not out.. Everything metal on site was earthed, in damp weather, the fences around the main power transformers would be arced onto when they pulsed the Taurus...I was there before they started injecting Deuterium so was able to walk inside the Taurus, all fascinating stuff...
It's well outside my expertise, but it never ceases to amaze me just how massive the forces of nature are, and how tiny we are in comparison.
I worked on gas turbines that were braked under full engine testing by generators wired into the national grid, and I thought these were huge. They're just miniscule - utterly insignificant - compared to scale and the magnitudes of forces and power involved in some of these fundamental science facilities.
Awesome anecdotes btw
Re: The science is cool thread
Posted: Thu Feb 20, 2025 9:42 pm
by fishfoodie
TB63 wrote: Thu Feb 20, 2025 1:20 am
They were experimenting with twisting the plasma to get more energy in to it then, one day, like an elastic band, they put too much twist in and the plasma beam jumped out of the containment field and hit the top of the Taurus, lifting it by 2mm.
Yikes ! That's a lot of gas volume, or it changed direction very, very quickly !
In my 1st job I was working with semiconductor plasma etchers, & they used a fairly simple gas mix, even if the proportions seemed to be purely empirical, to the point where the Lead Engineer would look in the view port in the chamber & say, (in broad Govan Glaswegian), "Aye, she looks right !"
I once asked what percentage of the etch was chemical, & what was down to big charged atoms banging into the metal & blasting it into the plasma, & all I got was a few guesses, but plasma physics is just one of those fields where you aren't going to learn much from books, you need lots & lots of experience & experimentation.
Part of todays was a scientist talking about what they're hoping to learn from one of the Sun probes, & when the host asked the why this kind of science is important, apart from understanding the impact of the Suns "weather" on our technology, communications & electric grids, she mentioned that it gives us an insight on plasma dynamics at a level far beyond what we can experiment with on Earth.
The next segment was a scientist explaining some new research on Dopamines & aggression, which was also really interesting.
"After launching on 10 June the trophy will make its way to the Scottish border for a five-day journey through Scotland. From Scotland, the trophy will travel to Belfast and spend five days in Northern Ireland and five days in the Republic of Ireland, finishing in Dublin and crossing the Irish Sea to Holyhead in Wales. Ten days in Wales will include visits to host city Cardiff and the Millennium Stadium before the trophy returns to England for the final 75-day countdown to Rugby World Cup 2015."
From Google AI
"The probability of something that has already happened is 100% or 1. Once an event has occurred, it's a certainty, and there's no longer a probabilistic question about whether it will happen. "
Uncle fester wrote: Sat May 10, 2025 7:42 am
Kosmos 482 should be crash landing soon enough.
It wasn’t on radar when it should have passed over Germany this morning at 0732 UT so presumably it’s already come down in the ocean. It was on radar as it went over at 0430 and 0604 so it came down at some point between 0604 and 0732 UT. If it had hit anything big we’d have heard about it by now..
Uncle fester wrote: Sat May 10, 2025 7:42 am
Kosmos 482 should be crash landing soon enough.
It wasn’t on radar when it should have passed over Germany this morning at 0732 UT so presumably it’s already come down in the ocean. It was on radar as it went over at 0430 and 0604 so it came down at some point between 0604 and 0732 UT. If it had hit anything big we’d have heard about it by now..
Shame. My young fellow was all excited about having a crater in our back garden.
That's a lot of gas volume, or it changed direction very, very quickly ! 
