candy-striped torus -- General Atomics catches Bob filching images red-handed, and they are Not Happy

Well sure, click.

These are supercomputer simulations/mathematical models of turbulence in plasma (ionized high-temperature gas) inside a magnetic confinement torus or tokamak. They were produced by Jeff Candy and Ron Waltz of General Atomics, San Diego, California, one of the largest defense/military contractors in the USA, and a pioneer in the development of (fission) nuclear power reactors.

Today General Atomics makes the Predator unmanned robot battlefield surveillance aircraft. Recently General Atomics held the record among defense contractors for providing free transportation for members of Congress involved in defense contract appropriations.

So much for the relationship between giant defense contractors and our elected legislators and public officials, and back to the pretty pictures.

Superpowerful magnets confine the charged plasma and keep it from touching the metal walls of the torus.

Torus is a fancy word for doughnut or bagel shape. In ancient Greek times, before the invention of the doughnut or bagel, tore or torus referred to the ring at the end of an anchor to which the anchor rope is tied. The tore/torus has been an object of great interest to mathematicians, geometers and topologists ever since.

If the plasma touches the metal, the consequent decrease in plasma temperature would make the system too cold and not energetic enough for the desired collision of gas nucleii.

Or so it has been explained to me to the pathetic limits of my understanding of such things.

Apparently several research laboratories in the USA and Europe claim to have achieved "energy break-even" with controlled high-temperature plasma fusion in the last few years. Energy break-even means that you get a little more usable (electric) energy out the ass of this rig than you have to put in up front to make the plasma nucleii hot and violent enough to collide and fuse and generate usable energy.

The gas which is heated to its plasma stripped-electron state is hydrogen, or hydrogen enriched with the natural isotope deuterium ("heavy hydrogen"). A hydrogen nucleus has or is just one single proton. A deuterium nucleus has one proton and one neutron.

The super temperatures and gravitational pressures inside stars, which in their early stage consist almost entirely of hydrogen, smash the hydrogen nucleii together to fuse them into helium nucleii. Each collision generates an additional biproduct of electromagnetic energy as heat, light, x-rays, radio waves, etc. Fusion inside our Sun makes the light and heat which make life on Earth possible.

When we do this on Earth, in a very uncontrollable and very brief way, it's a hydrogen or thermonuclear bomb.

Physicists and chemists have been trying to control hydrogen-collision fusion since the early 1950s as a potential source of electric power. The raw material would be abundant and cheap sea water. Unlike fission power reactors (Chernobyl, Windscale, Three Mile Island, etc.), controlled fusion would be almost entirely "clean," and would not produce bio-hazardous radioactivity or long-lived radioactive chemicals and waste products. The controlled fusion cycle does not produce bomb-making biproduct material (plutonium, enriched uranium) for terrorists or bomb-eager nations to divert and buy and sell.

If controlled fusion can be achieved on a large industrial scale, it would commence a profound historical change in Earth's industrial activity, as important a change as the large-scale shift to fossil fuels (at first to generate portable steam power) that sparked the industrial revolution of 18th century Europe and North America.

Large-scale fusion power generation would allow energy-hungry industry to keep expanding, but would immediately address and rectify the global climate changes blamed on industrial-scale burning of fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal). Controlled fusion would, in theory, have no negative effects on the atmospheric carbon cycle.

From where we stand today, controlled fusion is the ultimate Free Lunch -- almost limitless electric power, cheaply produced, with almost no environmentally toxic or damaging "down side."

Although North American, European and Japanese researchers in industry and in government and university labs pursue controlled fusion strenuously, almost nothing in the popular media is written about it. Everyone is afraid to pin too much hope on controlled fusion as a possible Savior of the Environment in the future, because no one yet knows with certainty if it can be made to work on industrial scale. Wind and solar get all the ink because at least we already know they work and are becoming practical now -- though wind and solar have great weaknesses and limitations that keep industry and the consumers of the developed nations addicted to fossil fuels and nuclear fission power generation.

Toroidal confinement plasma fusion experiments require the construction of the strongest magnetic fields on Earth, far stronger than the dangerously strong electromagnets used in modern medical imaging. Both technologies require people to be completely stripped of all ferro-metallic objects, or to stay far away from the intense magnetic fields. These are not refrigerator magnets. I've heard a buzz that these supermagnets are powerful enough to suck the iron atoms out of the blood's hemoglobin molecules, if you're dumb enough to get too close.

These models -- there are also brief computer-generated movies on the Web -- require massive amounts of digital computation on the world's most powerful supercomputers. The behavior of magnetically confined high-temperature plasma is not easy to model mathematically. The phrase "non-linear" crops up ubiquitously. The computer models are necessary to design the actual magnetic confinement toruses and the supermagnets to keep the superheated hot plasma away from contact with the metal surface.

Essentially, these are machines in laboratories on Earth which are designed to reproduce the temperatures and nucleii collision energies inside stars.

Cold Fusion

Don't confuse high-temp plasma fusion research with the "Cold Fusion" bubble and scientific scandal of 1989 (Fleischmann, Pons, Jones). The "inventors" of Cold Fusion claimed they could generate excess fusion energy (neutrons and heat) at ordinary near-room temperatures by a process that relies on chemical catalysis.

Nevertheless, Cold Fusion was a fascinating public story of how educated scientists can hypnotize themselves into believing in Magical Pots of Gold Under Rainbows, and how governments and universities can get caught up in a frenzy of dubiously supported Hope and Fantasy -- a Gold Rush in a university chemistry lab. There's a sucker born every minute, and often the sucker grows up to earn several Ph.D.s in chemistry.

from Wikipedia:

In 1994, Dr. David Goodstein described the field as follows:

"Cold Fusion is a pariah field, cast out by the scientific establishment. Between Cold Fusion and respectable science there is virtually no communication at all. Cold fusion papers are almost never published in refereed scientific journals, with the result that those works don't receive the normal critical scrutiny that science requires. On the other hand, because the Cold-Fusioners see themselves as a community under siege, there is little internal criticism. Experiments and theories tend to be accepted at face value, for fear of providing even more fuel for external critics, if anyone outside the group was bothering to listen. In these circumstances, crackpots flourish, making matters worse for those who believe that there is serious science going on here."

Deuterium pellet sphere / superlaser fusion

Another avenue of research into controlled fusion employs deuterium-rich pellet spheres whose surface, as the sphere falls, is superheated -- zapped -- by a superpowerful precision laser beam. The rest of the process takes place at ordinary Earth temperatures. I haven't kept up with the progress of this avenue of research into Controlled Fusion. The huge sums spent on superpowerful electromagnets in the first approach are instead spent on superpowerful lasers in lasered pellet research.

One way or the other, the road to limitless, non-toxic, non-carbon, cheap electricity has been neither smooth, cheap, swift nor easy.

As always with advanced scientific matters, most of what I've just written is probably fundamentally Wrong and Hopelessly Ignorant. If you know and can demonstrate this with certainty, Vleeptron warmly invites you to please Leave A Comment and set us straight. Try to keep the rude insults to a minimum, the Vleeptron High Non-Junk Science Council is primarily interested in Good Science, not a pissing match between skunks or a flame war.

A few years ago I filched and posted the candy-striped torus image on the old Vleeptron blog just because I thought it was pretty. And interesting. For a few years, I thought nobody noticed and nobody cared.

I was wrong. General Atomics just noticed. And cared. My free-and-easy cavalier web-filching ways have finally caught up with me.

I hope these people don't know where I live. They have Predator unmanned remote-guided aircraft, tied into GPS and Google Earth.