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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
How 'Miniature Suns' Could Provide Cheap, Clean Energy
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Thursday January 17 2019, @04:38PM (1 child)
Nothing specifically to do with the problem, but - whenever I read about fusion - I am reminded of an article I once read.
Fusion in the sun is actually a very rare event. The energy produced by the sun, on a cubic meter basis, is roughly equivalent to a good compost heap. It's just a really, really big compost heap.
What fusion researchers are trying to do is orders of magnitude harder. They don't want an occasional, accidental fusion of two atoms that happened to run into each other. They want this all the time, and that required a much hotter, denser plasma than occurs in nature.
Five years out? Nah. If they had a prototype already working, we would have heard about it. If they have actually solved some of the critical problems, they may have a small-scale prototype in five years - and that would already be huge. Time from small-scale prototype to commercialization will be another couple of decades.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday January 17 2019, @06:59PM
True as far as it goes, but you're overlooking one MAJOR difference:fuel choice. The sun is composed almost entirely out of Hydrogen-1, which means that the heat generated is the result of fusing hydrogen into deutrium, which is among the most difficult fusion reactions to trigger, while producing the least amount of energy.
Human-built reactors have a much wider range of fuels available, and target fusion reactions that are MUCH easier to achieve and produce MUCH more energy: typically deutrium-tritium as a starting point as it's one of the easiest reactions to achieve, and releases about 30x more energy per reaction than H-H fusion.