New Wave of Fusion and Robot Innovation at MIT

An anonymous reader writes "Popular Mechanics has been getting some great access inside the labs at MIT all week, and they've gotten some interesting looks at developing technologies. Robot-assisted rehab with gaming-style controllers comes out of the biomechanics lab, blind and crash-proof UAV testing with F/X cameras is being done at the aerospace controls lab, and work on electric scooters with super-cheap assembly is proceeding at the Media Lab. Perhaps most exciting is a fight for funding while the holy grail of clean fusion power in reach at the plasma center. The article on fusion predicts, "We'd see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century."

Prediction:

Tokamaks will never be cheap, nor efficient.

Inertial gravitational containment [wikipedia.org] is the holy grail.

Inertial electrostatic containment [google.com] is the next best thing.

Re:

http://focusfusion.org/log/index.php [focusfusion.org] may work as well as or better than inertial electrostatic confinement.

Re:The lecture

It's not just him ya know. Pretty-much every fusion researcher on the planet who isn't working on a Tokamak has had their funding dry up. This isn't because Tokamaks are so close to being ready, quite the opposite.

Re:

Well, perhaps it is in part my physics background, but I didn't get that impression at all. It is a brilliant idea, and even if you aren't familiar with Dr. Bussard, the man knows what he is talking about. He was simply old, somewhat bitter, and impatien

20 years...

Yes! Clean, reliable fusion power is only twenty years away...remarkably, this has been the case for over 40 years.

Re:20 years...

Froma researcher's point of view, it's more profitable to have further research. Actually getting things into production would eliminate the chance of pushing the research costs up. Investors would look at it as further research tidying up the details and cleaning up loose ends. It is in their interests never to have a final conclusion. The best answer is to give them a significantly larger budget and a restricted timeline. Give the researchers ten times the budget, lock them in a research facility in North Dakota. Tie the air conditioning and heating to a timer. Each year, reduce the power. Either they build a reactor in the designated time, or suffer the climate. The ultimate in extreme reality shows, where getting kicked off is not a good idea.

Re:

You can see a lot of investment starting to pour into the area of Hydrogen cell powered cars because people have realized the issues we will face shortage come ten years from now.

If anyone had really "realized the issues we will face", they wouldn't have

Re:20 years...

Once we discover a large reservoir of concentrated easy to mine hydrogen it will make sense to have a hydrogen energy economy. Currently, I can't think of many things more idiotic than burning carbon fuels to make energy at low efficiency, which is transmitted at low efficiency to a plant, which is harnessed at low efficiency to make hydrogen, which is transported by a familiar large infrastructure of energy using vehicles, to a station where you can fill up your hydrogen car that can burn the hydrogen at low efficiency. I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of energy being consumed (at the plant) compared to the amount actually usable by the hydrogen car is near 1%. What a fucking waste.

Or we could just cut all that shit and have cars that run at 20-40% efficiency burning carbon fuels.

Re:20 years...

Of course the first generation of clean energy infrastructure will have to be built using dirty energy. But then you use the energy from those sources to build the next generation. Like bootstrapping a compiler on a new system. You have to compile it with the old compiler before you can compile it with itself.

Re:

Obviously when they were researching into Hydrogen fuel cells the one thing on their mind was *Zero Carbon emission*, but the infrastructure is also coming up and once cars start rolling in full scale things will start catching pace.

If you can _make_ all

Hydrogen needs a carrier

Putting compressed/liquified hydrogen in tanks is the stupidest possible way to have a hydrogen powered car. Even with future carbon nanotube tanks (like the space elevator), the energy density is still less than current batteries. Steel tanks are a joke. The energy lost in compressing/liquifying the H2 is ridiculous.

To make hydrogen practical requires a carrier. There has been some experimentation with metal carriers, but by far the most efficient hydrogen carrier, packing in far more hydrogen per unit volume than even liquid H2, is carbon. Amazingly, someone/something long ago put huge deposits of carbon-encapsulated hydrogen in giant underground reservoirs for us to use.

The only problem is, the carbon carrier is *supposed* to be recycled, and we haven't bothered doing that, and instead have just dumped all the hydrogen stripped carbon into the atmosphere as CO2, in quantities large enough to alter the atmospheric CO2 levels to a worrisome extent. As soon as we start recycling the carbon like we're supposed to, hydrogen cars will take off. In fact, the infrastructure is already built!

From TFA...

"And then, there's the inevitable bad news: The first-gen RoboScooter will not be very robotic. The original concept developed by the Media Lab's Smart Cities research group called for wheels that were essentially self-contained robots, with dedicated proc

We don't understand plasmas.

The truth is, we still don't fully understand how plasmas act in the real world. The article alludes to this, by mentioning turbulence and instability. Fluid models and magnetohydrodynamics just aren't detailed enough, and full-blown simulations are far too complex to be of much use on a fusion-reactor scale.

A key concept is "transport". What a fusion reactor requires is to keep heat bottled up. The ions in particular need to be kept hot so that they can fuse. What happens, though, is that heat gets dumped from the ions into the electrons (which are useless for fusion) at a rate which exceeds theoretical predictions -- one of many "anomalous transport" phenomena. (Great phrase, which you may recognize from HL.)

Bottom line: we need to do more research on fundamental plasma physics for fusion. Yet for whatever reason, fusion funding has been dropping for decades.

Funding chart

http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9986&page=87 [nap.edu]

Re:

I thought that was "anomalous materials".

Re:Heat transfer

Most of the energy from DT fusion comes out in the form of fast neutrons. What's envisioned (emphasis on envisioned) is to have a lithium "blanket" surrounding the first reactor wall that will 1) be heated by neutrons 2) breed tritium for the fuel cycle. For bonus points make this a molten lithium system and run it through a heat exchanger. The rest is just a standard balance of plant: steam generator and turbine. Nothing exotic.

The main problem is dealing with all these pesky neutrons. Aneutronic fusion avoids them, but is far more difficult than DT fusion.

FYI

Link directly to the cities.media.mit.edu info/scoot photo... [mit.edu]

Bypassing the ever-silly: /.Soulskill/anonymous(again /.)/PM biz ...enjoy.
-=-=-= -=-=-=

Scooter with ITRI and Sanyang Motors

RoboScooter - Clean, Green Mobility for Today's Crowded Cities

The RoboScooter is a lightweight, folding, electric motor scooter. It is designed to provide convenient, inexpensive mobility in urban areas while radically reducing the negative effects of extensive vehicle use - road congestion, excessive consumption of space for parking, traffic noise, air pollution, carbon emissions that exacerbate global warming, and energy use. It is clean, green, silent, and compact.

People Ryan Chin, PhD Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Yaniv Fain, Sloan School Michael Chia-Liang Lin, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Arthur Petron, Mechanical Engineering Raul-David "Retro" Poblano, MSc Candidate, Smart Cities, Media Lab Andres Sevtsuk, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Urban Studies & Planning

SYM/Sanyang Motors Grand Wu Wan Ching Chang

ITRI Wen-Jean Hsueh Eugene Hsiao Ying-Tzu Lin Barbara Yeh

Scooter? Look China!

You should look China when you are talking about Scooter.

They have a wide selections in Carrefour, or whatever Supermarket.
Price tag: ~1200RMB (150USD). Probably can goes up to 30MPH.

May be not as stylish as the MIT one, but definitely cheap, usable and actually are all over the streets. And there are more scooter than bicycle on the street.

Some models looks just like more than a hack of Bicycle + Motor + Battery pack, but works! Most design with battery pack can be swap out, and can be plugged to the main directly for charging. I have seen the janitor in Office bringing her pack upstair for charging.

It's just cheap!

Re:Fusion power, always 20 years into the future

and what have YOU done about it huh?

Re:Fusion power, always 20 years into the future

I don't know about anyone else, but I asked some nuclear physicists very nicely and they assured me that they would build me one...

... to power the mecha that I asked some robotics and mechatronics guys to build me.

Re:Fusion power, always 20 years into the future

That's a great question!

I worked for two years at General Atomics trying to model and understand the interaction of fusion plasmas with the reactor walls. I've seen people here who have done more.

Like many other people who have worked/are working on fusion, I don't think it's going to be commercially viable this century. The problem is materials. It's simply too expensive to build these things.

Re:

Like many other people who have worked/are working on fusion, I don't think it's going to be commercially viable this century. The problem is materials. It's simply too expensive to build these things.

If the problem is just cost (I know it isn't...), the

Re:fusion energy

I don't know if you can say "always will be" 30 years in the future, but I'll admit it seems that way. I remember the same stories back in the 70's, and yes, we were supposed to be building our first commercial fusion plants right about now.

I have to wonder if other approaches, or a look at possibly some new ones wouldn't be a better idea. It seems that the constant with that 30 years is that it always involves "a bigger tokamak than we have now."

Re:

Saying something like

economically feasible fusion power by 2035

is the equivalent of saying. We have no idea when and if fusion is going to be readily availible, so we are going to estimate a date so far into the future that noone will remember this article if the prediction fails, but not far eno

Re:

Why not Nature? Their News and Views section explains the important papers at a layman's level, and the papers are, of course, the real science uncorrupted by journalism.