How 'Miniature Suns' Could Provide Cheap, Clean Energy:
Nuclear fusion has long been heralded as a potential answer to our prayers. But it's always been "thirty years away", according to the industry joke.
Now several start-ups are saying they can make fusion a commercial reality much sooner.
[...] A major challenge is how to build a structure strong enough to contain the plasma - the very high-temperature nuclear soup in which the fusion reactions take place - under the huge pressures required.
Exhaust systems will "have to withstand levels of heat and power akin to those experienced by a spaceship re-entering orbit," says Prof Ian Chapman, chief executive of the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA),
Robotic maintenance systems will also be needed, as well as systems for breeding, recovering and storing the fuel.
"UKAEA is looking into all these issues, and is building new research facilities at Culham Science Centre near Oxford to work with industry to develop solutions," says Prof Chapman.
[...] Oxfordshire-based Tokamak Energy is working on spherical tokamaks or reactors that use high temperature superconductors (HTS) to contain the plasma in a very strong magnetic field.
"High temperature" in the context of this branch of physics means a distinctly chilly -70C or below.
[...] The company has built three tokamaks so far, with the third, ST40, built from 30mm (1.2in) stainless steel and using HTS magnets. This June it achieved plasma temperatures of more than 15 million C - hotter than the core of the sun.
The firm hopes to be hitting 100 million C by next summer - a feat Chinese scientists claim to have achieved this month.
"We expect to have energy gain capability by 2022 and be supplying energy to the grid by 2030," says Mr Carling.
Meanwhile in the US, MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology] is working with the newly-formed Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to develop Sparc, a doughnut-shaped tokamak with magnetic fields holding the hot plasma in place.
Funded in part by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund led by Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg and other billionaires, the team hopes to develop fusion reactors small enough to be built in factories and shipped for assembly on site.
[...] "With the new HTS magnet technology, a net-energy fusion device can be much, much smaller - Sparc would be about one sixty-fourth the volume and mass of Iter[*]," says Martin Greenwald, deputy director of MIT's plasma science and fusion centre.
[*] From Wikipedia, ITER: "(International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering megaproject, which will be the world's largest magnetic confinement plasma physics experiment. It is an experimental tokamak nuclear fusion reactor that is being built next to the Cadarache facility in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, in Provence, southern France."
And, tokamak: "(Russian: Токамáк) is a device that uses a powerful magnetic field to confine a hot plasma in the shape of a torus. The tokamak is one of several types of magnetic confinement devices being developed to produce controlled thermonuclear fusion power. As of 2016, it is the leading candidate for a practical fusion reactor."
Related Stories
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: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Friday November 16 2018, @07:48AM (3 children)
All this, from a country that can't even engineer a Brexit? Colour me skeptical.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday November 16 2018, @08:45AM (1 child)
Promises, promises.
Smells like somebody is seriously trying some PR here - 'cause them promises come only 2 day and something since the Chinese EAST tokamak achieved 108K [abc.net.au].
From other sources: China's Nuclear Fusion Machine Just Smashed Temperature Records by Getting 6 Times Hotter Than The Sun
Chinese fusion tool pushes past 100 million degrees [phys.org]
The EAST [wikipedia.org] wiki page states:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday November 16 2018, @08:47AM
The linky missing after "From other sources": https://www.sciencealert.com/china-s-artificial-sun-has-officially-become-hot-enough-for-nuclear-fusion [sciencealert.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @10:36AM
Not only that, the same fsckwits who've spouted this nonsense (UKAEA) arse (sic) such wonderfully competent engineers and scientists that all the nuclear reactors they're planning to build in Britain are to be of foreign design...and built by foreign companies.
I can't just let the Brexit comment sit though, the debacle you're currently seeing is being engineered, a large percentage of the professional political classes in the UK never expected the majority of sheeple to vote to leave the EU, the still current UK prime minister herself is a Europhile and voted against leaving the EU, so it's no small wonder they're deliberately fucking the process up. Of course, the EU are quite happily fucking with the process as well, after all, what good shepherd wants to loose such a profitable fattened flock of sheeple.
Unfortunately for the sheeple, the choice of 'shepherd' is a bit of a moot one, short term the best they can hope for from either choice is to be 'fleeced', long term...it's the pot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Friday November 16 2018, @07:48AM (4 children)
Search for "fusion in 10 years", or "fusion in 20 years", or anything similar. It's just around the corner, and has been since the 1950s.
I once read an amusing but factual article that pointed out: we don't need to reproduce the conditions in the middle of the sun. In the sun, fusion is a comparatively rare event, and on a per-volume basis the sun produces energy roughly equivalent to a good compost heap. What we need is many orders of magnitude harder, and exists no where in nature.
It would be great, if these consortiums can finally construct something that works. Even then, they will discover operational problems that will take further decades to resolve.
Meanwhile, we have mature fission technologies, if we could only get past paranoia and nimbyism. FWIW, I live just a couple of miles from a fission plant, and have zero problems with that.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday November 16 2018, @07:54AM
I saw it in Spidarman 2
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 5, Funny) by c0lo on Friday November 16 2018, @09:04AM (1 child)
You've been tricked! The Tokamak design doesn't have corners!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday November 16 2018, @07:13PM
That's why it is so expensive: You cannot cut corners, because there aren't any.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Friday November 16 2018, @03:38PM
Yes it has, because the funding has been getting severely cut almost every year since those initial 20-year estimates were made
Imagine you want to design and build an airplane that will take 10 years to complete at $100 million year of funding, and then you cut the funding to $50 million per year. It's now going to take more than 20 years to complete. Cut funding in half again, you'll now have to wait more than 40 years. Cut it down to 1 million and you're looking at 1,000 years to complete (minus whatever fraction was completed before you cut funding that far). Fusion funding has suffered even worse than that.
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday November 16 2018, @08:41AM (2 children)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-15/china-attempts-to-create-an-artificial-sun/10495536 [abc.net.au]
That's while it took ITER 30 years to finish the building. It plans to start installing equipment about now and experiments in another 20 years.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aim on Friday November 16 2018, @01:22PM (1 child)
Those chinese 100Million degrees were doubled years ago by JET - the joint european torus, in the UK. That tokamak prepared the way for ITER, where the chinese are participating.
Besides the tokamak, the stellarator (see: Wendelstein 7-X) is quite interesting.
Frankly, with all those start-ups, there's lots of talk - I only wonder if there's real substance behind them. Could it be they need money from investors?
Also, fusion is pretty close - 8 minutes! Just look up there, to the Sun, 8 light-minutes away...
(Score: 2) by legont on Friday November 16 2018, @06:38PM
I've heard an opinion that the initial patents were too broad so nobody considered serious investments. Now they mostly expired so the question is not when but who will be the first.
Similar to airplanes where the US was the leader but ended up in a vicious cycle of patent battles while mostly French and some Germans took the lead.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @08:38PM
Are you fucking kidding me? They'd better not vent massive amounts of heat into the atmosphere!!!!
Now, for the audience, raise your hand if you just started rolling your eyes or started a derisive sneer. What do you think my point was? If you guessed "capture that heat and use the energy" you would be correct. If you thought it was some global warming thing, better luck next time.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 16 2018, @09:28PM
Google "First Wall Problem" or "plasma facing materials".
Smart people doing good science with iffy budgets. Politics!
ITER in France was the 'Great White Hope' when BPX (nicknamed big paper explosion) caught BSD (big science disease, aka massive budget escalation) in the 90's.
Now they seem to be the champion of 4 day workweeks and making physics gender neutral.
Not holding my breath.
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