DEEP UNDERGROUND MILITARY BASES
(DUMB BASES)
In the U.S., approximately 140 of these DUMB bases exist, and they employ perhaps over 200,000 people. A geologist friend of this author who helped build these DUMB bases, gave his life to get the truth out to the American people.
He was a programmed multiple of the Illuminati, and some of his alters knew it. Because these underground bases play such a vital role in the entire mind-control NETWORK, I will list these bases here, even though they have been given previously in - my Ezek. 6:3 book. DUMB (Deep Underground Military Bases)
SELECTED TOP SECRET UNDERGROUND INSTALLATIONS THAT THREATEN OUR LIBERTY
140 secret underground facilities have been built, many are underground small-cities. A number of these bases have been described to me by witnesses including NORAD, Dulce, Coos Bay, and Dreamland. What I am describing is a series of large underground facilities which are connected with tunnels. The tunnels carry extremely fast trains. Train terminals are up to 1 million sq. ft. in area, with multiple levels.
Underground facilities contain computer centers, genetic experimentation, mind-control research, housing for several nationalities of humans and several varieties of aliens. The corporations which assist the NWO are able to quietly interlink their facilities via the tunnel system too, as well as disperse some of their workers into the world above ground.
There are approx. 50 ways tunnels and underground facilities are dug, which include high pressure continuous water let, low pressure percussive water jet, high freq. electrical drill, turbine drills, pellet drills, spark drills, explosives, hydraulic rock hammers, lasers, electron beam guns, forced flames, etc. These various tunnelling methods can be broken down in:
*
Mechanical (such as a water canon)
*
Thermal (such as a high velocity flame, laser, atomic fusion, etc)
*
Chemical (such as a dissolver)
The beautiful thing about nuclear subterrenes (rhymes with submarine) is that they don’t leave any debris to dispose of.
These nuclear subterrenes are building tunnels 40’ in diameter, and as these machines work the rock is melted into a hard, glassy tunnel lining. Air-intake shafts bring fresh air to the tunnels and underground facilities. Underground facilities have fuel storage units, air-conditioning, water reservoirs, dining, medical, sleeping and storage units. Many of the underground sites are close to railroads and have entrances that trucks can drive into. Some of the entrances for trucks are protected by holograms that look like the side of a mountain, but allow vehicles if one just drives through them.
The other style of hidden entrances are buildings where trucks drive in and are lowered via access shafts down into the underground areas. Security for some (such as Groom Lake) of the facilities is maintained by Wackenhut. Penetration tests on facilities are carried out by a special unit called OP-06-D which are HQed at Off utt AFB, NE.
Format is as follows:
*
site name
*
site location (warning: longitudes & latitudes were quick off of the head estimates)
*
group/groups in control
*
size
*
activity
ARIZONA
· 1. Fort Huachuca. 31°50’ N 1100 19’48" W, saucer base below, intelligence training above, mind-control incl. too.
· 2. Gates Pass Base
· 3. Gila Mountain Area, south of Interstate 8 and approx. 30 east of Yuma, AZ. 290 N 116ºW. DUM base.
· 4. Grand Wash Cliffs, on western edge of the cliffs at the head of Grapevine Wash. Must be reach via hwy 93 and then unpaved roads. DUM base.
· 5. Green Valley
· 6. Hualapai Mountains, east side of the mountain range, about 35 mi. SE of Kingman, AZ
· 7. Rincon Mtn., north side of Rincon Mtn
· 8. Mt. Lemmon
· 9. Page
· 10. Safford, near Safford
· 11. Santa Catalina Mountains - base
ARKANSAS
· 12. In the vicinity of Hardy and Cherokee Village. 360 19’ N 9°29’W W. Installation purpose not known.
· 13. Pine Bluff, Ark. area. 34° 13.4’ N 92º01.0’W to 34º30’ N 92° 30’W. saucer base.
CALIFORNIA
· 14. 29 Palms Marine Base, Identified on military map as airspace area R-2501 N. Saucer base southeast of Ludlow. This is a U.S. alien research/ diagnostic facility and UFO base.
· 15. China Lake, mind control and weapons research
· 16. Darwin, CA, 4 miles dues west of Darwin
· 17. Deep Springs, CA, 37°22’ N 117º 59.3’ W. saucer base
· 18. Fort Irwin, CA, 35°20’N 116°8’W W. saucer base
· 19. Edwards Air Force Base, in the area where Diamond Cr. & the so. fork of the Yuba meet, there are 3 underground UFO bases. 34°8’ N 117° 48’ W
· 20. George Air Force Base, CA - saucer base
· 21. Helendale, Lockhead Underground Facility, 34º44.7’ N 1170 18.5’ W. Technology for secret projects. There are 3 saucer bases here.
· 22. Los Angeles, On Hwy 14 towards Edwards A.F.B. after Palmdale, one turns off and after taking several streets to 170th street, north on 170th St. to the Rosamond-170th intersection, the second and lower and better maintained dirt road will take you west, and if you take a right going north at the power lines and up to the hilltop you will see the top of an underground NORTHOP facility; Technology for the elite’s secret projects. This area was very active in the 1970s. Northrop’s facility is near the Tehachapi Mtns. It has been reported
to go down 42 levels. It is heavily involved with electronics and hi-tech aerospace research.
· 23. Mt. Shasta
· 24. Kern River, CA the hollowed out mountain next to the hydroelectric facility at the Kern River Project near Bakersfield- reported saucer base
· 25. Napa Valley- located at Oakville Grade north of Napa, CA. Tunnels also connect the wineries north of Napa, used for white slavery and mind-control. Has a saucer base.
· 26. Norton Air Force Base- saucer base
· 27. Quincy, CA, 39° 56.2’ N 120° 56.5’ W. saucer base
· 28. Near Palmdale (if one takes Palmdale Blvd. til 240th St. and goes to Ave R-8. One the eastern limit of Ave. R-8 is McDonnell-Douglas’s facility called the Uano Facility. One can see it better from the Three Sisters Hills to the south of the facility. Strange shaped disks raise out of the ground on pylons. These attached disks glow and change color. It is involved in hi-tech aerospace technology.
· 29. Presidio, CA - A FEMA/DOD site for Region IX’s regional office
· 30. San Bernardino, CO, 34º 50’ N to 34° 16’ N
· 31. Santa Barbara County - placed in the thick diatomite strata
· 32. Santa Rosa, 38º 26.4’ N 122º 42.9’ W, FEMA, Regional center for west coast, what FEMA is doing is mostly kept secret. This is listed as a Communications Antenna Field, but is doing much more.
· 33. Sierra Nevada Mountains, CA - very deep military base
· 34. Tehachapi Ranch- 4 saucer bases, Tecachapi Canyon has a new underground base which was finished in Sept. ’95. This is the "Unholy 6" base of the Orions. 35° 20’ 118° 40’
· 35. Trona, CA, 35° 45.5’ N 1 77º22.6’ W --several miles northwest of Trona, directly under Argus Peak. This DUM sits on China Lake’s NWC’s land, and may have been built in the ’60s.
COLORADO
· 36. Alamosa, 37° 28.1’ N 105°52.2’W W- reported saucer base
· 37. Book Cliffs, CO, 39° 40’ N 108º 0’ W near Rifle, CO
· 38. Boulder, CO--The headquarters for EMC, a type of electra-magnetic mind control that is being broadcast to modify the thinking of Americans, and to control slaves.
· 39. Colorado Springs, NORAD --Canada & U.S., & FEMA, hundreds of people on staff, contains at least 4.5 cubic miles of underground caverns and 45 underground steel buildings.
Many underground chambers are as large as 50, x 100 ’. This complex tracks thousands of satellites, missiles, submarines, and UFOs. NORAD also controls many Monarch slaves who have ALEX, JANUS, ALEXUS endtime callback programming. NORAD installation has 1278 miles of road underground.
· 40. Fort Collins- base for Gray aliens
· 41. Grand Mesa- Orion saucer base
· 42. Montrore Co.--north of Paradox, in Paradox Valley. The site in Paradox Valley can be reached via Hwy. 90 via Nucla.
CONNECTICUT
· 43. North west Connecticut
FLORIDA
· 44. Massive base- reported saucer base
· 45. Eglin AFB, 30º 40’ N 86° 50’ W- Orion saucer base since 1978
GEORGIA
· 46. Atlanta, GA --FEMA regional center, which is appropriately placed since Atlanta is to become a capital within the NWO redrawing of boundaries. Atlanta is believed to have several underground installations in its area, one to the north at Kennesaw Mtn., Marietta, GA connected to Dobbins AFB and one to the south of Atlanta at Forest Park.
· 47. Thomasville, 30° 50.2’ N 83°58.9’ W, FEMA, regional center, they train groups in Search and Destroy missions for when Martial Law is imposed. This is SW Georgia in area of tunnels.
IDAHO
· 48. Lower Goose Lake area in the general area of Oakley, ID.--Wackenhut of the Illuminati run a "model prison" for the NWO. The worst of the federal prisoners are placed in this underground prison which has 7,100 cells which are filled with about 2,700 federal inmates. A track runs through the middle of the eerie underground facility. Food and showers are on the tracks, and the men are allowed showers once a week. The minimum of lighting is used and the men are beaten senseless if they talk at all. It sits 500’ underground.
· 49. South central Idaho--under the Snake River lava flows between Twin Falls and Idaho Falls.
INDIANA
· 50. Bedford & Lawrence Co. area--continued activity in large old mines indicates a possible government use of the large old quarries.
KANSAS
· 51. Atchison, KS--the DIPEF underground facility, which the govt. would run in an emergency. AT & T maintains an underground facility at Fairview, KS.
· 52. Kinsley--an underground UFO base
MARYLAND
· 53. Camp David--just north of the camp is an underground facility important to the intelligence agencies.
· 54. below Ft. Meade, of the National Security Agency, 10 acres of the most sophisticated supercomputers that can be built, very large complex, massive surveillance of all the world’s communications, including all transmissions in the U.S. & world of telephones, telegraph, telex, fax, radio, TV and microwave transmissions.
· 55. Olney, actually the facility is between Olney and Laytonsville, on Riggs Rd. off of Rt. 108. Another underground facility may also exist in the area, FEMA & possibly NSA, the facility may be 10 levels deep, purpose unknown.
· 56. Suitland, MD- Classified archives of U.S. Govt. stored here in underground levels. Vaults have extensive amounts of documents which are not indexed. Restricted access with a coded security card. High level intelligence groups operate in the area also.
MASSACHUSETTS
· 57. Maynard, 42° 26.0’ N 71° 27.0’ W FEMA, regional center, Wackenhut is here too.
MICHIGAN
· 58. Battle Creek, 42° 19.3’ N 85° 10.9’ W FEMA, regional center, activity secret (not validated)
· 59. Gwinn, Ml, 46° 16.8’N 87° 26.5’ W, near Gwinn is a large underground base which is a key base for sending signals. An AFB is also nearby. Under Lake Superior is an alien base
with roads 5,000’ deep.
MISSOURI
· 60. 12 miles south of Lebanon, 36° 02.8’ N 115° 24.3’ W, near the newly created town of Twin Bridges-reported saucer base
· 61. In the Bat/Dry/Dead Man/ Howell cluster of caves- reported saucer base
· 62. St. Francis Mountains, MO (between St. Louis & New Madrid)
NEBRASKA
· 63. North-central Nebraska
· 64. Red Willow Co. near McCook, NE
NEVADA
· 65. Blue Diamond, 36° 02.8’N 115°24.3 W -reported saucer base
· 66-68. Groom Lake, also known as Dreamland, Area 51, The Area, the Spot, Red Square, Sally Corridor, Watertown Strip. 1150 50’N 37°20W. Run by the NWO along with demonic beings, the CIA is there and Wackenhut Security. Two large underground facilities close to but separate from Groom Lake but controlled by the demonic beings are Papoose Range and Cockeyed Ridge (S-4) underground bases. Purpose is the testing of various UFOs and other secret aircraft like the Aurora and Stealth. Also biological work is done, including the biological raising of small greys. Many levels have been built at these three complexes, and a 7 mile long run way (which is actually 39 miles) has been built over Groom Lake, a dry lake. There is an S-2, an S-4, an S-6, and an S-66 underground installations. S-66 is the most secret and it has 29 levels and is 11, 300’ deep.
· 69. Quartzite Mountain SE of Tonopah, 37° 31 ’N 116° 20’ W- reported saucer base
· 70. Tonopah, Airforce, CIA? & ??, deals with secret aircraft
NEW HAMPSHIRE
· 71-73. There may be as many as three underground installations in New Hampshire’s hills (according to reports).
NEW JERSEY
· 74. Picatinny Arsenal, 4o° 38’N 74° 32’ W- saucer base, 1/4 cubic mile large & very deep underground.
NEW MEXICO
The state of New Mexico and Colorado have been used for the construction of a series of underground bases. (All the rest of the states have too.) The Primary Underground facilities in New Mexico consist of:
· 3 enormous underground bases in the Dulce, NM area (an area I spent several days investigating in 1993)
· the White Sands--Alamogordo Area which has 3 underground bases
· Datil and Pie Town which have two more underground bases. (Carlsbad Cavern which had underground activity, which is reported discontinued, and another base to east of Carlsbad.)
· the Los Alamos area underground facility
· the Taos area underground facility
The New Mexico area has basically four underground system out. One goes to the 4-corners area and then to Groom Lake (Area 51). One goes north toward Delta, CO and Colorado Springs. The Taos facilities goes north approximately along Interstate 25 and eventually ties in NORAD. The southern bases connect to Texas and Mexico. The Los Alamos facility dates at least back to 1940. One can only imagine what has been built with 1/2 century of labor on this underground system. Visitors to the deeper levels report humans kept in glass cylinders, plus many other strange things. I have had the opportunity to debrief some people who have been in the lower reaches of some of these facilities. There are special badges, special uniforms, tube elevators etc. which for lack of time I will not describe.
· 75. Angel Peak- reported saucer base
· Carlsbad Cavern area (now destroyed), 32° 25.0’N 1040 14.0W -old relics of saucer base left
· 76-78. Dulce, N.M., 36º 56.0’N 106°59.8’W,--South of Dulce, in the area of the Jicarilla Indian Reservation, another facility is east of the Dulce facility a number of miles. This is run directly by Illuminati w/ Army and Airforce help, CIA also conduct experiments at the center; the size of the installation is hugh requiring small shuttle trains and has seven levels according to witnesses. Serves as a UFO base, biological experiments, production center for small-grey drones. Wackenhut provides some of the security on the ground.
· 79. Kirtland AFB, NM, Sandia National Lab
· 80. Manzano Mtn, near Albuquerque, known as the Kirtland Munitions Storage Complex, Airforce, 3,000-acre base within the Kirtland AFB/Sandia National Labs complex, guarded by 4 lethal rings of fences, use unknown, suspected UFO base. A new 285,000-sq. ft. bunker is being built near Manzano Base.
· 81. Pie Town, 34° 17.9’N 1 108°08.7’W, in area near Pie Town, UFO Base.
· 82. Sandia Mountains NE of Albuquerque -reported saucer base
· 83. to the north of Taos Pueblo
· 84. White Sands, 32°22.8’N 106°28.8’W, major hub for research, tied in with Dulce & NORAD, HO for NASA /military shuttle flights, radiation research ctr. and mind control.
NEW YORK
· 85. Adirondack Mountains (near Elizabethtown)
· 86. New York Metro area
· 87. Plattsburgh (near Canada and St. Albans) AFB, 49°40’N 73°33 W- two saucer bases in this area.
OKLAHOMA
· 88. Ada, 34°46.4’ N 96°40.7W W, underground saucer base, this base does human cloning, and it is FEMA’s most sensitive base.
· 89. Ashland Naval Ammunition Depot, 34°45.9’N 96° 04.3’W,- reported saucer base
OREGON
· 90. Bull Run, north side of Bull Run Reservoir area near Mt. Hood, and very close to Larch Mtn. and south of Benson St. Park of the Columbia Gorge.
· 91. Coos Bay area has had three separate but coordinating underground facilities built for UFOs. The facility farthest east, about 20 miles inland in the wilderness near Hwy 42, has been shut down. It is now an old abandoned facility well camouflaged. The coast facility is probably still operational.
· 92. Klamath Falls, OR--since Sept. ’95 this has been a base for a number of NWO groups incl. the Air National Guard, FEMA, CIA, FBI, Spetznaz, and MOSAP training base. An underground concentration camp exists here.
PENNSYLVANIA
· 93. Blue Ridge Summit, near Ft. Ritchie, known as ’Raven Rock" or "Site R", Army, major electronic nerve center, 650 ft. below surface with about 350 staff and over a 716 acre area. possibly connected via tunnel to Camp David. The NOD installation is involved with psychic (demonic) and satellite control over slaves. This underground complex is to allow the government of the United States to escape a nuclear attack. The enormous complex radiates under Wash. D.C. and connects with many other sites. The tunnel system is used to move some of the mind-control sex slaves. The walls and ceilings of the tunnels are ceramic tile with fluorescent lighting recessed into the ceilings.
TEXAS
· 94. Ft. Hood, TX, 31° 15’N 97° 48’ W, home of some Delta Mind-Controlled soldiers and a reported saucer base.
· 95. Denton, TX, 33° 13.2’N 97° 08.2’W - FEMA, regional center, activity secret
· 96. Red River Arsenal, TX- reported saucer base
UTAH
In Utah, the Kennecott Copper Company has been connected to the Illuminati and the KKK. These connections have been exposed in other writings by this author. Kennecott’s mine (reported to be owned by the World Bank) in the Salt Lake City area is serviced by Union Pacific, which is reported connected to the Mormon Church.
The mine is receiving a heavy volume of big trucks after 11 p.m., for instance, in a normal night over 6 dozen large trucks with 2 trailors each rolling into the mine. In other words, it appears that the heavy train & tractor trailor activity indicates something besides mining.
VIRGINIA
· 97. Bluemont, Mount Weather base, Federal Preparedness Agency & FEMA, small-city underground, top-secret, staff of several hundred, does secret work for FEMA and contains a complete secret government with the various agencies and cabinet-level ranking administrators that keep their positions for several administrations and help run the United States.
· 98. Culpepper, 380 28.5 N 77°59.8’W, about 2 miles east of Culpepper off of Rt. 3, called Mount Pony, Illuminati--Fed. reserve, 140,000 sq. ft., includes a facility for the storage for corpses, monitors all major financial transactions in the U.S. by means of the "Fed Wire", a modern electronic system.
· 99. Pentagon, Arlington, VA-
· 100. Warrington Training Ctr. --two sites one on Rt. 802 and the other on Bear Wallow Road, on Viewtree Mountain. One is Station A the other Station B. Army & ??, purpose unknown
WASHINGTON
· 101. Bothell, 47°45.7’N 122°12.2w W, FEMA, regional center, activity unknown
WASHINGTON, D.C.
· 102. WHITE HOUSE, 38°53.5’N 77°02.0’W--The secret NOD underground installation which is connected to the intelligence groups like NSA and the CIA as well as many other nefarious groups lays under the White House with tunnels connecting this NOD installation with the House of the Temple. The Supreme council of the 33° of the Scottish Rite’s House of the Temple has a 14’ x 25’ room in it with 13 chairs where the Illuminati’s Grand Druid Council meet. The NOD Deep Underground Installation has numerous levels to it. One eye-
witness, went to level 17 (via an elevator) and stated that he believes that deeper levels exist.
WEST VIRGINIA
· 103. Sugar Grove, the Navy’s Strategic Intelligence Services microwave communications. There base here.
· 104. White Sulphur Springs, under the Greenbriar Hotel, a mini-city large enough for 800 people equipped with its own crematorium, if there are any other purposes other than listening to U.S. microwave communication it is unknown by this author.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Other planets are warming
"Evidence that CO2 is not the principle driver of warming on this planet is provided by the simultaneous warming of other planets and moons in our solar system, despite the fact that they obviously have no anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Mars, Triton, Pluto and Jupiter all show global warming, pointing to the Sun as the dominating influence in determining climate throughout the solar system." (Ian McClintock)
What the science says...
Select a level... Basic Intermediate
Mars and Jupiter are not warming, and anyway the sun has recently been cooling slightly.
This argument is part of a greater one that other planets are warming. If this is happening throughout the solar system, clearly it must be the sun causing the rise in temperatures – including here on Earth.
It is curious that the theory depends so much on sparse information – what we know about the climates on other planets and their history – yet its proponents resolutely ignore the most compelling evidence against the notion. Over the last fifty years, the sun’s output has decreased slightly: it is radiating less heat. We can measure the various activities of the sun pretty accurately from here on Earth, or from orbit above it, so it is hard to ignore the discrepancy between the facts and the sceptical argument that the sun is causing the rise in temperatures.
TSI from 1880 to 1978 from Solanki. TSI from 1979 to 2009 from PMOD.
But if the sun’s output has levelled off or even diminished, then what is causing other planets to warm up? Are they warming at all?
The planets and moons that are claimed to be warming total roughly eight out of dozens of large bodies in the solar system. Some, like Uranus, may be cooling. All the outer planets have vastly longer orbital periods than Earth, so any climate change on them may be seasonal. Saturn and its moons take 30 Earth years to orbit the Sun, so three decades of observations equates to only 1 Saturnian year. Uranus has an 84-year orbit and 98° axial tilt, so its seasons are extreme. Neptune has not yet completed a single orbit since its discovery in 1846.
This is a round-up of the planets said by sceptics to be experiencing climate change:
* Mars: the notion that Mars is warming came from an unfortunate conflation of weather and climate. Based on two pictures taken 22 years apart, assumptions were made that have not proved to be reliable. There is currently no evidence to support claims that Mars is warming at all. More on Mars...
* Jupiter: the notion that Jupiter is warming is actually based on predictions, since no warming has actually been observed. Climate models predict temperature increases along the equator and cooling at the poles. It is believed these changes will be catalysed by storms that merge into one super-storm, inhibiting the planet’s ability to mix heat. Sceptical arguments have ignored the fact this is not a phenomenon we have observed, and that the modelled forcing is storm and dust movements, not changes in solar radiation.
* Neptune: observations of changes in luminosity on the surface of both Neptune and its largest moon, Triton, have been taken to indicate warming caused by increased solar activity. In fact, the brightening is due to the planet’s seasons changing, but very slowly. Summer is coming to Neptune’s southern hemisphere, bringing more sunlight, as it does every 164 years.
* Pluto: the warming exhibited by Pluto is not really understood. Pluto’s seasons are the least understood of all: its existence has only been known for a third of its 248 -year orbit, and it has never been visited by a space probe. The ‘evidence’ for climate change consists of just two observations made in 1988 and 2002. That’s equivalent to observing the Earth’s weather for just three weeks out of the year. Various theories suggest its highly elliptical orbit may play a part, as could the large angle of its rotational axis. One recent paper suggests the length of Pluto’s orbit is a key factor, as with Neptune. Sunlight at Pluto is 900 times weaker than it is at the Earth.
Claims that solar system bodies are heating up due to increased solar activity are clearly wrong. The sun’s output has declined in recent decades. Only Pluto and Neptune are exhibiting increased brightness. Heating attributed to other solar bodies remains unproven.
"Evidence that CO2 is not the principle driver of warming on this planet is provided by the simultaneous warming of other planets and moons in our solar system, despite the fact that they obviously have no anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Mars, Triton, Pluto and Jupiter all show global warming, pointing to the Sun as the dominating influence in determining climate throughout the solar system." (Ian McClintock)
What the science says...
Select a level... Basic Intermediate
Mars and Jupiter are not warming, and anyway the sun has recently been cooling slightly.
This argument is part of a greater one that other planets are warming. If this is happening throughout the solar system, clearly it must be the sun causing the rise in temperatures – including here on Earth.
It is curious that the theory depends so much on sparse information – what we know about the climates on other planets and their history – yet its proponents resolutely ignore the most compelling evidence against the notion. Over the last fifty years, the sun’s output has decreased slightly: it is radiating less heat. We can measure the various activities of the sun pretty accurately from here on Earth, or from orbit above it, so it is hard to ignore the discrepancy between the facts and the sceptical argument that the sun is causing the rise in temperatures.
TSI from 1880 to 1978 from Solanki. TSI from 1979 to 2009 from PMOD.
But if the sun’s output has levelled off or even diminished, then what is causing other planets to warm up? Are they warming at all?
The planets and moons that are claimed to be warming total roughly eight out of dozens of large bodies in the solar system. Some, like Uranus, may be cooling. All the outer planets have vastly longer orbital periods than Earth, so any climate change on them may be seasonal. Saturn and its moons take 30 Earth years to orbit the Sun, so three decades of observations equates to only 1 Saturnian year. Uranus has an 84-year orbit and 98° axial tilt, so its seasons are extreme. Neptune has not yet completed a single orbit since its discovery in 1846.
This is a round-up of the planets said by sceptics to be experiencing climate change:
* Mars: the notion that Mars is warming came from an unfortunate conflation of weather and climate. Based on two pictures taken 22 years apart, assumptions were made that have not proved to be reliable. There is currently no evidence to support claims that Mars is warming at all. More on Mars...
* Jupiter: the notion that Jupiter is warming is actually based on predictions, since no warming has actually been observed. Climate models predict temperature increases along the equator and cooling at the poles. It is believed these changes will be catalysed by storms that merge into one super-storm, inhibiting the planet’s ability to mix heat. Sceptical arguments have ignored the fact this is not a phenomenon we have observed, and that the modelled forcing is storm and dust movements, not changes in solar radiation.
* Neptune: observations of changes in luminosity on the surface of both Neptune and its largest moon, Triton, have been taken to indicate warming caused by increased solar activity. In fact, the brightening is due to the planet’s seasons changing, but very slowly. Summer is coming to Neptune’s southern hemisphere, bringing more sunlight, as it does every 164 years.
* Pluto: the warming exhibited by Pluto is not really understood. Pluto’s seasons are the least understood of all: its existence has only been known for a third of its 248 -year orbit, and it has never been visited by a space probe. The ‘evidence’ for climate change consists of just two observations made in 1988 and 2002. That’s equivalent to observing the Earth’s weather for just three weeks out of the year. Various theories suggest its highly elliptical orbit may play a part, as could the large angle of its rotational axis. One recent paper suggests the length of Pluto’s orbit is a key factor, as with Neptune. Sunlight at Pluto is 900 times weaker than it is at the Earth.
Claims that solar system bodies are heating up due to increased solar activity are clearly wrong. The sun’s output has declined in recent decades. Only Pluto and Neptune are exhibiting increased brightness. Heating attributed to other solar bodies remains unproven.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Planet X and 2012: Proof Earth Is Not Experiencing a Pole Shift
Filed under: conspiracy theories, doomsday, misconceptions
Introduction
Between my posts on the magnetic pole shift and geographic pole shift (since I left my notes on the latter in the office and so will have to write that post tomorrow), I’m going to address the claim that people make that our planet, right now is in the middle of a pole shift, that it’s already started to happen, and The Government doesn’t want you to know.
I’m going to show you why this is very obviously wrong, and what you can do yourself on any clear night yourself to prove that this is wrong.
All posts in this series:
• Planet X and 2012: The Real and Historical Story of Planet X
• Planet X and 2012: Primer on the Mayan Calendar
• Planet X and 2012: The PseudoAstronomy (or Just Plain Wrong Astronomy) About a Galactic Alignment
• Planet X and 2012: The Pole Shift (Magnetic) Explained and Debunked
• Planet X and 2012: Proof Earth Is Not Experiencing a Pole Shift
• Planet X and 2012: The Pole Shift (Geographic / Spin Axis) Explained and Debunked
• Planet X and 2012: Why Planet X Is NOT Coming in 2012
• Planet X and 2012: What The Sky Looks Like On December 21, 2012
• Planet X and 2012: Why a 3600-Year Planet X (Nibiru) Doesn’t Exist
• Planet X and 2012: Could Planet X Be a Planet Around a Binary Star to Our Own – a “Dark Star?”
• Planet X and 2012: The “Institute for Human Continuity” Is NOT REAL
• Planet X and 2012: “Even the Maya Are Getting Sick of 2012 Hype”
• Planet X and 2012: Why Gilbert Eriksen’s “Wormwood” Won’t Be Showing Up
The Premise
This premise is NOT unique to this particular website, but it’s the one I’m using to illustrate the point for this post. The author clearly states, “Earth’s axis tilt has recently increased by an additional 26 degrees.” He also provides a diagramatic illustration of what Earth’s orbit should be (top) and what it actually is (according to him) (bottom).
Background
For background, we’ll actually use his first (top) diagram. Earth’s axis is tilted 23.5° relative to the ecliptic. The “ecliptic” is defined as the plane that Earth traces out when it orbits the sun. So the tilt can also be described as the tilt that Earth’s axis makes relative to the path it takes around the sun.
Now let’s define “axis.” Again, this may seem elementary, but it’s important we get all the definitions straight. There are two points on Earth – the North and South geographic poles – that are always* pointed at the exact same locations in space. If you were to draw a line between these two points and follow them to other stars, the North pole line would come fairly close to what’s popularly known as the “North Star,” or “Polaris.” This common name comes both from medieval Latin polaris meaning “heavenly,” from the original Latin polus meaning “end of an axis.” Fairly apropos.
Now that is very important here – the poles are always aimed at the same spot in space, regardless of the time of day, regardless of the season. And Polaris sits 66.5° above the ecliptic (90°-23.5°= 66.5°) – or just about (since it’s actually slightly off of the axis, but it’s close enough for our purposes here).
The rest of the planet rotates – spins – around an imaginary line that runs through the North and South geographic poles (those two stationary points relative to the stars). This means that everywhere else on Earth, the stars rise and set throughout the day and night as Earth rotates under them. At either pole, the same stars just move in direct East-to-West circles without any rising or setting.
* There is a ~26,000-year precession (wobble) of the pointing of Earth’s rotation axis. The axis stays the same relative to Earth, but it moves relative to the stars in a rather large circle. 13,000 years ago, the North Star would have been the very bright star Vega. However, this should NOT be confused with a pole shift. This process is very slow and steady, and it has nothing to do with the claims of the 2012 doomsdayers.
Why This Pole Shift Claim Is Demonstrably Wrong
I’ll admit, this is fairly low-hanging fruit. You don’t have to be an astrophysicist to figure out that these claims are wrong. And you should also be wary when the very first words on the guy’s website are, “Order your copy today” (of his book). You should also be careful when the guy’s Ph.D. is purely honorary and in the “the field of Energyinformative Sciences, from the Academy of Energyinformative Sciences.” Notice something missing? Yeah, anything related to astronomy, geology, or physics … not that a degree in those automatically makes all your ideas suddenly believable.
With that in mind, what would happen if the pole, well, shifted? Well, it would not look like this person’s diagram, partly because the plane of the ecliptic does not rotate with the axis of rotation. Earth’s orbit around the sun is independent from its rotation about its axis. But the major problem with the diagram is how he has drawn the day/night sides. Because the ecliptic would stay the same as it is now, the day/night shading should run vertically through the image.
What would the consequences of this be? Well, this is where his claims are very easily demonstrably wrong, in two very simple ways.
First, let’s look at this tilt and where the day/night line should be. If Earth has tilted an additional 26° as of now, it would be tilted 49.5° relative to the ecliptic. That means that all latitudes North of 49.5° N or South of 49.5° S would experience 24 hours of daylight during their summer solstices and 24 hours of night during their winter solstices. England, Norway, Canada, Alaska, Tierra del Fuego, parts of Australia … I think they would have noticed this. I don’t think that governments could really cover something like that up.
Second, let’s look at the stars. He claims, “The star layout would only be a miniscule change which the average person would not notice.” This is factually wrong and very easy to see for yourself. Just go outside with a camera that can have a shutter speed of a minute or longer and a tripod. Aim it towards the North, and take a 1-5 minute picture (or longer if you’d like). What you will see is the stars making little arcs through the picture, but there will be one reasonably bright star that appears to not move at all. That star is Polaris. It may look something like the photo below, which was taken for about 30 minutes. The bright star towards the lower right corner is Polaris.
Sorry Southern Hemisphere folks, there is no pole star for you guys, but you can still accomplish the same effect and see stars moving around the Southern Celestial Pole.
What does this relatively stationary star show? It shows that Earth’s axis is still pointed towards Polaris. If it had tilted by 26° — even if it had tilted by 1° – that star would not stay in the same place, but it would move along with the others.
In addition, tens of thousands (or more) telescopes rely upon knowing exactly where Polaris is relative to the North Celestial Pole. Without it, they couldn’t keep keep track of objects, “go to” systems wouldn’t work, and everyone who has any telescope that tracks the night sky would notice.
The Conspiracy
And so we get to the conspiracy.
Why has no one mentioned the shift of the Earth’s Axis? Surely they would tell the public if something this major had occurred. Surely the scientists or meteorologists would have said something? Surely the media would have mentioned this?
Wrong!!!! Global Panic! Economic Meltdown! Panic Hording!
Meteorologists, Media CEO’s, astronomers, astrophysicists and other experts worldwide seem to have been silenced. A common gov’t control procedure in wartime or cataclysmic situations with severe penalties for those who fail to comply… Threats of Gitmo or being discredited & unemployed would be persuasive. Remember what happened to Bob Lazar for revealing Area 51 secrets? The gov’t destroyed him.
The gov’t successfully persuaded thousands of workers & scientists to keep their silence when building the A-bomb in the 1940’s, so let that be an example of how it is possible to silence an entire industry of tens of thousands, if needed.
Again, these claims are demonstrably wrong because anyone can check Earth’s polar alignment by going outside and looking for the North Star (or Southern Cross), and anyone can tell you that southern Argentina doesn’t experience 24-hr daylight around the summer solstice. And, being an astronomer, I can say that I certainly haven’t received my hush money, otherwise I’d be driving a nicer car (or have a nicer camera system, more likely … or maybe live in a nicer apartment).
Final Thoughts
This represents one of the more silly claims (remotely) related to the Planet X and 2012 doomsday scenario / conspiracy that’s out there. But it is related under the category of a “pole shift,” and so I have included it in this series. The idea that Earth is currently experiencing a pole shift is easily shown to be incorrect, and with that, I hope to lay this topic to rest – at least to those of you who have read this blog.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Building a second sun
Building a second sun: Take $10 billion, add coconuts
THE balmy south of France has always been a magnet for sun worshippers. So it is perhaps fitting that here, not far from the Côte d'Azur, an international team of researchers is building a machine to recreate the sun. It will take tens of thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete, plus a whole host of more unusual materials: beryllium, niobium, titanium and tungsten; frigid liquid nitrogen and helium. Oh, and a supply of burnt coconuts.
This eclectic mix of ingredients will be turned into ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor - the next big thing in nuclear fusion research. When completed in 2018, the reactor will fuse together two heavy isotopes of hydrogen to release vast quantities of energy. In theory, the result will be clean electricity galore with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than today's nuclear fission reactors leave behind.
So why we are not already flooding our electricity grids with fusion energy? While the concept of nuclear fusion is simple, the practicalities are anything but. That's because the nuclei themselves are reluctant participants: each
carries a positive electrical charge and these repel one another, so forcing two nuclei together is almost impossible. Only at stupendously high temperatures do the nuclei acquire enough energy to overcome their mutual aversion, smash into one another, and fuse.
It is much the same picture in the sun. There, heat is generated from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei. But the fuel barely smoulders even at 15 million kelvin, the temperature of the sun's core. It is consumed so slowly that the supply lasts for billions of years.
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.
ITER follows the design of several smaller experimental reactors where physicists have already achieved the temperatures required for fusion. The nuclear fuel is held inside a ring-shaped reactor called a tokamak.
Magnets outside the ITER ring combine to generate a spiralling field that holds the superhot plasma in place. To make its magnetic cage, ITER will use superconducting coils of niobium-alloy wire weighing a total of 10,000 tonnes and cooled by a supply of liquid helium.
Trapped in its cage, the fusion fuel is simultaneously cooked in three different ways. While electrical circuits force a current through the plasma, it is blasted with microwaves and bombarded by high-energy atoms generated by small particle accelerators dotted around the ring. Even under this triple-pronged attack, so far no tokamak has yielded much fusion energy. ITER should do better by firing up a much bigger, denser ring of plasma. A lot of power will have to be pumped in to start the plasma sizzling, but if all goes to plan, 10 times as much will emerge.
All that power poses a threat to ITER because the magnetic cage is not impregnable. The violet-hot plasma will radiate X-rays, a trickle of charged particles will always escape, and the fusion reaction will create high-energy neutrons, which are electrically neutral and can't be contained by magnetism. So despite the magnetic cage, ITER's plasma will blast the surrounding walls with several megawatts of heat per square metre, far more than in previous tokamaks or conventional nuclear fission reactors.
The solution is simple: use water to carry the heat away. "Of course this is exactly what we want from fusion in the end - to extract the heat," says Mario Merola, head of the ITER division responsible for internal components of the reactor.
Once again, it's the practicalities that are the problem. The main reactor wall, known as the blanket, will be made from 440 stainless steel blocks nearly half a metre thick and riddled with high-pressure water pipes. This steel blanket should absorb most of the neutrons, which will heat the blanket from within. Near the inner wall, the water pipes can be no more than 2.5 centimetres apart, otherwise the steel between them would become dangerously warm and soft.
For the innermost surface facing the plasma, steel is no good. Incoming plasma particles would chip iron atoms out of the steel and back into the chamber, where they would pollute the fuel and damp down the fusion reactions. So the ITER team has chosen to face the wall with tiles made of beryllium. While beryllium is toxic to humans, it is quite palatable to the plasma because it is such a light element, close in atomic weight to deuterium and tritium. So although some beryllium will get blasted off the walls, it won't quench the reactor's fire.
The steel and beryllium plates will also be battered by mechanical forces generated by the interaction of the electric currents and magnetic fields passing through them. Each 4-tonne plate will experience forces of up to the weight of 100 tonnes, so they will have to be firmly locked in place - and sturdily built, even though they are punctured with holes for the pipes. "The design of the blanket modules is one of the most technically challenging parts of the whole machine," says Merola.
A different kind of armour plate is needed around the bottom of the chamber. Here, a device called the divertor is used to keep the plasma pure. The main by-product of the fusion reaction is helium nuclei, which would eventually build up and stifle the nuclear fire. The divertor's job is to skim off the outermost layer of plasma, which can then be cooled and siphoned off to have the helium "ash" and other impurities removed. The surface of the divertor will get hot enough to melt beryllium, so it will be covered in tungsten and carbon fibre, both materials with melting points above 3000 kelvin.
Armour plates
Wearing this water-cooled suit of armour, ITER should be able to resist the steady heat given off by the ring of plasma, but that isn't all it has to contend with. The plasma inside a tokamak turns out to be similar to the sun in more ways than one: like its big brother this doughnut-shaped mini-star can suddenly and violently erupt in an event called an edge localisation mode, or ELM. In a fraction of a millisecond, the surface of the plasma ring balloons outwards, sending out an explosive burst of particles. "It looks like a solar flare," says ITER researcher Alberto Loarte.
"The problem is that the release is very intense and localised, so local power densities are very high - many gigawatts per square metre," Loarte explains. That is more than a million times the power density of sunlight hitting Earth. Even though an ELM is very brief, this flash of energy is still enough to vaporise a thin layer of beryllium, tungsten or carbon. As ELMs are expected at a rate of a few per second, the vital armour would soon be destroyed.
However, the ITER team has a plan to fight these turbulent fires: throw ice cubes at them. The technique was developed during the 1990s at a reactor called ASDEX in Garching near Munich in Germany. Like other tokamaks, ASDEX has to keep its plasma topped up with fuel, and to do this it is equipped with a gas-powered peashooter that fires pellets of frozen deuterium into the plasma chamber.
The ASDEX team discovered that the sudden puff of gas released when a pellet enters the plasma can trigger an ELM-like outburst. So it is possible to cut ELMs down to size by deciding where and when to aim your pellets. "You can decide to trigger these events frequently, making very many small ELMs," says Loarte. These smaller flares should be less damaging.
But this may not prove a perfect method of control: the ELMs might still eventually eat through ITER's inner armour, and a further line of defence could be needed. In 2006, at the DIII-D tokamak operated by General Atomics in San Diego, California, physicists discovered that they could prevent ELMs from happening altogether by using an array of small magnetic coils inside the reactor. Tucked in just behind the protective blanket wall, these coils produce small magnetic fields that perturb the surface of the plasma and somehow prevent the ELMs bursting out. "The theoretical basis for this is not yet clearly understood," says Loarte. Both methods have been developed further at the JET fusion reactor near Oxford, UK, but the ultimate test will be at ITER to find out if they can control ELMs without releasing too much plasma and shutting down the fusion reaction.
A more insidious hazard is posed by neutrons. As well as heating up the fabric of the reactor, high-energy neutrons from the fusion core will damage the crystal structure of anything they hit, potentially making a strong metal brittle and weak. The bombardment of neutrons generated by ITER will be more intense than anything ever seen on Earth - so will the reactor crumble away? Merola is confident that it won't. The blanket will be made from austenitic stainless steel - a type of steel also used in domestic cutlery - which has a resilient crystal structure that keeps its strength even if many atoms are knocked out of place. "Austenitic steel is very forgiving," says Merola.
Fusion remains a controversial goal, not least because of the expense of the research still required. ITER alone will cost more than $10 billion. Sceptics also like to point out that ever since the idea was first touted in the 1950s, fusion's promise of clean power has receded endlessly into the future.
The ITER team are now hoping to drag it closer to the present. If they can successfully hold a slice of the sun at the reactor's heart, we might finally be on the verge of getting usable energy out of this electric dream.
2002 was an excellent year for coconuts. It's strange how you need this very natural material to make a fusion device
Totally tropical tokamak
Is your fusion reactor getting clogged with garbage? Try using some coconut. It's not the most obvious ingredient for such a high-tech device, but it will play a vital part in the ITER reactor in France.
The coconuts will be used to generate 10,000 cubic metres of nothing - the vacuum essential to ITER's operation. Some of this vacuum, in the central chamber, separates the plasma from the surrounding solid walls and allows fusion to proceed unhindered by air molecules. A whole lot more nothing is needed to fill the vacuum jackets that insulate ITER's supercooled magnets.
The vacuum pumps that will suck air out of ITER will also need to hoover up the waste helium from the fusion reaction, along with other debris created when hot plasma smashes into the reactor wall. "This can only be done with very large cryogenic pumps," says Christian Day of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, who is building ITER's vacuum pumps.
A cryopump works by capturing gas molecules on a cold surface. The pumps in ITER will have two stages, chilled to 80 and 5 kelvin respectively. While most gases will freeze on contact at these temperatures, the helium and hydrogen isotopes emerging from ITER are less easily caught. They can only be captured by adsorption, a process that involves atoms of the gas sticking loosely to a solid surface - and the greater the surface area, the better. "We wanted a material that behaves like a sponge, with lots of internal surfaces," says Day.
He and his team have spent 20 years searching for the ideal adsorber. Their quest was wide-ranging, taking in sintered metals and porous minerals called zeolites, but eventually they found that the material with the greatest capacity to adsorb gases was charcoal. They tried charcoal made from industrial polymers, from different varieties of wood, from peat, and from textiles such as wool and cotton, and more.
Once source stood out. "We found that coconut-shell charcoal is the best," Day says. "It is somehow strange that you need this very natural material to make a fusion device."
To make coconut charcoal, you first char the shells in a low-oxygen atmosphere, then wash them in acid and bathe them in steam to clean out a network of fine pores. The walls of these pores form a huge internal surface - about 1200 square metres per gram of charcoal. "We found the decisive point is pore size distribution," says Day. "We need pores of all types, because different pore sizes work best for different gases."
The provenance of the coconut matters too. The best fusion coconut turned out to come from one particular Indonesian island, Day found, and the quality of the resulting charcoal even depends on the year. "2002 was an excellent year for coconuts," he says.
So the team bought up most of the vintage 2002 Indonesian coconut-shell charcoal. "We have a few tonnes in a garage in Karlsruhe," Day says. That will be enough to supply ITER's cryopumps a few times over, so there should be a surplus - perhaps destined for the first commercial fusion power stations some decades from now. Unless 2035 is an even better year for coconuts.
THE balmy south of France has always been a magnet for sun worshippers. So it is perhaps fitting that here, not far from the Côte d'Azur, an international team of researchers is building a machine to recreate the sun. It will take tens of thousands of tonnes of steel and concrete, plus a whole host of more unusual materials: beryllium, niobium, titanium and tungsten; frigid liquid nitrogen and helium. Oh, and a supply of burnt coconuts.
This eclectic mix of ingredients will be turned into ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor - the next big thing in nuclear fusion research. When completed in 2018, the reactor will fuse together two heavy isotopes of hydrogen to release vast quantities of energy. In theory, the result will be clean electricity galore with no carbon emissions and far less radioactive waste than today's nuclear fission reactors leave behind.
So why we are not already flooding our electricity grids with fusion energy? While the concept of nuclear fusion is simple, the practicalities are anything but. That's because the nuclei themselves are reluctant participants: each
carries a positive electrical charge and these repel one another, so forcing two nuclei together is almost impossible. Only at stupendously high temperatures do the nuclei acquire enough energy to overcome their mutual aversion, smash into one another, and fuse.
It is much the same picture in the sun. There, heat is generated from the fusion of hydrogen nuclei. But the fuel barely smoulders even at 15 million kelvin, the temperature of the sun's core. It is consumed so slowly that the supply lasts for billions of years.
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.
ITER follows the design of several smaller experimental reactors where physicists have already achieved the temperatures required for fusion. The nuclear fuel is held inside a ring-shaped reactor called a tokamak.
Magnets outside the ITER ring combine to generate a spiralling field that holds the superhot plasma in place. To make its magnetic cage, ITER will use superconducting coils of niobium-alloy wire weighing a total of 10,000 tonnes and cooled by a supply of liquid helium.
Trapped in its cage, the fusion fuel is simultaneously cooked in three different ways. While electrical circuits force a current through the plasma, it is blasted with microwaves and bombarded by high-energy atoms generated by small particle accelerators dotted around the ring. Even under this triple-pronged attack, so far no tokamak has yielded much fusion energy. ITER should do better by firing up a much bigger, denser ring of plasma. A lot of power will have to be pumped in to start the plasma sizzling, but if all goes to plan, 10 times as much will emerge.
All that power poses a threat to ITER because the magnetic cage is not impregnable. The violet-hot plasma will radiate X-rays, a trickle of charged particles will always escape, and the fusion reaction will create high-energy neutrons, which are electrically neutral and can't be contained by magnetism. So despite the magnetic cage, ITER's plasma will blast the surrounding walls with several megawatts of heat per square metre, far more than in previous tokamaks or conventional nuclear fission reactors.
The solution is simple: use water to carry the heat away. "Of course this is exactly what we want from fusion in the end - to extract the heat," says Mario Merola, head of the ITER division responsible for internal components of the reactor.
Once again, it's the practicalities that are the problem. The main reactor wall, known as the blanket, will be made from 440 stainless steel blocks nearly half a metre thick and riddled with high-pressure water pipes. This steel blanket should absorb most of the neutrons, which will heat the blanket from within. Near the inner wall, the water pipes can be no more than 2.5 centimetres apart, otherwise the steel between them would become dangerously warm and soft.
For the innermost surface facing the plasma, steel is no good. Incoming plasma particles would chip iron atoms out of the steel and back into the chamber, where they would pollute the fuel and damp down the fusion reactions. So the ITER team has chosen to face the wall with tiles made of beryllium. While beryllium is toxic to humans, it is quite palatable to the plasma because it is such a light element, close in atomic weight to deuterium and tritium. So although some beryllium will get blasted off the walls, it won't quench the reactor's fire.
The steel and beryllium plates will also be battered by mechanical forces generated by the interaction of the electric currents and magnetic fields passing through them. Each 4-tonne plate will experience forces of up to the weight of 100 tonnes, so they will have to be firmly locked in place - and sturdily built, even though they are punctured with holes for the pipes. "The design of the blanket modules is one of the most technically challenging parts of the whole machine," says Merola.
A different kind of armour plate is needed around the bottom of the chamber. Here, a device called the divertor is used to keep the plasma pure. The main by-product of the fusion reaction is helium nuclei, which would eventually build up and stifle the nuclear fire. The divertor's job is to skim off the outermost layer of plasma, which can then be cooled and siphoned off to have the helium "ash" and other impurities removed. The surface of the divertor will get hot enough to melt beryllium, so it will be covered in tungsten and carbon fibre, both materials with melting points above 3000 kelvin.
Armour plates
Wearing this water-cooled suit of armour, ITER should be able to resist the steady heat given off by the ring of plasma, but that isn't all it has to contend with. The plasma inside a tokamak turns out to be similar to the sun in more ways than one: like its big brother this doughnut-shaped mini-star can suddenly and violently erupt in an event called an edge localisation mode, or ELM. In a fraction of a millisecond, the surface of the plasma ring balloons outwards, sending out an explosive burst of particles. "It looks like a solar flare," says ITER researcher Alberto Loarte.
"The problem is that the release is very intense and localised, so local power densities are very high - many gigawatts per square metre," Loarte explains. That is more than a million times the power density of sunlight hitting Earth. Even though an ELM is very brief, this flash of energy is still enough to vaporise a thin layer of beryllium, tungsten or carbon. As ELMs are expected at a rate of a few per second, the vital armour would soon be destroyed.
However, the ITER team has a plan to fight these turbulent fires: throw ice cubes at them. The technique was developed during the 1990s at a reactor called ASDEX in Garching near Munich in Germany. Like other tokamaks, ASDEX has to keep its plasma topped up with fuel, and to do this it is equipped with a gas-powered peashooter that fires pellets of frozen deuterium into the plasma chamber.
The ASDEX team discovered that the sudden puff of gas released when a pellet enters the plasma can trigger an ELM-like outburst. So it is possible to cut ELMs down to size by deciding where and when to aim your pellets. "You can decide to trigger these events frequently, making very many small ELMs," says Loarte. These smaller flares should be less damaging.
But this may not prove a perfect method of control: the ELMs might still eventually eat through ITER's inner armour, and a further line of defence could be needed. In 2006, at the DIII-D tokamak operated by General Atomics in San Diego, California, physicists discovered that they could prevent ELMs from happening altogether by using an array of small magnetic coils inside the reactor. Tucked in just behind the protective blanket wall, these coils produce small magnetic fields that perturb the surface of the plasma and somehow prevent the ELMs bursting out. "The theoretical basis for this is not yet clearly understood," says Loarte. Both methods have been developed further at the JET fusion reactor near Oxford, UK, but the ultimate test will be at ITER to find out if they can control ELMs without releasing too much plasma and shutting down the fusion reaction.
A more insidious hazard is posed by neutrons. As well as heating up the fabric of the reactor, high-energy neutrons from the fusion core will damage the crystal structure of anything they hit, potentially making a strong metal brittle and weak. The bombardment of neutrons generated by ITER will be more intense than anything ever seen on Earth - so will the reactor crumble away? Merola is confident that it won't. The blanket will be made from austenitic stainless steel - a type of steel also used in domestic cutlery - which has a resilient crystal structure that keeps its strength even if many atoms are knocked out of place. "Austenitic steel is very forgiving," says Merola.
Fusion remains a controversial goal, not least because of the expense of the research still required. ITER alone will cost more than $10 billion. Sceptics also like to point out that ever since the idea was first touted in the 1950s, fusion's promise of clean power has receded endlessly into the future.
The ITER team are now hoping to drag it closer to the present. If they can successfully hold a slice of the sun at the reactor's heart, we might finally be on the verge of getting usable energy out of this electric dream.
2002 was an excellent year for coconuts. It's strange how you need this very natural material to make a fusion device
Totally tropical tokamak
Is your fusion reactor getting clogged with garbage? Try using some coconut. It's not the most obvious ingredient for such a high-tech device, but it will play a vital part in the ITER reactor in France.
The coconuts will be used to generate 10,000 cubic metres of nothing - the vacuum essential to ITER's operation. Some of this vacuum, in the central chamber, separates the plasma from the surrounding solid walls and allows fusion to proceed unhindered by air molecules. A whole lot more nothing is needed to fill the vacuum jackets that insulate ITER's supercooled magnets.
The vacuum pumps that will suck air out of ITER will also need to hoover up the waste helium from the fusion reaction, along with other debris created when hot plasma smashes into the reactor wall. "This can only be done with very large cryogenic pumps," says Christian Day of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, who is building ITER's vacuum pumps.
A cryopump works by capturing gas molecules on a cold surface. The pumps in ITER will have two stages, chilled to 80 and 5 kelvin respectively. While most gases will freeze on contact at these temperatures, the helium and hydrogen isotopes emerging from ITER are less easily caught. They can only be captured by adsorption, a process that involves atoms of the gas sticking loosely to a solid surface - and the greater the surface area, the better. "We wanted a material that behaves like a sponge, with lots of internal surfaces," says Day.
He and his team have spent 20 years searching for the ideal adsorber. Their quest was wide-ranging, taking in sintered metals and porous minerals called zeolites, but eventually they found that the material with the greatest capacity to adsorb gases was charcoal. They tried charcoal made from industrial polymers, from different varieties of wood, from peat, and from textiles such as wool and cotton, and more.
Once source stood out. "We found that coconut-shell charcoal is the best," Day says. "It is somehow strange that you need this very natural material to make a fusion device."
To make coconut charcoal, you first char the shells in a low-oxygen atmosphere, then wash them in acid and bathe them in steam to clean out a network of fine pores. The walls of these pores form a huge internal surface - about 1200 square metres per gram of charcoal. "We found the decisive point is pore size distribution," says Day. "We need pores of all types, because different pore sizes work best for different gases."
The provenance of the coconut matters too. The best fusion coconut turned out to come from one particular Indonesian island, Day found, and the quality of the resulting charcoal even depends on the year. "2002 was an excellent year for coconuts," he says.
So the team bought up most of the vintage 2002 Indonesian coconut-shell charcoal. "We have a few tonnes in a garage in Karlsruhe," Day says. That will be enough to supply ITER's cryopumps a few times over, so there should be a surplus - perhaps destined for the first commercial fusion power stations some decades from now. Unless 2035 is an even better year for coconuts.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)