Say you’re an ambitious young engineer and you want to tackle some seriously challenging problems. The automotive industry has no money to hire you, and their work on battery-powered cars is mundane and rote anyway. You could work in aerospace, designing the next satellite or Mars rover, but even those challenges are no longer brand new.
How about designing a power system that needs to survive temperatures ten times hotter than the center of the sun?
This is the intimidating challenge facing the scientists and engineers who are blazing a trail in nuclear fusion research. The technical scope and scale of this challenge is as large as the clean energy reward should they ever succeed in their mission.
If you are attracted to high risk and high reward technology, this might be the place to be.
Excerpt:
At a fusion power plant, the fuel needs to be burned on human, not cosmological, timescales. The heavier isotopes deuterium and tritium are a little easier to burn than ordinary hydrogen, but even so, to get a good blaze going inside ITER the temperature will have to be racked up to a hellish 150 million kelvin. That brings a mountain of engineering problems. Not least is how to contain a plasma of electrons and atomic nuclei that is 10 times as hot as the sun’s core.
Even the most hardy of construction materials cannot withstand temperatures of more than a few thousand kelvin. So the solution is to weave a cage for the plasma from magnetic fields.
via Building a second sun: Take $10 billion, add coconuts – tech – 12 October 2009 – New Scientist.
