New design could finally help to bring fusion power closer to reality

Re:New design could finally help to bring fusion power close... by DennisP on Monday August 10, 2015 @04:55PM (#10037236)

Meanwhile, MIT's fusion program is likely to be shut down soon. Their Alcator C-Mod has the strongest magnetic field of any tokamak in the world, and made a serious breakthrough in tokamak physics several years ago.

I had a chance to visit a couple years ago. A grad student showed us a metal tie, about a meter long, and said they'd calculated that two of them could hold down the Space Shuttle during launch. To hold the reactor together when they switched it on, they needed 38 of them.

They hadn't run the reactor for a year due to funding issues.

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Re:New design could finally help to bring fusion power close... by mikeash on Monday August 10, 2015 @05:22PM (#10037481)

I had to run the numbers on that Space Shuttle thing, just to see. The Space Shuttle weighed about 4.5 million pounds at launch, and had a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.5, meaning there was about 2.25 million pounds of net upward force on it. So each of those metal ties was capable of carrying a bit over a million pounds of load. Neat.

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Re:New design could finally help to bring fusion power close... by dosshell on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @03:07AM (#10039477)

And in Si units about: 500 000 kg (453 592.37)

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Re:New design could finally help to bring fusion power close... by gizmo686 on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @04:03AM (#10039632)

kg is a unit of mass.The Si unit of force is the Newton.

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Re:New design could finally help to bring fusion power close... by richmarr on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @06:45AM (#10040096)

What's the SI unit of pedantry?

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Re:New design could finally help to bring fusion power close... by blackbeard on Tuesday August 11, 2015 @07:40AM (#10040275)

Easier to understand than the American/Imperial one :)

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