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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].
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:48PM
Magnets are not the problem with ITER. Or even the money. The problem with ITER is that it's not proven technology. Science has to be done and finished before anyone will spend billions making more compact fusion reactors.
If ITER is costing something like $20B, then "compact DEMO" that's "order of magnitude cheaper" will cost what? $5-10B? And it certainly will not fit in your pocket!
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2015, @04:59PM
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/cost-advantage-roi/ [lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com]
http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/lpp-executive-summary/ [lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor [wikipedia.org]
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 11 2015, @05:58PM
Yeah I donno about the wikipedia article, where its claimed you can't build a mobile breeder because the breeding blanket weighs a kiloton but there seems to be no explanation why you can't build a non-breeding mobile. In fact, to get a mobile space reactor or submarine reactor, countries would probably burn coal to generate tritium just to get the mobile fusion power if they had to (although in practice you'd just consider a multi kilo ton breeder blanket either a national strategic asset paid for by .gov or if someone outside the USA tried it you'd call it a proliferation risk and bomb them, depending on perspective).
You need some shielding or you'll Cherenkov radiate like a searchlight, at least for a submarine. I recall that was in the plot line of "Ghost Fleet".
The dual mirror is innovative. Its a typical undergrad textbook thing to prove a single mirror device will never break even or the break even size is like a bazillion free paths such that you'd need a simple single mirror machine the length of Texas. You could cross eyes some and say its a segment of an unrolled tokamak, well, that would take a lot of eye crossing, but its not that bad of an analogy.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2015, @06:01PM
I'm interested in the parts I blockquoted, and you can find other reporting on Lockheed's fusion plans. Indications are they think they can commercialize a small-scale shipping container sized nuclear fusion reactor.
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(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 11 2015, @06:23PM
Right right I think we agree on the good parts. Will be very interesting to see what happens with these guys. There are merely aspects of the wiki article that are non sequitur.
I suspect "shipping crate sized" means our Navy will fund it and we'll see nothing for quite awhile. Its like they were fishing for the Navy with bait. I suppose all branches have their reasons for finding it a tasty piece of bait, except perhaps for the air force of our navy's army aka the USMC air corps.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 11 2015, @06:34PM
The Navy likes the taste of fusion bait so much, they are apparently looking into cold fusion/LENR:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion#United_States [wikipedia.org]
https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=navy+cold+fusion [google.com]
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(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Tuesday August 11 2015, @07:00PM
The navy has (had?) a thing for the polywell/fusor approach too.
That's another one of those "works so well it fell off the face of the earth" technologies.
Last I heard WB-8 exceeded all contract expectations so the next step was (insert radio silence here).
I'm sure when they resurface the stories about WB-9 will be interesting to hear, hope there's good results.
Fusors don't get much love from the conventional people because they're not the politically correct tokamak or even a mirror, and they don't get any love from the conspiracy theorists because they're already commercially successful and shipping controllable neutron sources and you can't stick it to the Man when the Man is selling commercialized portable neutron sources.
Fusor = orphan of fusion research yet is also another naval research fusion operation.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday August 11 2015, @06:12PM
The problem with ITER is that it's not proven technology.
In all fairness I looked it up and ITER isn't supposed to run above 13 T which isn't that big of a deal anymore. Well, its not building subwoofers and fridge magnets but its not a big deal anymore.
The linked article is basically speculation on "well, if it takes 30 years to build a 13 T reactor because its Fing huge, then how long could we expect it to take to make a 20T to 30T reactor" knowing that the scaling factors are absolutely insane so you could probably put a 50T reactor on your desktop (I haven't run the numbers, but that would be funny). In my infinite spare time it would be funny to run the numbers, how high of a field strength would it take to make a fusion reactor smaller than a phone? Now at gigawatt level radiation you'd die pretty quick, but at a billion times lower output and a billion times lower radiation maybe...
It makes a fun ultra hard sci fi story, so tomorrow we discover compressed unicorn poop makes 500 T magnetic fields, what happens next? Well, aside from chemistry lab NMRs operating at like 100 THz, etc etc.
A good space analogy is its the old worry about colonization ships where you send a generation ship on the slow boat to Alpha Centauri which will take dozens of generations and many centuries and they're gonna be real pissed off when the Enterprise drops out of warp in two hundred years and home is just a 9 minute flight back or WTF. So the fastest way to get to the nearest star is not to launch anything for a couple centuries, which is paradoxical but true.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday August 11 2015, @09:05PM
The problem with ITER is that it's not proven technology.
The problem with ITER is that even if it works as advertised, it won't do a thing to progress towards a commercially viable fusion power source aside perhaps from a bit of high temperature plasma dynamics.
If ITER is costing something like $20B, then "compact DEMO" that's "order of magnitude cheaper" will cost what?
$2B. That what order of magnitude cheaper means.
For me, the huge price difference is not the compact design but the fact that the superconducting REBCO magnets don't need to be run at liquid helium temperatures. I don't know whether they can be run at liquid nitrogen temperatures (I gather there is some need to cool magnets which are operating near their limits well below the nominal superconducting temperature threshold), but if they can, that will make the project vastly cheaper.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Wednesday August 12 2015, @02:52AM
Well, they started producing F35s well before the design was finished, let alone tested. they put a lot more money into that, and now they'll have a bunch of expensive hanger queens for airshows.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek