
A Star in a Bottle - numlocked
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all
======
jackgavigan
As a child, I read _Friday_ by Robert A Heinlein, which portrayed a future in
which energy needs are addressed by energy storage devices called
"Shipstones", which are described as _a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a
smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of.
To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like
calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker."_

In the novel, the Shipstone's eponymous inventor realised _" that the problem
was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is
everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients
of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in
green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is
free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension._

 _" Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did
not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was
a bucket in which to carry it."_

Ever since then, I've been far more interested in new methods of _storing_ and
_transporting_ energy than in new methods of _generating_ energy.

Also, what happens if the mechanisms that contain the "Star in a Bottle" fail?
Will the French Alps suddenly and catastrophically acquire a new valley?

~~~
sbierwagen

      Also, what happens if the mechanisms that contain the "Star 
      in a Bottle" fail? Will the French Alps suddenly and 
      catastrophically acquire a new valley?
    

This is a reasonable concern, but your intuitions on the physical processes
involved are off by a couple orders of magnitude.

From a previous comment on another fusion story, two years ago:
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839722](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2839722)

    
    
      Fusion reactors are fundamentally different from fission 
      reactors. You have to get a tenuous wisp of hydrogen (the 
      reactor in this particular experiment was running at 10 
      mTorr, or 0.0013% atmospheric pressure) very, very hot, and 
      keep it away from solid matter, which is millions of 
      degrees of colder than the fuel plasma, and will suck all 
      of the energy out of the reaction.
    
      You shut off the containment coils, and tremendously hot 
      plasma ions leap away from each other, instantly stopping 
      the reaction. If the reaction somehow "runs away", which it 
      absolutely can't, then it brushes the walls of the vacuum 
      chamber, poisoning it with cold metal ions, like injecting 
      lead shavings that have been chilled to absolute zero 
      directly into your heart.
    
      If our magical "runaway reaction" somehow overcomes this, 
      and melts a hole in the vacuum chamber, then the atmosphere 
      rushes in, both freezing cold and at intolerably high 
      pressure, like the North Sea flooding into the hull of a 
      submarine resting on the ocean floor.
    
      Fusion reactors don't melt down, or explode. At all. It 
      just can't happen, much like how a Yugo rear-ending a 
      garbage truck in Brooklyn doesn't instantly consume all of 
      New York City in a gasoline fireball.

~~~
bicknergseng
"a Yugo rear-ending a garbage truck in Brooklyn doesn't instantly consume all
of New York City in a gasoline fireball."

My new favorite metaphor.

~~~
jackgavigan
I'd just like to point out that the Yugo metaphor is invalid because the
article specifically states that the experiment involves "beams of uncharged
particles — the energy in them so great it could vaporize a car in seconds".

So there.

~~~
polarix
Similarly, the YUGO (825kg curb weight) contains about 7.4e19 joules of
energy, when converted purely.

Which comes out to 17.7 billion tons of tnt, or 1.1 million times the force
unleashed on Hiroshima.

If we're being pedantic.

~~~
jackgavigan
How much energy is there in a Ferrari?

~~~
bicknergseng
1735 kilograms (Ferrari California curb weight) * (the speed of light^2) =
1.55934024 × 1020 joules

~~~
jackgavigan
How many Hiroshimas is that?

~~~
dredmorbius
Well, that turns out to be a unit of energy which GNU unit (my favorite shell
utility) doesn't have, nor does it have kilotons (or tons) of TNT).

However I've found a calculator that does do kilotons of TNT:

[http://lectureonline.cl.msu.edu/~mmp/conversions/conv_energy...](http://lectureonline.cl.msu.edu/~mmp/conversions/conv_energy.htm)

So one Ferrari is 37.13 * 10^6 kilotons. Hiroshima was 15 kt, so one Ferrari
contains the energy released in 2,475,333.3 Hiroshima atomic bombs.

And for reference, 1 kilotonTNT is:

4.200e+12 joule

1.003e+12 calorie

1.003e+9 kilocalorie

At 3600 kcal/lb fat, one kilotonTNT is equivalent to 278,611.11 lb of fat.
Which is to say, if everyone (313 million people) in the US lost 1/5 of an
ounce each, the energy released would be equivalent to one Hiroshima bomb.

3.978e+9 BTU

1,167 MWh, or 1.2 GWh. Roughly the energy a large generating plant produces in
an hour. Which is to say that the _time_ over which you release energy
matters.

And you've also inspired me to figure out how to add my own units definitions,
so now I have kttnt:

686 barrels of oil, almost exactly 100 tons of oil, 1.16 GWh, 143 toncoal, 154
tons of charcoal, or about 51 grams of pure uranium.

And checking: 100 tons / 51 grams is 1,778,793, which is to say, atomic energy
has roughly 1 million times the energy storage density of our best chemical
energy sources.

You'll note that 100 tons of oil is a lot less than a kiloton (1000 tons) of
TNT. Turns out that what makes TNT so special _isn 't_ its energy _content_
but the _rate of release_ of that energy. Oil (or aviation fuel as the
occupants of 120 Cortlandt St., NYC, discovered a few years back) has about 10
times the energy content of explosives, it just delivers it over a longer
period of time.

------
benjamta
My father worked on the ITER project for many years. This article goes some
way to express the shear scale of this project, it's absolutely vast.

When I was a lot younger I was taken on a tour of JET
([http://www.efda.org/jet/](http://www.efda.org/jet/)) and was overawed with
the size of it. ITER is an order of magnitude bigger.

The machine that follows ITER is where things get really interesting. Called
DEMO, it's still in the planning phase - but will provide a template for
future commercial fusion power generation. They're talking about possibly
putting fusion generated power into the grid by 2040. Truly exciting stuff.

~~~
XorNot
My favorite memory of being in France a half year back was visiting the ITER
site. Partly because we misjudged how to get there and trekked 3km up the
highway from the bus stop in the middle of nowhere to get to it.

It was still just a hole in the ground then - they were getting ready to put
in the seismic dampeners for the base layer of the Tokamak structure. Since
then I've had it liked on Facebook so I can see the progress bit by bit.

~~~
benjamta
It's fascinating seeing it progress (albeit from afar), true cathedral scale
engineering.

~~~
parasight
I can't seem to find any current pictures using Google. Can someone provide a
link or is it prohibited to take pictures of the construction site.

~~~
tim333
[https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/img_galleries/rebar...](https://www.iter.org/doc/all/content/com/img_galleries/rebar_2_3a_full_view.jpg)

------
slacka
It's crazy that the US blew over 4 Trillion and countless lives for oil in
Iraq. Yet, we spend practically nothing on technology that could offer clean,
safe, energy independence.

I'm happy to see any money going into fusion research, but it does seem that
Focus Fusion has a much better chance of delivering in the near term. If
you're unfamiliar with the technology, check out the Google tech talk below.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-
VxJWpg](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhKB-VxJWpg)

~~~
Zikes
We didn't go to Iraq for oil, we went there so that more of our own money
could be funneled from government coffers into politicians' bank accounts by
way of defense contracts.

~~~
scarmig
Even that goes too far.

We're terrified of the fact that we live in an arational, incomprehensible
world. It's a comforting fiction that some large conspiracy controls
everything for the benefit of itself at the expense of everyone else, because
at least that admits the possibility of control. And if societies can be
controlled, at least in principle they can be fixed.

Much scarier is the idea that power stumbles blindly around like a drunken
three legged elephant, arbitrarily murdering half a million people for no
coherent reason beyond, well, why not?

~~~
byerley
Perhaps scarier and more accurate is the idea that it's done for a very good
reason, but that we lack the context/intelligence to understand it as
individuals. No one wants to be the organism in a superorganism.

~~~
tripzilch
Seriously. The regular and systematic murder and disposal of countless
innocent intestinal flora, sometimes bordering on genocide, is considered
healthy and even joke-worthy by some of us superorganisms.

------
ryanklee
> will stand a hundred feet tall, and it will weigh twenty-three thousand
> tons—more than twice the weight of the Eiffel Tower.

This is a strange sentence.

    
    
      (1) Notice Height of object-A; 
      (2) Notice Weight of object-A; 
      (3) Compare Weight of object-A to Weight of object-B
          where object-B is known more for its property of  
          Height than of its Weight.
    

The sense here (I think) is that the Eiffel tower is significantly taller than
than ITER, and therefore ought to be significantly heavier. But it's not! ITER
is heavier, and heavier by a lot. Go figure!

But what a silly line of reasoning. Is it a common conclusion that taller
things should also be heavier things?

Further, this seems to me to be of the same breed as "bigger than the state of
Rhode Island"-type of arbitrary comparisons -- only in this instance more
confusing!

~~~
leoedin
The article's full of fairly silly elaborate descriptions. My favourite so far
(3 pages in):

> Some in the field believe that a working machine would be a monument to
> human achievement surpassing the pyramids of Giza.

Which suggests that the pyramids of Giza are a monument of human achievement
that hasn't yet been surpassed. You only need to take a look at almost any
20th century bridge, skyscraper or even ship to know that that isn't really
true. Certainly the pyramids of Giza are a monument of ancient Egyptian
achievement, but the last few centuries have completely and utterly surpassed
that.

~~~
lloeki
> the pyramids of Giza are a monument of human achievement that hasn't yet
> been surpassed.

> [...] the last few centuries have completely and utterly surpassed that

In terms of what they were built for, that is travel through time mostly
unharmed for several thousands of years, a literal vessel of eternity, this
claim is undebatably false. Few things we have built in the last two centuries
will survive more than a decade if left unattended, and even fewer more than a
century. It takes but a trip to Normandy to see german bunkers getting
swallowed by nature. The smarter we get, the less durable we build things: we
split atoms, we flick electrons and we land proxy explorers on nearby
celestial bodies but our grandeur is a delusion and nothing will remain should
our kin be obliterated. The testament of mankind that are such incredible
buildings can only be surpassed by moving our butt out of this rock and
sustain a decent living on the next one, ensuring our species survival. Any
technological achievement is but a bullet point towards that goal.

~~~
dragonwriter
> It takes but a trip to Normandy to see german bunkers getting swallowed by
> nature.

Or, especially for the SF Bay Area crowd, you could go to the Marin headlands
and see US bunkers from the same era -- intended to defend against Japanese
attack -- doing the same thing. Shorter trip.

~~~
mc32
We didn't expect the Japanese to wage a centuries-long war with us. They were
made with a shortish fixed lifespan in mind. This is why they appear in
disrepair. I imagine the Germans had the same calculus when they built theirs.
But, yes, a they're good examples of things reverting to nature, slowly.

------
habosa
Hate to be that guy, but how can a star in a bottle cost only ~105% of
WhatsApp. One of them is incorrectly valued.

~~~
chaz
One is a cost, the other is a valuation -- two completely different things. A
ditch can cost a million dollars to dig, but have a ~$0 valuation.

~~~
habosa
True, but on the other I hand it's simpler to say that I need $20B to buy
ITER, $19B to buy WhatsApp, and $11B to buy the LHC. One of those things is
not like the other.

I totally understand that I am cherry-picking here. There are many things in
the world that are over- or under-valued when you compare their economic
contribution to their societal contribution. I just thought this would be an
interesting point to make on Hacker News.

~~~
chaz
> I need $20B to buy ITER, $19B to buy WhatsApp, and $11B to buy the LHC

No, you could say that it would cost you $20B to _build_ a copy of ITER --
very different. You can't buy ITER for what was paid to build it. Or maybe you
can. We have no idea because the valuation is unknown. The project is so
risky, we're spreading the cost around 35 countries. If we thought it was more
of a sure thing, every country would be trying to build their own. Many
companies, too.

~~~
BigTuna
The valuation is so unknown that the project has its own currency: the ITER
unit of account. True, that was done because 3 dozen countries with their own
(mostly) separate currencies are collaborating on the same project, but it
makes for a nice excuse. :)

------
ck2
Check this out, Japan is going their own way instead of this experiment

 _According to researchers at a demonstration reactor in Japan, a fusion
generator should be feasible in the 2030s and no later than the 2050s. Japan
is pursuing its own research program with several operational facilities that
are exploring several fusion paths._

[http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/45/2/004](http://iopscience.iop.org/0029-5515/45/2/004)

Also, they are already planning the successor to ITER, a commercial plant
called DEMO

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEMO)

~~~
marze
You can get the date fusion power will become feasible by adding 30 years to
the current year. Been holding steady at 30 for quite some time.

~~~
ck2
Well I get that logic but this time they are putting some serious money where
their mouths are.

Even the USA/Russians could not come to an agreement to build such a project.

------
geetee
_No one knows iter’s true cost, which may be incalculable, but estimates have
been rising steadily, and a conservative figure rests at twenty billion
dollars—a sum that makes iter the most expensive scientific instrument on
Earth._

And WhatsApp cost how much?

------
ximeng
I wonder if a more open design approach would help them to build trust,
increase quality and reduce expense. Rather than the team doing all the work
themselves they could open up more data to outsiders to look at and spend more
of their time on management. See italic points below. The more of the article
I read, the more it sounds like by sharing information openly they could save
massively.

" As the meeting ended, he noted that there was not enough time to vet the
components that occupy the third floor: plans had to be gathered,
specifications brought up to date, problems reconciled. “It is not
reasonable,” he said. “It means that we would need to _process thousands of
data points in three weeks_.” Chiocchio asked if things would speed up after
early floors were finished, but there were simply too many details to work
through before delivering drawings to the contractor. “We have no more float,”
Cordier said. “If we delay now, we will have a real delay. The only way to
avoid a schedule loss is to increase our resources to cope with it.”

That afternoon, Chiocchio joined me for lunch. He seemed exhausted. iter, by
the time it is finished, _will contain ten million individual parts, but he
had only twenty-eight people working for him_. He later showed me a room near
his office where three men sit at workstations every day to hunt down
conflicts. Before each man, there was the huge iter puzzle in miniature,
filling up two computer screens. Up close, the design looked as though someone
had taken the industrial landscape that runs alongside the New Jersey Turnpike
and compressed it into a cube the volume of a Holiday Inn. “We have to check
everything, from clashes to interfaces—like here,” one of the men said,
pointing to a schematic where a support structure for the tokamak was not
lining up with an embedment plate."

------
Flammy
Obviously the tech is really awesome, but I was curious how the projected
power level compares (500 megawatts)

Comparison to existing powerplants:
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+megawatts](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+megawatts)

TL;DR: We already have significantly bigger plants. ('average' coal and
nuclear plant produces about twice as much power)

~~~
pilom
For those curious, the Three Gorges Dam in China is the largest powerplant in
the world and has a maximum power rating of 22,500 MW (22.5 GW).

~~~
cwal37
To be fair, Three Gorges (like any large hydro) is comprised of many turbines,
32 700MW turbines in this case.

To counter, the biggest nuclear power plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa, has 7
generating units which are each above 1 GW. Two of those units are at ~1.3GW,
nearly double a Three Gorges turbine.

For more perspective, the smallest nuke in the States is Fort Calhoun which
has a single reactor at 502MW.

------
lquist
I am awestruck by ITER. This is the reason that I am in this field.

------
transfire
ITER is a money hole. It was setup to suck R&D money away from real fusion
research.

~~~
tfgg
While I do think that alternative fusion paths should be better funded, cranks
aside, I don't think that it's the fault of ITER that it's the most promising
and best developed and so the best funded one. The entire field is
ridiculously underfunded for what it can offer and we shouldn't be having to
risk it all on one or two projects.

~~~
antimagic
Exactly. This article just makes me mad - they are penny-pinching on quite
simply the most important piece of technology that humanity has ever tried to
develop. If commercial reactors are switched on by 2040, the planet's CO2
output will have dropped drastically by 2060 - way more than all but the most
optimistic estimations linked to climate change.

$10b is nothing compared to what was destroyed in the GFC. It's nothing
compared to what the US spent on a largely futile war in Iraq. It is nothing
compared to what G8 governments spend every year on defence. FFS, damages from
_Hurricane Sandy_ are estimated at twice that figure. It's peanuts.

Somewhere along the line, the message that this is R&D, and not science has
been lost. Politicians honestly seem to think that this is another of those
toys that scientists are always wanting to build, and not the solution to the
world's energy problems. Dear politicians - no, this is not another space
telescope. It's not even another LHC. It is nothing more or less than the one
technology that can save the planet from the worst ravages of climate change,
and they quibble about the cost. Madness.

~~~
DanBC
> Politicians honestly seem to think

I am not making an anti-American point here. UK politics has equally daft
politicians. But politics is full of people like this:

[http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=87390](http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=87390)

> "Wind is God's way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from
> areas where it's hotter to areas where it's cooler. That's what wind is.
> Wouldn't it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated
> massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the
> winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I'm not saying
> that's going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on
> the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you
> can't transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It's just something to think
> about."

[http://imgur.com/gallery/JPoWLEx](http://imgur.com/gallery/JPoWLEx)

------
pandler
I hate for my only comment on this fascinating piece to be largely irrelevant,
but has anyone else noticed that the publication date is March 3, 2014? It's
only the 25th of February.

------
mindbet
I read this article, and I couldn't help thinking — Couldn't they spend these
billions on something like deep geothermal energy and get a much better (and
more likely) return?

~~~
vilhelm_s
One good resource for this kind of question is David MacKay's book
"Sustainably Energy - Without the Hot Air" (free online:
[http://www.withouthotair.com/](http://www.withouthotair.com/)). He goes
through each type of sustainable energy source and estimates how much power it
can provide.

At least in the UK, the total potential for geothermal energy is quite small,
much less than other sources such as wind and solar. But its a nice short-term
supplement, we can construct them today.

Having working fusion would be an amazing thing. The raw materials (lithium
and deuterium) are plentiful enough that they will basically never run out, it
would provide energy forever.

------
scotty79
Is it harder to build smaller tokamak? And if so, why?

~~~
femto
[http://www.efda.org/faq/i-would-think-that-iter-would-
requir...](http://www.efda.org/faq/i-would-think-that-iter-would-require-a-
substantial-amount-more-power-to-produce-the-plasma-than-jet-if-you-were-to-
create-a-smaller-reactor-you-would-need-less-energy-to-run-it-thus-allowing-
for-it/)

------
rubicks
"Big machines either work as they’re supposed to or they don’t."

Anyone else struck by the wildly reductionist sentiment in that statement?

------
ck2
_a cryogenics plant, which will produce liquid helium_

Wait, they are manufacturing helium? Thought that wasn't possible?

Or just converting gas to liquid?

~~~
pilom
Helium exists in 2 parts of this plant. In the plasma toroid (the hot part)
hydrogen will be converted into helium but in incredibly small quantities (X
grams/hour).

In the electromagnets, there will be liquid helium. This is to keep the wires
in the electromagnets cold enough to be superconducting. This liquid helium is
mined from the earth and then cooled to a liquid in the cryogenics plant.

So overall, they are "manufacturing" cryogenically-cooled-helium by taking
helium from the ground and cooling it. They are also "manufacturing" helium
atoms at a very small quantities by fusing hydrogen atoms together.

~~~
Grue3
Then isn't the process limited by the amount of helium on Earth (which is
pretty low)? Once all liquid helium evaporates the reactor wouldn't be able to
produce enough helium to replace it.

------
qntmfred
_the technology could solve the world’s energy problems for the next thirty
million years_

oh, ok

~~~
drjesusphd
What's wrong with the claim? It's only dependent on getting the D-D fusion
reaction burning (which we're still a long way off).

Second only to matter/antimatter annihilation, nuclear fusion is the most
energy-dense process in the universe. And the fuel consists of about 0.03% of
the world's oceans.

~~~
qntmfred
i wasn't aware that we had any accurate projections of the world's energy
needs 30 million years from now

~~~
drjesusphd
Of course we don't. A more accurate statement is that it would supply the
world's _present_ energy needs for 30 millions years.

------
happyscrappy
Single page:

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/03/140303fa_fact_khatchadourian?currentPage=all)

------
monsterix
> No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter.

I am not sure about this one comment in the article submitted by OP. As far as
I understand the temperature at the center of the earth should be as high as
that of the Sun. The core is known to be the heaviest and hottest part of our
planet.

~~~
dragonwriter
> > No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter.

> I am not sure about this one comment in the article submitted by OP. As far
> as I understand the temperature at the center of the earth should be as high
> as that of the Sun.

I think the most recent estimates have the core temperature of the Earth at
about the _surface_ temperature of the Sun, plus or minus a few hundred
kelvin. (In the neighborhood of 6000K)

The _core_ temperature of the sun, and the temperatures expected in the
reactor described, are several orders of magnitude hotter, on the order of
10^7 K.

------
EGreg
Decades from now? Well I hope they build the prototype in space then, and far
far away. I don't want that heat escaping...

~~~
EGreg
Heat radiation is hard to trap. In fact, we use it in nuclear reactors to boil
water, which should in theory let even more heat escape due to the second law
of thermodynamics.

Yes, a vacuum may stop convection but heat can escape through radiation. What
then? That's why I would want this thing so far away that the angular
projection of the Earth onto it is small.

------
tonetheman
And zombies will come out of it and we will all die... or they will switch it
on and we will instantly turn into a star. :)

------
ck2
LHC didn't make me nervous and I laughed somewhat at the people who sued to
keep it off for fear it might end the world.

This one however, I dunno. Sounds like things could go wrong with that much
energy. When they made the first atomic bomb, they had theories about what
might happen but not 100% sure and there were some surprises.

But I'll take death from this over death from fracking.

~~~
aqme28
It's actually a lot less energy than it sounds like. The temperatures will hit
10-100 times the temperature of the sun, but the density inside will be very
very low. This thing couldn't vaporize a car.

Remember, this is only a 500 megawatt device, and the reaction is so unstable
that if it somehow escapes the containment of the device it dies instantly. It
can't "run away" like some fission reactions can.

edit: Not actually sure how much energy it takes to "vaporize a car in
seconds." In terms of energy this thing is roughly equivalent to any other
fairly large power plant.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> but the density inside will be very very low

The density is not that low, but the total amount of ultra-hot matter is
pretty small. If magnetic confinement is lost, the plasma will expand and
cool; there is no sustained fusion without the confinement. The core would
probably be wrecked, but that's about it.

~~~
aqme28
_" The density is not that low, but the total amount of ultra-hot matter is
pretty small."_

I'm sorry but I don't understand the distinction.

~~~
dragonwriter
> I'm sorry but I don't understand the distinction.

While its contained, the density is not that low; if it loses containment, the
density will _become_ low as it expands. At least, that's my understanding of
the distinction here.

~~~
aqme28
It's more about containing it within the walls of the container than within a
very small subsection of the container. The whole thing will be at a pretty
serious vacuum throughout operation.

I should probably disclaim: I worked on a Tokamak in undergrad.

