[HN Gopher] MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward f...
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MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy
Author : klintcho
Score : 214 points
Date : 2021-09-08 19:50 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| NiceWayToDoIT wrote:
| I remembered that in 2018 Japanese team manage 1200 T peak power.
| http://www.sci-news.com/physics/strongest-magnetic-field-ach...
|
| In comparison, 20T does not look much, but again it is, I wonder
| with the Japanese technique what is the highest continuous
| magnetic field.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Every mass-media article on fusion seems obliged to use "the fuel
| comes from water" line. I wonder if a "just says in mice" style
| harassment campaign would get journalists to stop saying this.
| FredPret wrote:
| It's now only twenty years away!
| dfdx wrote:
| Plenty of skepticism in these comments. I've been following CFS
| for a while and can present a point of view for why this time
| might be different.
|
| Fusion energy was actually making rapid progress in the latter
| half of the twentieth century, going from almost no power output
| in the fifties and sixties to a power output equal to 67% of
| input power with the JET reactor in 1997. By the eighties there
| was plenty of experimental evidence to describe the relationships
| between tokamak parameters and power output. Particularly that
| the gain is proportional to the radius to the power of 1.3 and
| the magnetic field cubed. The main caveat to this relationship
| was that we only had magnets that would go up to 5.5 Tesla, which
| implied we needed a tokamak radius of 6 meters or so in order to
| produce net energy.
|
| Well that 6 meter tokamak was designed in the eighties and is
| currently under construction. ITER, being so large, costs tens of
| billions of dollars and requires international collaboration; the
| size of the project has led to huge budget overruns and long
| delays. Recently however, there have been significant advances in
| high-temperature super conductors that can produce magnetic
| fields large enough that we (theoretically) only need a tokamak
| with a major radius of about 1.5 meters to produce net gain. This
| is where SPARC (the tokamak being built by the company in the
| article) comes in. The general idea is that since we have
| stronger magnets now, we can make a smaller, and therefore
| cheaper tokamak quickly.
|
| Small tokamaks do have downsides, namely that the heat flux
| through the walls of the device is so large that it will damage
| the tokamak. There have been breakthroughs with various divertor
| designs that can mitigate this, but to the best of my knowledge
| I'm not sure that CFS has specified their divertor configuration.
|
| This was just a short summary of the presentation by Dennis Whyte
| given here [0]. I do not work in the fusion community.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I've always wondered: why exactly is ITER so expensive, and
| slow? Is the engineering required at such a standard that it
| should takes decades of planning and construction and tens of
| billions of dollars? The timeline is so dilated (started in
| 1988, first plasma planned for 2025!) it feels like the kind of
| project that's expected to be cancelled from the start.
|
| It just doesn't strike me as obvious that reducing the major
| radius by a few meters would have such a huge impact on
| cost/timelines.
| LeegleechN wrote:
| It's just an absolutely giant construction project. The mass
| and volume of the construction goes as the cube of the major
| radius of the reactor. Back of the envelope, SPARC is
| (6/1.5)^3 = 64 times smaller than ITER. The construction
| budget for SPARC is ~$500M, so ITER being tens of billions is
| in line.
| bigyikes wrote:
| How do projects like LIGO ever get completed? I'm probably
| totally naive here, but I thought LIGO is physically larger
| and has many difficult constraints. The LHC comes to mind
| as well, and that absolutely dwarfs ITER in physical size.
| What's the difference? Dealing with heat output?
| Superconductors are really hard maybe?
| sbierwagen wrote:
| LIGO did take decades to construct, like the LHC.
| According to LIGO's wikipedia article, it was the most
| expensive project ever funded by the NSF in 1994.
| neltnerb wrote:
| LIGO's size is also deceptive, the legs are kilometers
| long but the design is a L with the important bit being
| to vibrationally isolate things, maintain dimensional
| stability, and maintain vacuum.
|
| ITER is likely bigger in terms of volume of concrete or
| actual footprint.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Margin?
|
| Akin's law of spacecraft #29 "To get an accurate estimate of
| final program requirements, multiply the initial time
| estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost
| estimates one place to the right."
| dfdx wrote:
| Anecdotally, ITER was the largest of few options for a fusion
| researcher to run their experiment in a new tokamak.
| Everybody wanted to put their work into it, and as more
| features were added, the more funding it sucked up, leaving
| less money for other experiments, leading to more people
| wanting to put their experiment into ITER. Here's a
| presentation [0] that goes over why SPARC, being so much
| smaller and simpler than ITER could be more likely to
| succeed.
|
| [0] https://library.psfc.mit.edu/catalog/online_pubs/iap/iap2
| 016...
|
| This quote from the presentation summarizes it well:
|
| "The more money that's involved, the less risk people want to
| take. The less risk people want to take, the more they put
| into their designs, to make sure their subsystem is super-
| reliable. The more things they put in, the more expensive the
| project gets. The more expensive it gets, the more
| instruments the scientists want to add, because the cost is
| getting so high that they're afraid there won't be another
| opportunity later on- they figure this is the last train out
| of town. So little by little, the spacecraft becomes gilded.
| And you have these bad dreams about a spacecraft so bulky and
| so heavy it won't get off the ground- never mind the
| overblown cost."
|
| "That boils down to the higher the cost, the more you want to
| protect your investment, so the more money you put into
| lowering your risk. It becomes a vicious cycle." - Rob
| Manning, Chief spacecraft engineer, JPL
| maccam94 wrote:
| This is also why it's exciting to see the huge drop in
| satellite launch costs driven by SpaceX. Your satellite
| design is going to be much different if you have a few
| chances to launch on a $1B rocket per year, vs launching it
| for $10M anytime. Rather than one complicated reliable one,
| you might make 10 simpler ones and buy extra flights to do
| repairs if necessary.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Here's a render of the completed reactor: https://www.iter.or
| g/doc/all/content/com/gallery/media/7%20-... Note human for
| size.
|
| It's all completely bespoke scientific equipment hand made
| for this project only. The cryostat will be the largest
| stainless steel vacuum vessel ever made-- all welded by hand.
|
| After welding, a substantial number of in-vessel components
| have to be installed by threading them through access ports,
| which is also quite a task:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt70mO2nQac
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| That will become a level in an FPS game for sure.
| causality0 wrote:
| Are those calculations of net gain referring to the total
| energy generated, or the amount we can realistically capture
| and put to use?
| yboris wrote:
| A march 2019 talk by Dr. Dennis Whyte of MIT working on SPARC
| https://www.psfc.mit.edu/sparc
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rY6U4wB-oYM
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| This is exciting. Magnetic field strength is a key component for
| enabling magnetic confinement fusion. This is because energy gain
| and power density scales to the 3rd and 4th power with magnetic
| field strength but only ~linearly with reactor size. See
| following equations for more details:
| https://youtu.be/xJ2h3vbOag4?t=306
|
| So, why is this particular announcement exciting? There are 3
| factors:
|
| 1. This is a high temperature superconductor. I can't find any
| references, but as far as I remember the substrate they are using
| needs to be cooled to (WRONG, it was cooled to 20degK, see reply
| by MauranKilom) 60-70 degK to achieve super conductivity. Compare
| to magnets used in ITER which need to be cooled to 4degK. This is
| the difference between using relatively cheap liquid nitrogen vs
| liquid helium.
|
| 2. Field strength of 20 Tesla is significantly higher than 13
| Tesla used in ITER. Given that magnetic confinement fusion scales
| significantly better with field strength vs reactor size, this
| will enable much smaller reactor to be power positive. See
| following links for more details on ITERs magnets:
| https://www.newscientist.com/article/2280763-worlds-most-pow...
| https://www.iter.org/newsline/-/2700
|
| 3. Finally, the magnet was assembled from 16 identical
| subassemblies, each of which used mass manufactured magnetic
| tape. This is significantly cheaper and more scalable than custom
| magnet design/manufacturing used by ITER.
|
| The kicker is how 3 of the factors above interact with the cost
| of the project. Stronger magnets allow smaller viable reactors.
| High temperature superconductors + smaller reactors allow for a
| much simpler and smaller cooling system. Smaller reactors +
| scalable magnet design further drives down the cost. Finally,
| cost of state of art mega projects scales somewhere between 3rd
| and 4th power with the size of the device. Combining all of the
| above factors, SPARC should be here significantly sooner than
| ITER and cost a tiny fraction (I would guesstimate that fraction
| to be between 1/100 and 1/10,000).
|
| edit: typos + looked at the cost of ITER and refined my cost
| fraction guesstimate + corrected some stuff based on the reply by
| MauranKilom.
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Appreciate the rundown of why this is important!
|
| > This is because energy gain and power density scale
| exponentially with magnetic field strength but only linearly
| with reactor size
|
| Nit: It scales polynomially, not exponentially. Specifically
| (according to those formulas) energy gain scales with the cube
| of field strength and power density with the fourth power.
| Still massive scaling indeed, but exponentially would be
| something else.
|
| > as far as I remember the substrate they are using needs to be
| cooled to 60-70 degK to achieve super conductivity
|
| The video in the article shows 20 K. Could of course be that
| higher temperature is feasible and they just played it safe (or
| the video is wrong).
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| You are right on both counts, I will update the comment. 2020
| paper referenced 7degK magnets. I am not sure where I got
| 70degK number from...
| https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
| core/c...
| zardo wrote:
| There is a temperature dependent maximum field strength the
| material can take and keep superconducting. REBCO
| superconducts at 70k, but it can't take much current at that
| temperature.
| jcfrei wrote:
| Lots of negative comments in this thread. I've been following CFS
| for a few years now and I honestly believe this is an historic
| event - probably the beginning of the "fusion age".
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "probably the beginning of the "fusion age"."
|
| I wouldn't call it that, even if there would be a energy gain.
|
| I call it beginning of "fusion age", when we solved fusion ad
| can build them reliable and reproducible - and if we still need
| them by that time, for main energy production.
| phscguy wrote:
| Yeah, any positive news on fusion progress and there always
| seems to be the same set of comments appear that are
| overwhelmingly critical of fusion development. Fusion is not
| well funded and imo has been let down by mismanagement of ITER,
| and despite this keeps making progress.
|
| I feel that fusion is one of humanity's best shots at actively
| reversing climate change, and it is disheartening to see such
| widespread pessimism about it. Yeah it's hard. There are huge
| hurdles in making it economicly viable, but if we can go from
| first powered flight to the moon in 70 years, and put billions
| of transistors on a chip in 50, then maybe we can get fusion
| going. It's clearly possible.
| john_yaya wrote:
| The magnets are a problem to solve, but not the biggest problem
| by far. Solve for neutron embrittlement of the reactor parts, and
| then you'll start to have some credibility.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Update: They have a press release on their website
| https://cfs.energy/news-and-media/cfs-commercial-fusion-powe...
|
| In case others are wondering, looks like this is for SPARC.
|
| FTA: This "MIT-CFS collaboration...on track to build the world's
| first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that
| produces more energy than it consumes. That demonstration device,
| called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025."
|
| CFS: https://cfs.energy/technology
|
| (edit: clarification)
| noobermin wrote:
| University press releases need not be peer reviewed so they can
| get close to saying things that would offend other scientists and
| get away with it. The key phrase in "the most powerful magnetic
| field of its kind ever created on Earth" is "of its kind."
| Creating a many telsa magnetic field has been done in other
| experiments like with lasers[0], only they are physically smaller
| in size and last for nanoseconds, it's just of this size,
| stability and with the high temperature superconductors that
| makes it special. If the claim is just the magnitude of the field
| they've already been beat.
|
| [0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02641-7
|
| Just as a note, the max B field here is 600T
| zardo wrote:
| I think "it's kind" refers specifically to a magnet for plasma
| containment. As this doesn't set the record for a REBCO magnet.
|
| https://nationalmaglab.org/news-events/news/lbc-project-worl...
| shmageggy wrote:
| These university press releases are always very positively
| framed. This one makes the new magnet seem incredibly promising
| and fusion seem like almost an inevitability now, but decades of
| failure have us conditioned for skepticism. What's the catch this
| time?
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| > What's the catch this time?
|
| This is D-T fusion. Which means you have to have T. Which
| currently comes from fission reactor and has a half life of 15
| years.
|
| So the plan is to use a molten salt blanket with Be to breed T.
| But Be isn't scalable for consumption, so maybe lead
| eventually. That's probably do-able, it just slows down the
| rate new reactors can come online since Pb is not as good a
| neutron multiplier.
|
| Once they breed extra T, they have to capture and refine it.
| Hydrogen is very corrosive and hard to work with... and T is
| radioactive hydrogen. Again, probably doable. But guess what?
| Refining spent nuclear waste in fission reactors is also do-
| able. It's also super expensive.
|
| And they still need a containment vessel that will withstand
| the wear and tear from sitting next to a mini hydrogen bomb all
| day.
|
| These challenges are likely all surmountable. But are they
| surmountable AND cheaper than existing nuclear or other energy
| sources? Meh?
| OJFord wrote:
| > This is D-T fusion. Which means you have to have T.
|
| For the other uninitiated, (or far enough out of secondary
| school and didn't take it further!) this seems to refer to
| Deuterium-Tritium fusion, D & T being the isotopes of
| hydrogen with an atomic mass of 2 (1 neutron, 'heavy' but
| stable) and 3 (2 neutrons, radioactive) respectively.
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| > But are they surmountable AND cheaper than existing nuclear
| or other energy sources?
|
| DT fusion solves the two biggest arguments that are always
| raised by nuclear energy opponents: storage of nuclear waste
| (it doesn't produce high-level waste) and safety (it's not
| perfect but it can't explode). I wouldn't call it a "meh",
| even if it comes off as much more expensive than fission.
| danans wrote:
| > I wouldn't call it a "meh", even if it comes off as much
| more expensive than fission.
|
| It's not competing with fission, though. It's competing
| with renewables + storage + load shifting + efficiency.
| Compared to those, it might indeed be "meh".
| rnhmjoj wrote:
| Agreed, but grid and storage technology that will
| completely solve the renewable intermittence is probably
| as far in the future as commercial fusion reactors.
| UnFleshedOne wrote:
| In the grid this would take role of coal or gas plants
| for base load, no?
| speed_spread wrote:
| It sounds like the T production chain might itself be quite
| messy. Molten isotopes salt and lead? How much of that
| stuff would you need? What do you do with when it goes bad?
| It may not go boom Chernobyl-style, but it's still far from
| the birds-in-the-sky deuterium-from-the-sea fusion dream.
| scythe wrote:
| The bad zone of radioactive byproducts is the half life
| between 10 and 1000000 years. Shorter and you can wait it
| out. Longer and the activity is low enough to ignore when
| it's spread out. When designing a fusion reactor, you can
| usually choose components that won't generate these
| undesirable nuclides. But in fission, many products are
| generated, so persistent contamination is practically
| impossible to avoid.
| [deleted]
| stormbrew wrote:
| I'm not sure it's possible for "lay people" (of which I am one)
| to recognize the difference between a very slow success and
| "decades of failure".
|
| Very little is invested into fusion power as a project,
| overall. So advancements seem to come when outside influences
| cause breakthroughs.
|
| I wonder how different the world would have been if it had for
| whatever reason been easier to produce fusion power than a
| fusion bomb. Military investment into the bomb would have
| probably pushed things forward a lot quicker. As is, the US
| military built thermonuclear bombs _very_ quickly and then the
| appetite for advancement just dried up.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| You could say that military investment into fusion and
| fission bombs was groundwork for everything done since. On
| the other hand, the fact that nuclear power started with
| bombs probably contributed to it falling out of favor and
| being regulated to irrelevance (even though hydrocarbons have
| been responsible for a lot more deaths and environmental
| damage).
| phkahler wrote:
| >> What's the catch this time?
|
| There are a bunch of issues still to be resolved. Higher magnet
| strength is/was just one of many.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Agreed. Whilst it may well be the largest, highest-field "only"
| high Tc superconductor design in the world, it's definitely not
| the highest-field high Tc superconducting magnet -- I believe
| that honour belongs to another bit of MIT with a 1.3 GHz NMR
| machine [1] (but I do remember something about Bruker
| collaborating with the US's National Magnet Lab and building a
| 30T machine -- I can't easily find a link).
|
| I really wish that press release would put the link to the
| paper at the top -- I found it very hard to work out what was
| actually new!
|
| [1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6926794
| bb88 wrote:
| This was a 32T field created, not sure if it's the same, but
| similar.
|
| https://english.cas.cn/newsroom/research_news/tech/201912/t2.
| ..
|
| Googling "30T magnetic field" shows some papers that have
| apparently "pulsed" 30T.
| apendleton wrote:
| I think the framing of what's happened so far as "failure" is
| probably the main thing responsible for this perception. It's
| true that progress has been slower than many had hoped and the
| most optimistic had projected, but "failure" sort suggests that
| the things the research community have been trying haven't
| represented meaningful progress towards the goal of power
| production, which isn't the case.
|
| Q (the ratio of energy out to energy in) has improved by about
| four orders of magnitude since controlled fusion was first
| achieved, and it's been a slow, at least reasonably steady
| march since the middle of the 20th century to achieve that
| progress. The current record-holding Q for magnetic confinement
| is around 0.67, so we need well under one more order of
| magnitude to get to the point of "theoretical break-even" (Q>1)
| -- we're most of the way there. A plant just barely better than
| break-even probably wouldn't be commercially viable, though,
| and while estimates vary, that point is probably somewhere in
| the 10-30 range, so we have maybe another order of magnitude to
| go after break-even. I don't think there's anything to suggest
| that after decades of progress we'll suddenly stop being able
| to make more.
|
| It's true that things have slowed down somewhat in the last
| 10-15 years, but most of the blame there goes to the need, in
| order to continue moving forward, to build bigger and bigger
| reactors, and the need to divert resources to that goal (mostly
| ITER). To the extent that promises of going faster have turned
| out to be hot air, it seems like they've mostly been in the
| form of novel approaches that do fusion in some fundamental new
| way that avoids the need to build an ITER-like thing. These
| approaches seem to often involve lots of unknowns, and end up
| getting bogged down in practical issues once they're actually
| tried (surprise plasma instabilities and so on).
|
| Recent advances in materials science (mostly REBCO magnets) and
| computing, though, offer a path to progress on the regular,
| bog-standard flavor of magnetic confinement fusion (tokamaks)
| on a smaller scale -- that's what this is. The nice thing about
| that is that the plasma physics here are very well understood,
| and have been heavily researched using conventional/not-super-
| conducting magnets that won't ever achieve break-even, but
| create identical plasma conditions inside the reactor (MIT
| Alcator C-Mod is effectively the conventional-magnet
| predecessor to this project). Up until now, the only real
| question was whether or not they could build strong-enough
| REBCO magnets, and now they have, so this is all good news and
| reason for optimism.
|
| Of course, commercial viability is a whole other question
| involving lots of questions besides physics. But the physics
| here seem to not be in serious doubt, unlike some of the
| proposals from other startups that are more exotic.
| zardo wrote:
| Would stellarators see the same benefits as tokomaks from
| higher field strength magnets?
| apendleton wrote:
| Potentially yes, though stellarator research in general
| seems to be somewhat less mature than tokamak research.
| There's an outfit called Type One Energy, though, that
| looks to me like they're essentially CFS but for
| stellarators (i.e., take established stellarator designs
| but do them with HTS magnets):
| https://www.typeoneenergy.com/ . Their academic heritage
| seems to come out of the University of Wisconsin instead of
| MIT.
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| Ah, a university press release.
|
| Nah.
| sdeyerle wrote:
| In the original proposal for the ARC reactor, they were proposing
| making the magnet separable so the top and bottom of the reactor
| could be separated and the vacuum vessel removed. (See pg. 5 of
| https://library.psfc.mit.edu/catalog/reports/2010/15ja/15ja0...)
|
| It doesn't look like they are targeting that here. Does anyone
| know if that is ARC (not SPARC) specific, or if that has been
| abandoned?
| nielsbot wrote:
| The article says this is from an "MIT-CFS collaboration" which
| is "on track to build the world's first fusion device that can
| create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it
| consumes. That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted
| for completion in 2025."
|
| So, sounds like it's for SPARC.
| sdeyerle wrote:
| Yeah, they are definitely building SPARC. I had just been
| under the impression they were trying to do the separable
| magnets in SPARC, and was curious if I misunderstood their
| plan or if their plan had changed.
| nielsbot wrote:
| Yeah--I misread your question. :)
| [deleted]
| dfdz wrote:
| The thumbnail of the youtube video made me laugh
|
| Smaller. Smarter. Sooner. 2018
|
| Currently 2021 where is my fusion energy? But this time must be
| different, after this advance we are only a few years away from
| fusion energy?
| bwestergard wrote:
| They seem to have made two claims. First, that they have a
| qualitatively different design that requires a significantly
| stronger magnetic field. Second, that they could build a magnet
| that produces such a field.
|
| They are now claiming to have done the latter. Are you
| skeptical of the new design? Or do you think it does not
| represent as significant a departure from earlier designs as
| they claim?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| The running joke has always been that "Fusion is 20 years
| away," and has been, for the last 50 years.
|
| I really want this to work. I am a bit concerned, with how "the
| old guard" will react, once we have successful, productive,
| fusion.
|
| I foresee an astroturf NIMBY campaign against construction of
| fusion plants.
| phicoh wrote:
| At the moment it is very far for clear that fusion will be
| cost effective. The article says this about the fuel of
| fusion: "The fuel used to create fusion energy comes from
| water, and "the Earth is full of water -- it's a nearly
| unlimited resource. [...]"
|
| They forgot to say that it is not the H2O that comes out of
| your tap. The earth is especially not full of tritium.
| apendleton wrote:
| The plan is for them to breed their own tritium, though, so
| the consumables coming in the front door would just be
| deuterium and lithium, both of which (while less common
| than tap water) are not rare.
| rory wrote:
| The fuel for fission comes from rocks. The Earth is full of
| rocks!
| hutzlibu wrote:
| It's like saying the ocean is full of gold for anyone to
| pick up. It is. But not worth picking up with the very low
| concentration.
| Krasnol wrote:
| You don't need an astroturf.
|
| Nuclear ruined it's own reputation for generations though
| hopeful not as long as they'll have to care for the waste we
| already have.
| soperj wrote:
| It wasn't a joke, it was always based on an adequate level of
| funding. Everything is always off in the future if it never
| gets funded.
| JackFr wrote:
| Ah yes, and how much money? The answer always seems to be
| "More".
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Please consult this graphic from 1976 if you are actually
| interested in the answer.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png
| drdeca wrote:
| Could you clarify how to read this chart? The y axis is,
| funding given different plans? Or.. I got the impression
| that this is meant to depict a relationship between when
| practical fusion would be developed and how much funding
| it receives, but I don't see how to get that from the
| chart.
|
| Also, not sure why imgur has that image marked as adult
| content.
| apendleton wrote:
| I mean, yes, obviously if the criticism is that they're
| getting too little money, clearly they want more. Some
| technologies are fundamentally expensive to develop (the
| Apollo program, the Manhattan project, etc.). That
| doesn't mean the people saying so are automatically
| charlatans, especially given that they've never gotten
| what they've asked for -- it's not like some bomber
| development project where they get what they want and
| then keep coming back for more. The relatively paltry
| amounts the US has been devoting to fusion energy
| research are lower than any of the scenarios laid out in
| a 1976 DOE planning document[1] about what it would take
| to achieve fusion power, and lower even than just
| continuing at 1970s levels (a plan they labeled in that
| document as "fusion never").
|
| [1] https://books.google.com/books?id=KSA_AAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA
| 234&ots...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Per a comment by nielsbot, they're saying 2025. So, four
| years away, not 20. That's progress...
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| Fusion is the Linux Desktop of energy projects.
| Seanambers wrote:
| If anyone have not seen it i recommend this video as a primer for
| fusion technology, it's from MIT.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0KuAx1COEk
|
| The video thouches upon magnetic fields and its relevance at this
| time mark ; https://youtu.be/L0KuAx1COEk?t=2880
| freeopinion wrote:
| Let me know when the advance comes from Elizabethtown Community
| and Technical College. That would probably be affordable to put
| in production.
| kgarten wrote:
| Better title: Startup builds strong magnet that might be useful
| for a fusion plant.
| criticaltinker wrote:
| The advances enable a magnetic field strength that would
| otherwise require 40x more volume using conventional technology -
| doesn't the reduced volume imply the plasma temperature would
| also increase significantly? Or is the magnetic field strong
| enough to protect the walls of the chamber?
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| My understanding is that the volume of the magnet is smaller
| and thus the entire reactor size goes down significantly
| leading to lower cost.
|
| ITER was designed to use weaker electromagnets and therefore
| needs a massive building and tons of cranes and a massive
| budget.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The ARC reactor design has 10x the volumetric power density
| of ITER.
|
| Unfortunately, the ARC design also had 40x worse power
| density than a PWR primary reactor vessel.
| apendleton wrote:
| Is that the right metric? You wouldn't need to build a huge
| containment structure around it like you would for a PWR,
| so I'd imagine the power density of the plant as a whole
| wouldn't be anywhere near 40x worse. Why focus just on the
| primary reactor vessel?
| mzs wrote:
| SPARC yttrium barium copper oxide (YBCO) high temp (10-70K)
| superconducting magnets
| pcj-github wrote:
| If we had "an inexhaustible, carbon-free source of energy that
| you can deploy anywhere and at any time" we'd wreck the planet
| faster than we already are... I guess at least a few could escape
| though.
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