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from the fusion-is-just-over-the-next-hill dept.
According to Science, a privately funded company called Tri Alpha Energy has shown success holding plasma in a steady state using a field-reversed configuration machine:
In a suburban industrial park south of Los Angeles, researchers have taken a significant step toward mastering nuclear fusion—a process that could provide abundant, cheap, and clean energy. A privately funded company called Tri Alpha Energy has built a machine that forms a ball of superheated gas—at about 10 million degrees Celsius—and holds it steady for 5 milliseconds without decaying away. That may seem a mere blink of an eye, but it is far longer than other efforts with the technique and shows for the first time that it is possible to hold the gas in a steady state—the researchers stopped only when their machine ran out of juice.
"They've succeeded finally in achieving a lifetime limited only by the power available to the system," says particle physicist Burton Richter of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who sits on a board of advisers to Tri Alpha. If the company's scientists can scale the technique up to longer times and higher temperatures, they will reach a stage at which atomic nuclei in the gas collide forcefully enough to fuse together, releasing energy.
...Facilities like the NIF rapidly implode the plasma, relying on its inward inertia to hold it long enough for a burst of fusion reactions. The ITER, in contrast, holds the plasma steady with powerful magnetic fields inside a doughnut-shaped chamber known as a tokamak. Some of the field is provided by a complex network of superconducting magnets, the rest by the plasma itself flowing around the ring like an electric current.
Tri Alpha's machine also produces a doughnut of plasma, but in it the flow of particles in the plasma produces all of the magnetic field holding the plasma together.
Might this technique bring nuclear fusion power closer than being perpetually 20 years away?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tfried on Wednesday August 26 2015, @06:53PM
Fusion isn't just an incremental improvement, it is a game changer.
Is it? Sure, that believe explains the hype behind fusion, but is the hype well-founded? Yes, fuel for fusion reactors will come pretty much for free (not counting the cost of gaining and handling the required tritium), but how much will a working fusion reactor cost to build? How many people will be required to run it? What will be the lifetime of the reactor? How much will it cost to dismantle and dispose of the reactor after EOL? At what scale will fusion reactors work, commercially, what will be the availability per reacotr, and what does that mean wrt cost of power distribution? In other words: What will be the effective price per kWh produced?
I'm absolutely no expert on the topic, but to my best guess, even if fusion is actually going to rule the energy market, eventually, getting from first viable solutions to market dominance will absolutely be an incremental and slow process.
(Score: 1) by ese002 on Wednesday August 26 2015, @07:26PM
Is it? Sure, that believe explains the hype behind fusion, but is the hype well-founded? Yes, fuel for fusion reactors will come pretty much for free
For deuterium-tritium fusion, the deuterium fuel will be quite cheap. The tritium comes form lithium which is a little pricey. Still, the fuel costs will likely be a very small part of total cost of running the plant. Not so much because the fuel is so cheap but because the plant is so very expensive.
The model for fusion power is fission power. Fission plants are big, expensive operations. The fuel costs are nearly negligible but that has never translated to generated power that is "too cheap to meter" despite all the early optimism. Fusion power is much more complicated that fission. That means much higher construction and operating costs. There might be fewer legal challenges but I would not even guarantee that.
I predict that, once fusion is producing useful amounts of net power, it will still be some time before a plant is built that can achieve economic break-even over its lifetime.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday August 26 2015, @07:43PM
Look at the math. You get huge amounts of energy out of a fusion reaction. Once they cross unity gain even small improvements in efficiency will produce truly astounding amounts of energy. And increase they will, they been increasing the power of their containment, lasers, etc. almost as if Moore's Law were regulating them, highly improbable that the limit hits them right at unity gain. The fuel is essentially limitless and even a fairly large cost of construction repays pretty fast when you are generating that kind of power. Energy in large enough quantities that the old rules go out the window. Hydrogen is currently just a joke, it isn't a green energy source it is either an over complicated battery or cracked from natural gas... so just burn the LNG and save money. Fusion means we could generate enough of the stuff at low enough cost to make it practical. And so on. Commercial scale fusion would quickly supplant all other forms of energy. It would lower the cost of energy enough it would destabilize whole industries. For example electricity is the major expense in aluminum production today... what happens when it suddenly gets a LOT less expensive vs other materials? The ripples just keep going.
Which is why I said it isn't going to ever get here, because just about everybody with an investment in anything has a stake in preventing it. It won't just be the fission industry or the coal industry or 'big oil' or even the alt energy / government nexus of power. They will ALL be united against it. They won't just be nuke baiting, they will be telling low info types it does everything from cause cute animals to explode to make people's cell phones get bad reception.
The only silver lining for other energy is that, at least at first, fusion reactors will probably be like fission reactors in that they will only be suitable for base load.
(Score: 1) by tfried on Wednesday August 26 2015, @08:07PM
Look at the math. You get huge amounts of energy out of a fusion reaction.
Well, look at the math: We get ridiculous amounts of energy in the form of solar radiation for free. More than we'll ever need, i.e., for all practical purposes: limitless. The only question is: At what cost can we harvest this energy? In this department, for photovoltaics, we've reached an EROI above 1 decades ago, but we're just starting to get near commercial viability. For fusion, we're at the stage of hoping to achieve an EROI above 1, but getting there simply does not imply commercial viability, yet.
As a side note: Electricity is the major cost factor in producing aluminum, today, but it is not the only environmental impact of aluminum production. And as another side note: Nowadays, energy spot markets in certain regions show prices of electricity close to, and even below zero, regularly.