- 2850 - FUSION REACTOR - the dream of limitless electricity? A new “compact” fusion reactor that could feasibly be built and go online much faster than existing fusion reactor concepts. Construction of a reactor, called “Sparcs“, is being developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a spin off company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, is expected to begin next spring, 2021, and take three or four years to provide us limitless energy.
-------------- 2850 - FUSION REACTOR - the dream of limitless electricity?
- I did a book report in high school 60 years ago about how fusion generated electricity would bring us limitless energy. I should not have gotten a good grade because here we are and it is still “ 5 “ more years until it works. Engineering is theory to practice to production.
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- If the reactor reaches productive fusion, a long process begins for designing and building a power plant. The two key takeaways are improving materials and shrinking costs. A traditional “tokamak” like “ITER” uses a gigantic magnetic field to contain the extraordinarily hot plasma. Sparc uses a “a newer electromagnet technology that uses so-called high temperature superconductors that can produce a much higher magnetic field.
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- That means a smaller amount of plasma, a smaller entire reactor form factor, and perhaps fewer problems with containing and sustaining plasma, which have challenged existing plasma fusion projects.
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- Research programs and government projects around the world have studied the “tokamak, stellarator“, and other fusion reactor design for decades with relatively few milestones reached. The record for sustained fusion time is just a fraction of a second, and one industry joke goes that fusion is always 30 years away. Well , it has been over 60.
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- The fraction of a second on record was also totally subsumed by the massive amount of energy the host reactor used to get up to temperature and stay contained and externally cooled. It is not efficient if it takes more energy in than you get out.
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- Fusion involves heating contained matter to at least or even many times more than the temperature of the sun, and then keeping that reaction at temperature with necessarily difficult containment. But, the promise of almost limitless power for almost limitless time is what keeps people searching.
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- Sparc promises to return 10 times the energy it uses as power output, which is very, very far from the “limitless energy” concept suggested by the sun.
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- NASA too has made tiny, but promising steps toward lattice confinement nuclear fusion. Magnetic fusion requires massive heat and is still not sustainable for energy use.
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- NASA has unlocked nuclear fusion on a tiny scale, with a phenomenon called lattice confinement fusion that takes place in the narrow channels between atoms. In the reaction, the common nuclear fuel deuterium gets trapped in the “empty” atomic space in a solid metal. What results is a “Goldilocks effect” that’s neither supercooled nor superheated, but where atoms reach fusion-level energy.
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- “Lattice confinement” may sound complex, but it's just a mechanism, by comparison, tokamaks like ITER and stellarators use “magnetic confinement.” These are the ways scientists plan to condense and then corral the fantastical amount of energy from the fusion reaction.
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- In a traditional magnetic fusion reaction, extraordinary heat is used to combat atoms’ natural reaction forces and keep them confined in a plasma together. And in another method called “inertial confinement” fuel is compressed to extremely high levels but for only a short, nano-second period of time, when fusion can occur.
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- In the new method, conditions sufficient for fusion are created in the confines of the metal lattice that is held at ambient temperature. While the metal lattice, loaded with deuterium fuel, may initially appear to be at room temperature, the new method creates an energetic environment inside the lattice where individual atoms achieve equivalent fusion-level kinetic energies.
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- The fuel is also far more dense, because that’s how the reaction is triggered. A metal such as erbium is “‘deuterated’ or loaded with deuterium atoms, ‘deuterons,’ packing the fuel a billion times denser than in magnetic confinement (tokamak) fusion reactors. In the new method, a neutron source ‘heats’ or accelerates deuterons sufficiently such that when colliding with a neighboring deuteron it causes fusion reactions.
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- With atoms packed so densely within the atomic lattice of another element, the required energy to induce fusion goes way, way down. It’s aided by the lattice itself, which works to filter which particles get through and pushes the right kinds even closer together. But there’s a huge gulf between individual atoms at energy rates resembling fusion versus a real, commercial-scale application of nuclear fusion.
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- This is an important first step and one that offers an alternative to the spectacular scale of major tokamak and stellarator projects around the world. Even the smallest magnetic confinement fusion reactors require sun-hot fusion temperatures that have continued to create engineering problems.
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- Scientists are doing cutting-edge work on all these kinds of reactors, but a way that didn’t require heating to and maintaining millions of degrees could be a lot simpler. At the very least, it could be suited to applications where a magnetic fusion reactor isn’t feasible.
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--------------------------------------- Other reviews:
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- 2639 - FUSION REACTORS - for our electricity? See Review 2638 about the history of fusion reactors. When I was in high school I learned in physics class that fusion was going to replace fission and our electricity would no longer depend o fossil fuels. Electricity would essentially be free. Well 60 years later and we are still saying that “recent developments” in the world of fusion power are giving scientists newfound optimism for the elusive ‘holy grail’ of energy technologies.
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- 2638 - FUSION - from stars to electricity? How does fusion work in the stars? See the end of this review to learn how fusion works on the planet Earth. If we can get Earth’s nuclear fusion reactors working above a breakeven point they could supply all the electrical energy needs of the planet with no pollution. This review is 8 pages.
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- How Does Fusion Work in the Stars? The fusion in the core of stars can be analyzed as simple hydrogen nuclei, which are protons, fusing together to create heavier elements. Each fusion process up to the element Iron releases some amount of energy. Knowing how much energy our Sun puts out we can estimate the lifetime of our star, how long it will take to “burn up” all of this proton fuel.
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- 1068 - Muon Capture. The cyclotron used to produce the Muons. On October 4, 2009 I attended a lecture at SSU by Tom Banks from Lawrence Berkeley Labs. His topic was experimental physics in Muon Capture. Tom received an award for having the best physics dissertation last year. To understand the experiment of Muon Capture we need to first understand, “ What’s a Muon?”.
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- September 30, 2020 2850
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