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posted by janrinok on Tuesday August 11 2015, @03:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the power-for-the-people dept.

Nuclear fusion... ten and a few years away?

Advances in magnet technology have enabled researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor — and it's one that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. The era of practical fusion power, which could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource, may be coming near.

Using these new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils "just ripples through the whole design," says Dennis Whyte, a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center. "It changes the whole thing."

The stronger magnetic field makes it possible to produce the required magnetic confinement of the superhot plasma — that is, the working material of a fusion reaction — but in a much smaller device than those previously envisioned. The reduction in size, in turn, makes the whole system less expensive and faster to build, and also allows for some ingenious new features in the power plant design. The proposed reactor, using a tokamak (donut-shaped) geometry that is widely studied, is described in a paper in the journal Fusion Engineering and Design, co-authored by Whyte, PhD candidate Brandon Sorbom, and 11 others at MIT. The paper started as a design class taught by Whyte and became a student-led project after the class ended.

[...] While most characteristics of a system tend to vary in proportion to changes in dimensions, the effect of changes in the magnetic field on fusion reactions is much more extreme: The achievable fusion power increases according to the fourth power of the increase in the magnetic field. Thus, doubling the field would produce a 16-fold increase in the fusion power. "Any increase in the magnetic field gives you a huge win," Sorbom says. While the new superconductors do not produce quite a doubling of the field strength, they are strong enough to increase fusion power by about a factor of 10 compared to standard superconducting technology, Sorbom says. This dramatic improvement leads to a cascade of potential improvements in reactor design.

They are calling it an affordable, robust, compact (ARC) reactor. Presentation [PDF].

ARC: A compact, high-field, fusion nuclear science facility and demonstration power plant with demountable magnets [abstract]


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:30PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:30PM (#221309)

    Prediction is of course not easy ;-) However, many of the predictions of the past did not have the exponential growth of computational modelling to aid in the design processes. For current fission reactors there is a huge intertia in building new reactors, such that there are designs in use from before the IBM PC. Just let that sink in for a bit. There is of course massive political interference in nuclear reactors, and perhaps not a bad idea, but the optimisation for security is not likely to yield better designs.

    Hence, I would expect any practical fusion design to be a computational model first, especially since this design is much smaller, makes it "easier" to model (many simulations have volumetric element limitations).

    The real problem is, any major success is likely to be used to prop up artificial scarcity, which is the current method for many legacy businesses to maintain profits...

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  • (Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday August 11 2015, @10:09PM

    by DECbot (832) on Tuesday August 11 2015, @10:09PM (#221472) Journal

    So you're predicting that the output harmonic frequencies in the audible range will be recorded and copyrighted, and thus any operating fusion reactor will require a performance rebroadcasting license from the RIAA?

    --
    cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base