Fusion power, still the king of power?

[russ_watters]

Correction: we do not know any other way to make it work currently. Fusion was though to be like that at some point.

I'm not sure this is true. With fusion it has essentially always been known (since discovery) that if you bring two nuclei together, they will fuse. There are several methods, with only gravitational collapse known in nature, but I doubt anyone ever doubted you could do it with an explosion, considering how short it went from nothing to a working device.

Gravitational collapse energy harnessing, by name, requires gravitational collapse. And while it may be possible to create a black hole with a supercollider, I'm not sure that counts as "gravitational collapse" and it is an exothermic process, so I see no reason to believe such a [vaguely described] device would be a primary source and not a battery.

 

[Bob 1i1]

Sorry @mfb: I understand... and appreciate your answer, thanks.

 

[anorlunda]

You can watch real time data, not just averages here http://www.nyiso.com/public/markets_operations/market_data/graphs/index.jsp
for New York State & NYC. The daily variation, spikes, and deviation between actual and forecast (dotted line) are all shown. Here's a shot of the most current data, Those little wiggles around 1510-1540 are probably related to cooking Thanksgiving dinner.

As far as grid operators "taking spikes into account", we do not plan for those brief spikes in advance. It's pretty futile. The magnitude of load change in Manhattan due to a TV event is smaller than the change of load when a cloud passes overhead on a sunny day. We certainly can't predict individual clouds. Rather, the automatic generation control (AGC) reacts to them. See the PF Insights Article What Happens When You Flip the Light Switch? for an explanation of how we react.

We do plan for weather events. For example, if severe thunderstorms are forecast for tomorrow afternoon, we increase the power reserve margins and reduce the quantity of energy transmitted long distances. Weather forecasts, plus historical records form the basis of the load forecast.

 

[GTrax]

Can someone please describe in more technical details the thermometry equipment used to measure ultra high temperatures, in the range of 20 Million degrees Celsius and higher - some fundamental math would be also much appreciated, or perhaps direct me to a more technical literature, I wasn't able to find much on the subject online, thank you in advance, Cheers!

Bob has such a good question, and I hoped there would be some answers.

Lacking that, I speculate, in the full knowledge that whatever I think of could easily be shown as neophyte musings among the more experienced engineering folk, but anyway..
20 million degrees is going to be bright! Even so, the kit that records it need not suffer much, and the fact we can find YouTube and other videos of tokomak plasmas up to 100 million K means that the first surface window, likely at some distance away, for the path to the camera (quartz or something) did not melt.

Pyrometry of a high order perhaps. I think maybe a highly attenuated sample, contrived via a low efficiency reflection, perhaps with wavelength specific dichroic filters, maybe throw in neutral density filters, finally arriving at a semiconductor-based or other bolometer, just might do it.

We already have low-cost radiation-based temperature measuring devices available right now. I have one I use for indicating the temperature of heat-sinks. These measure infra-red, but other wavelengths can be sensed with similar technology. One can find robust UV and X-ray photodiode sensors using silicon or silicon carbide.

Regrettably, I cannot provide any fundamental math, but I think the technologies are mature enough to to find some, likely also on this site.
Wikipedia has lots of references for photodiode.

 

[BWV]

Well probably 95% of all power used by humans comes from fusion, so it is the most important current energy source

 

[mfb]

@GTrax: Did you see post #29?

Just measuring the brightness, especially in the infrared, is problematic as a fusion plasma is not necessarily opaque in the infrared range.
And I still think this is off-topic here.