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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: 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.