World’s Largest Nuclear Fusion Experiment Clears Milestone The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is under construction in southern France. Credit: Oak Ridge National Laboratory Flickr (CC BY 2.0) "A multination project to build a fusion reactor cleared a milestone yesterday and is now 6 ½ years away from “First Plasma,” officials announced." "The section recently installed—the cryostat base and lower cylinder—paves the way for the installation of the tokamak, the technology design chosen to house the powerful magnetic field that will encase the ultra-hot plasma fusion core." “Manufactured by India, the ITER cryostat is 16,000 cubic meters,” ITER officials said in a release. “Its diameter and height are both almost 30 meters and it weighs 3,850 tons." "Officials say the ITER nuclear fusion reactor is poised to be the most complicated piece of machinery ever built." One must wonder at that last quote: does that fact almost guarantee failure? Controlled fusion schemes have been built and failed numerous times during the past 50+ years. My other concern is: the extreme cost involved to produce electrical energy. Who will be able to afford it? One of the world's largest nuclear power plants, built west of Phoenix when we lived there, wound up costing almost 5 times the projected cost of $4 billion. It's operation has resulted in sharply increased costs passed on to the consumer. Frank See: https://www.scientificamerican.com/...WFUI11lqXeZF9l0xz2oEqJxOYXEwONA05zGhgZiMWWfBE
U.S. did it first. Equal to 10 million tons of TNT; declassified by government. Horrifying. The black building housed it's "guts", which included a compressor plant capable of keeping the fuel, Hydrogen, normally a gas, liquified under very high pressure. It was later learned, Hydrogen need not be used, but instead a compount of Heavy hydrogen, Deuterium, and Lithium was found to work: Lithium Deuteride. Frank "The entire Mike device (including cryogenic equipment) weighed 82 short tons (73.8 metric tonnes), and was housed in a large corrugated-aluminium building called a "shot cab" which was set up on the Pacific island of Elugelab, part of the Enewetak atoll. A 9,000-foot (2.7 km) artificial causeway connected the islands of Elugelab, Teiter, Bogairikk, and Bogon. Atop this causeway was an aluminium-sheathed plywood tube (named a "Krause-Ogle box") filled with helium ballonets. This allowed gamma and neutron radiation to pass uninhibited to an unmanned detection station housed in a bunker on Bogon. The blast created a crater 1.9 km (6,230 ft) in diameter and 50 m (164 ft) deep where Elugelab had once been;[9] the blast and water waves from the explosion (some waves up to 6 m (20 ft) high) stripped the test islands clean of vegetation, as observed by a helicopter survey within 60 minutes after the test, by which time the mushroom cloud and steam were blown away. Radioactive coral debris fell upon ships positioned 56 km (35 mi) away, and the immediate area around the atoll was heavily contaminated for some time. Two new elements, einsteinium and fermium, were produced by intensely concentrated neutron flux about the detonation site." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike#Detonation