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Energy From Fusion In 'A Couple Years,' CEO Says, Commercialization In Five
TAE Technologies will bring a fusion-reactor technology to commercialization in the next five years, its CEO announced recently at the University of California, Irvine.
"The notion that you hear fusion is another 20 years away, 30 years away, 50 years away—it's not true," said Michl Binderbauer, CEO of the company formerly known as Tri Alpha Energy. "We're talking commercialization coming in the next five years for this technology."
[...] For more than 20 years TAE has been pursuing a reactor that would fuse hydrogen and boron at extremely high temperatures, releasing excess energy much as the sun does when it fuses hydrogen atoms. Lately the California company has been testing the heat capacity of its process in a machine it named Norman after the late UC Irvine physicist Norman Rostoker.
Its next device, dubbed Copernicus, is designed to demonstrate an energy gain. It will involve deuterium-tritium fusion, the aim of most competitors, but a milestone on TAE's path to a hotter, but safer, hydrogen-boron reaction.
Binderbauer expects to pass the D-T fusion milestone soon. "What we're really going to see in the next couple years is actually the ability to actually make net energy, and that's going to happen in the machine we call Copernicus," he said in a "fireside chat" at UC Irvine.
Also at NextBigFuture.
Related: Lockheed Martin's Patent for a Fusion Reactor the Size of a Shipping Container
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(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:31AM (10 children)
Sorry, if they don't even have a prototype that works they aren't five years from commercialization. If they had a demo unit NOW it would be a hard slog to get through the regulatory hoops to being a product of that sort to market in only five years. And just showing net energy gain is a long way from a real demo unit that produces electricity.
So they are a) lying liars who know they are peddling snake oil and just trying to fleece some idiotic investors or b) or they are the idiots.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 17 2019, @03:07PM (3 children)
What regulations? A quick search finds me lots of regulations on fission reactors, but nothing on fusion or more general "nuclear" power - which means new regulations would have to be created, and that's unlikely to happen until *after* they start producing reactors - I don't think there were any regulations on the first fission reactors either.
Also, the nice thing about fusion is that there's no long-lived nuclear waste to dispose of - basically just the reactor and shielding during decommissioning, and that only because even with aneutronic p-B fusion you will inevitably get some other side reactions occurring.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:13PM (2 children)
Riddle me this, who will be the first grid operator to step up and connect an UNREGULATED ATOMIC HELLFIRE MACHINE to their grid in $current_year? Unregulated means unsalable. So wait for the currently utterly dysfunctional governments of the world to invent some appropriate regulations.
You know fusion is safe, safer than fission, safer than coal, safer than even hydro. I know all that. But we live in an age where morons rule. i.e. A democracy.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 17 2019, @06:18PM
Depends - if they can increase profit margins by 20% by doing so, they'll be fighting each other for the chance, and damn the consequences.
>we live in an age where morons rule. i.e. A democracy.
If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. Theoretically the government making the laws is a democracy, but it's pretty much sold out to the people with money. And our economy is not even remotely democratic, it's a fairly well consolidated oligarchy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 17 2019, @06:31PM
I'm surprised at this level of vitriol against government and regulation. As you suggested, do you want a completely unknown and untested machine being thrown onto the power grid that feeds your house? I know I wouldn't.
I'll agree that "over-regulation" is a bad thing. It's more a debate of how much regulation is appropriate, and how much is over-regulation. Needing to fill out 20 forms to throw away a piece of paper is bad, but likewise being able to dump barrels of sludge into a river with merely a verbal guarantee that it's safe is also bad.
We'll see how much regulation ends up being needed for fusion power. I hope it's not "too much."
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Thursday January 17 2019, @03:41PM (5 children)
Also, they *do* have a working prototype, it just doesn't achieve break-even. Which is to be expected, because almost every fusion technology has a reaction efficiency that improves rapidly with scale - and judging by the relative size of the plasma injectors, the production reactor will be at least 10-20x the size of their prototype.
Now, it's possible their large full-scale prototype won't work for some reason, but it sounds like so long as it does, it will be a commercial-ready reactor. Assuming the design is complete, 5 years to build and test the thing sounds possibly optimistic, but probably no worse the Musk-time. It's not like they're trying to build exotic superconducting magnetic containment systems or anything - all that sort of complexity is in their plasma injectors, which look to be complete, and the high-precision concussion pistons, which they also appear to be complete. What remains is building LOTS of the things, and the pressure vessel they attach to.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:09PM
Everybody and their dog in the physics game has a fusion reactor with less than unity gain. Nobody has one with >1. That was the situation ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, forty years ago and it will be the situation ten years from now. Allowing >1 to exist would disrupt the world's economy too much for those who own the world to allow it to exist. Let the scientists play, but somehow these things just never work out.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday January 17 2019, @05:50PM (3 children)
It's not just a matter of scaling up, like inflating a balloon. Engineering doesn't work that way. Don't ask the guy who built your garden shed to build a sky scraper.
Take just the magnetic fields, for example. Ever heard of the inverse square law? If you field is bigger, parts of it will be farther from the generating magnets, and loses strength as the square of the distance. But if anything, the field needs to be stronger to contain the larger amount of plasma. Scaling the magnets means increasing their size, which means moving parts of them farther from the field you need, which means you need an even bigger magnet. It may not be possible to scale fast enough to overcome the inverse-square law.
I'm being simplistic here, but you get the idea: scaling is hard. If their prototype doesn't achieve break-even, then it's not a prototype of a commercial plant.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 17 2019, @06:10PM (1 child)
Look into General Atomics design - they're using spherical mechanical shockwaves, not magnetic fields, to reach fusion conditions, in large part to avoid those problems. And it appears they've already developed the full-scale plasma injectors and shockwave-generating pistons - now they just need to build a lot more so they can assemble them into a full reactor.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 17 2019, @06:21PM
My mistake - that should be General *Fusion*, not Atomics. And it looks like I misread, and that's one of their main competitors, while they are using magnetic confinement.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 17 2019, @06:35PM
You're right that the scaling isn't simple - but we're not talking about having shed-builder building build a skyscraper, we're talking about skyscraper builders that have been building miniature skyscrapers in their back yard specifically as working prototypes for their full-scale designs, because nobody will fund a full-size model until they can convince them that the enormously expensive real thing wil function as intended.
You also seem a little confused as to how magnets work in regards to most fusion reactor designs:
First - there is no inverse square law for magnets - magnetic fields fall off with the inverse cube - so that aspect of the problem is actually much worse.
Second - that's rarely actually an issue, because you're not trying to confine the plasma around a central magnet, you're confining it within a vessel built out of magnets - as the vessel gets larger, you just use more or larger magnets at the same distance from the plasma.
Third - you don't need stronger magnets to contain more plasma, any more than big balloons need to be made from stronger rubber than small ones. What you do need stronger magnets for is to increase the pressure that the plasma is contained at, which increases the fusion rate. And conveniently enough, it's substantially cheaper and easier to make a big electromagnet more powerful than it is a small one. If fact, that's one of the big reasons most small fusion prototypes are generally much less efficient - you just can't build a strong enough magnet to do more within the available space.