'Now Fusion Has a Chance': New MIT Research Claims Fusion Power's 'Practicality' Has Been Proven (futurism.com) 90
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More than two years since MIT claimed its scientists achieved a breakthrough in fusion energy, the university is claiming that new research "confirms" that the magnet-based design used in those tests isn't just impressive in a lab setting, but is practical and economically viable, too.
These findings come from a comprehensive report which features six separate [peer-reviewed] studies published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity this month, assessing the feasibility of the superconductor magnets used by MIT scientists in their landmark test conducted in September 2021.
"Together, the papers describe the design and fabrication of the magnet and the diagnostic equipment needed to evaluate its performance," MIT announced, "as well as the lessons learned from the process.
"Overall, the team found, the predictions and computer modeling were spot-on, verifying that the magnet's unique design elements could serve as the foundation for a fusion power plant." The successful test of the magnet, says Hitachi America Professor of Engineering Dennis Whyte, who recently stepped down as director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was "the most important thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research." Before the [2021] demonstration, the best-available superconducting magnets were powerful enough to potentially achieve fusion energy — but only at sizes and costs that could never be practical or economically viable. Then, when the tests showed the practicality of such a strong magnet at a greatly reduced size, "overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day," Whyte says.
"Now fusion has a chance," Whyte adds
These findings come from a comprehensive report which features six separate [peer-reviewed] studies published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity this month, assessing the feasibility of the superconductor magnets used by MIT scientists in their landmark test conducted in September 2021.
"Together, the papers describe the design and fabrication of the magnet and the diagnostic equipment needed to evaluate its performance," MIT announced, "as well as the lessons learned from the process.
"Overall, the team found, the predictions and computer modeling were spot-on, verifying that the magnet's unique design elements could serve as the foundation for a fusion power plant." The successful test of the magnet, says Hitachi America Professor of Engineering Dennis Whyte, who recently stepped down as director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was "the most important thing, in my opinion, in the last 30 years of fusion research." Before the [2021] demonstration, the best-available superconducting magnets were powerful enough to potentially achieve fusion energy — but only at sizes and costs that could never be practical or economically viable. Then, when the tests showed the practicality of such a strong magnet at a greatly reduced size, "overnight, it basically changed the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40 in one day," Whyte says.
"Now fusion has a chance," Whyte adds
Re:Is nuclear waste disposal possible? (Score:4, Funny)
No. And the question has no point: pre-existing nuclear waste is a fake problem that anti-nooks pretend exists.
I guess your meds delivery is running late, eh?
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Re: Is nuclear waste disposal possible? (Score:2)
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No, he is right. All the nuclear waste produced in total could fit in 1 Olympic sized swimming pool 4ft deep.
Sure. If you add a couple of pretty large buildings for the cooling and 20m or so of concrete for shielding and a few ultra-reliable power stations to keep the cooling running. And if that swimming pool ever loses cooling and catches fire, it is pretty much over for human life on this planet.
You are really utterly and completely stupid.
LOL, what? Maybe watch less cartoons, and learn some, you know, actual science? Nuclear fuel needs cooling only for five years or so, and even then the cooling takes the form of "just dump it in a pool of water", with no uhhh... "ultra-reliable power stations" involved, much less a, what, fucking few?! of them? Shielding? 20 meters? more like a meter or two of water covering those rods, and workers above those pools just walk around them with no additional protection needed. Also, radioactive waste is not s
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The modus operandi of "gweihir" is to post complete nonsense and when confronted with actual facts start throwing insults!
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Nope. Spend fuel needs long-term cooling to be save (not a lot, but it _must_ not fail) and it cannot all be dumped into one place savely. I am not making anything up. Look, for example, an the "Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository" for how it actually needs to be done and then tell me again it can all be just put into a not cooled not secured "swimming pool".
You think these people would go to all this effort if it wasn't needed? No, they would not. You people are really the dumbest shits around.
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Idiot very much?
You could read up the stuff on wikipedia.
They do decay quite quickly.
lolz
Re:Is nuclear waste disposal possible? (Score:5, Informative)
While I admit, the "swimming pool 4 ft deep" is most likely just reactor rods, possibly for the US only, or the contents of cooling pools, etc... Your "20 m of concrete for shielding" and everything else is far more off base and indicates that you haven't actually researched this stuff.
You might want to double check things before you call others stupid, when you may be making stupid statements in your own post.
1. Not even reactor safety domes is 20m thick. Concrete is actually pretty poor shielding - water does much better.
2. Looses cooling and catches fire - "pretty much over for human life on this planet"? Completely wrong. The worst case with cooling ponds happened in Japan, and you may not have noticed this, but Japan is still occupied today.
Okay, your typical spent fuel pool [wikipedia.org] is 12m deep, with the bottom 4.3m equipped with storage racks to hold the fuel assemblies.
I'm going to figure that it isn't "4 foot deep" for the rods, but the 4.3M. Your typical reactor rod is ~160 inches, which is 4M. Diameter is listed as 1cm. Olympic size swimming pool is 50x25 meters*. 1,250 square meters, each rod takes 0.0001 square meters = 12.5M reactor rods. Oof. At this point I'm going to figure that the "olympic sized" cooling pond is actually the regulation 12m deep, with an extra couple meters of water on the sides so the concrete isn't being heavily irradiated. ... That's going to take some BIG pipes.
It's incredibly hard to find out how much heat a waste rod is outputting, besides the fact that it's always dropping over time.
But let's say it's 100W. [world-nuclear.org] It'd be higher for fresher rods, lower for older. But at 51k rods for 1GW, that's basically 20kW per rod, while active in the reactor. You hit 1% within days of being shutdown, and it keeps going from there.
But 12.5M rods is still a lot, so we're looking at 1.25GW of power. Which is actually a respectable amount. Keep in mind that we're looking at 245 1GW reactor's worth of rods.
It takes ~2.2MJ of energy to evaporate 1L of water. The waste is producing 1.25GJ/second. That's enough to evaporate 568L/second. 150 gallons per second.
Honestly, at this point you slap a pressure container around it and use it to generate power.
Things get a lot easier if the rods are closer to 10W than 100W, of course.
Also, this discounts any heat radiated out of the floor and walls of the pool, as well as non-evaporative heat radiation.
*This source [scientificamerican.com] says that the US nuclear industry has produced enough fuel rods to "cover a football field 7 yards deep" - 120x53.3 yards = 6.4k square yards, should be obvious that 45k cubic yards is a lot more than 1.25k cubic meters. So pretty much has to be "rods in US cooling pools".
Re:Is nuclear waste disposal possible? (Score:4, Informative)
Finally! [researchgate.net]
Found a reference. It's ~600 watts, average case, after 5 years. per m^3 of fuel rod. Given that your average fuel rod will be less than 0.0004 m^3, you're looking at 0.24 watts per fuel rod.
We're down to 3MW, around the chinese plan to use a fuel waste pool as a domestic heating supply.
Around 5k liters of water per hour. about 1320 gallons/hour.
You'd want a 1.5" PVC pipe, schedule 40, and a pump to match. Which I'm pretty sure you'd have just from wanting to fill the pool in the first place in a decent amount of time.
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You can't store the rods that densely though, so the actual space needed for them is much greater. Cooling pools are one of the most frequent sources of accidents at nuclear plants too.
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The worst case with cooling ponds happened in Japan, and you may not have noticed this, but Japan is still occupied today.
Remember how they emergency-airlifted a very large, very heavy concrete pump from Germany (a "Putzmeister") to get water into that spent fuel pool because they feared losing Tokyo if it caught fire? Obviously, you do not. Dumb fuck.
Here is are a few fucking references:
https://www.theatlantic.com/te... [theatlantic.com]
http://service.putzmeisteramer... [putzmeisteramerica.com]
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Nice work on constructing a strawman, then attacking it. You dumb fucker. Ever consider that I might be summarizing?
Especially note how you're fucking stupid, you didn't even understand your references:
To help keep the reactors cool, TEPCO is bringing in five boom trucks from Putzmeister Germany including the eye-popping 70Z-meter, which is nicknamed "the Juggernaut."
1. They brought in 5 of them (unless plans changed), not 1.
2. This is the important bit: The stated use is for the reactors, not the cooling ponds.
the Juggernaut can shoot 700 gallons of water per minute without requiring workers to get close to the plant's core.
3. The primary goal here was reach, not volume.
The 2nd article does mention the cooling pools - but again, already damaged, and they were using it to keep th
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Well, that nicely shows you are reading exactly what you want do read. Dumb fuck. If they had not gotten that first Putzmeister into place fast, they would have lost that pool and, with the wrong wind, Tokyo on top of that. You are blanking that all out. Dumb fuck. What happened there is that they got _very_ lucky with that pool in several regards. No worst-case in sight unless you are a dumb fuck. And that was just the spend fuel from one reactor for a small part of its operational life. Incidentally, I ju
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You're a real dumb fucker if you think that calling people names is going to convince them. In my case, it just means that I call you names as well.
The articles don't suggest that Tokyo would have been "lost" at all. Reading comprehension, you lack it. They might have lost more people to the radiation if they'd caught fire than they did IRL to the evacuation. Yes, the evacuation killed more people than the accident did. Of course, it's all a rounding error compared to the actual Tsunami.
If they hadn't
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All the nuclear waste produced in total could fit in 1 Olympic sized swimming pool 4ft deep.
Nope. A football field seven yards deep [scientificamerican.com].
All told, the nuclear reactors in the U.S. produce more than 2,000 metric tons of radioactive waste a year, according to the DoE—and most of it ends up sitting on-site because there is nowhere else to put it. "When we remove fuel from the core after its final usage, we store it in a pool on site. We have the capacity to store it there for many years," says Bryan Dolan, vice president of nuclear development at Duke Energy Corp., which operates three nuclear power plants in South Carolina. The amount of space required to store it, after all, is "incredibly small."
In fact, the U.S. nuclear industry has produced roughly 64,000 metric tons (one metric ton equals 1.1 U.S. tons) of radioactive used fuel rods in total or, in the words of NEI, enough "to cover a football field about seven yards deep." (Of course, actually concentrating rods this way would set off a nuclear chain reaction.)
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He's not. Even if the volume of "all the nuiclear waste" (who has exact numbers anyway?) would be smaller than the olympic pool it would reach critical mass before the pool was filled.
Cool! Does it mean we can harvest energy from it?
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We're actually looking into that:
https://www.euronuclear.org/ne... [euronuclear.org]
Note, I initially thought that the Chinese were looking to do that - but I think it was a mistranslation in an article I read a while ago. Instead, they're looking to make reactors that only produce low pressure steam for district heating. Not using waste rods though, but because they're only producing heat, they don't need the pressure, so can be a lot safer - working at almost atmospheric pressures.
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All nuclear waste doesn't consist of spent fuel rods. There's literally tons of additional stuff of varying degrees of dangerous contamination and exposure that can't be just tossed into the local dump.
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No. And the question has no point: pre-existing nuclear waste is a fake problem that anti-nooks pretend exists.
9600 year storage. Nope, real problem.
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Would it be possible to use fusion to dispose of pre-existing nuclear waste?
Pre existing nuclear waste is buried and should stay buried. I see no compelling reason to dig it up as it poses no risk. It will accomplish nothing and would pose a hazard in case it is not handled properly or involved in some accident.
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Pre existing nuclear waste is buried
Not really. There's quite a lot of it stored in pools [nrc.gov]. Which were originally intended to be temporary.
Re: Is nuclear waste disposal possible? (Score:2)
Once thoruim reactors are live we can just dump it in there.
Still waiting for my thin film solar cells (Score:2)
Once I got those,, I'll look into a thorium reactor for my garden shed.
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So, never then.
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Iron is the dividing line for stars - above iron, thing decay into iron, below iron things can be fused ito iron. We get heavier elements from supernovas, because their creation requires a lot of energy instead of releasing energy in normal stellar processes.
If you're looking at extracting power from nuclear waste, you need to harness the energy it releases as it decays.
Re:Is nuclear waste disposal possible? (Score:5, Informative)
Not fusion. There are fission designs that could burn preexisting nuclear waste, but nobody is building them (that I know of). One example that claims this capability is the Molten Salt Reactor. (Well, at least some of them. That's a whole family of fission reactor designs.)
P.S. Contra a different response, it's not a fake problem, but there are solutions. It's just that nobody is plunking for them. So the waste gets stored in "temporary holding areas", which were never intended for long term storage.
Re: Is nuclear waste disposal possible? (Score:2)
Actually they are being built. The first one is about to be built in China, and multiple companies are gearing up for building modular reactors.
Poland recently announced an SMR as well.
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People have tried building molten salt and other types of reactor that can consume spent fuel, but they all turned into expensive fiascos and there is no commercial interest in throwing good money after bad.
Yes, it can. (Score:5, Interesting)
Would it be possible to use fusion to dispose of pre-existing nuclear waste?
The answer is yes, but not in the way you think.
Abundant energy opens up the possibility of recycling by plasma separation. Basically, you vaporize any matter and create a plasma, then force the plasma into a separation channel, such as a magnetic field, where the different elements and the different isotopes of each element go to different cachements.
Much of nuclear waste is unburned fuel, which if separated and remixed would provide for more fuel without having to mine more uranium.
Of the remainder, much of it could be of use in research or medical applications if it could be purified, and plasma separation would do that handily.
And finally, if the unneeded radioactive isotopes could be concentrated, the safe storage problem becomes easier. Concentrate all the radioactive isotope in one batch, let it go 1 half life, then separate and concentrate for a new batch. Instead of waiting dozens of half lives for a huge amount of waste to become safe, you wait dozens of half lives and get half as much waste at each iteration.
I've often wondered if fusion separation could be used to recover, for example, copper and gold from human garbage. IIRC, the Kennecott copper mine [wikipedia.org] ore is 0.6% copper, and is scheduled to run out in 2032. E-waste probable has more than that in copper, and probably other useful elements. Fusion separation would be wildly energy intensive, but the heat energy required might be able to be recovered to help power earlier sections of the process.
Fusion could supply that energy.
For comparison, hydrogen bombs are roughly 1000 times the power of the first atomic bombs - that's how much energy is available if we could figure out how to tap it.
Re:Yes, it can. (Score:4, Informative)
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No, you'd need a sub-critical fast reactor for that. Basically a fast reactor with an external neutron source. You could use D-T fusion as the neutron source, though.
Now only . . . (Score:2)
Now, with this breakthrough, commercial fusions only 50 years away!
hawk
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It's always been a certain dollar amount of research effort away. A dollar amount that was cancelled in the 1970s. In fact, the progress made given the amount of cancelled money is amazing. It's not like there hasn't been progress.
References:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EF... [twimg.com]
https://www.reddit.com/media?u... [reddit.com]
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Keep in mind that today's most highly funded effort -- ITER .. is a scaled down version of what was planned to be built in the 80s.
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I read an article that explained it as "X years away if Y% of GDP was spent every year." If that Y number were maintained since the beginning of fusion research to now, we would already have it. The Y number has been cut in terms of absolute terms, not to mention in terms of GDP, so of course X has increased. Also, if funding was cut a little, it may slow down research, but if you cut a lot, you cause labs to shut down, researchers to move to other fields, etc. so the crippling effects are compounded. T
Re:Now only . . . (Score:5, Informative)
These comments are so predictable, from people who have no understanding.
The origin of this notion of "fusion is always said to be close, but it never shows up!" dates back to the progression leading up to, and past, ZETA in 1957. Russia had just launched Sputnik, embarrassing the west, in this ideological war of civilizations. But ZETA offered hope from a PR perspective: "Oh, sure, you launched a satellite, but we just invented limitless power!"
The problem was that the early ZETA numbers turned out to be wrong due to measurement errors. At the time, there was literally no way anyone could hope to model fusion on a computer, and very little understanding of what they were doing in general beyond a basic particle physics standpoint. The steady increasing understanding of what went wrong was then compounded over the next couple decades by more projects which increasingly showed that the barriers to overcome for different fusion mechanisms were much greater than expected.
We now understand all this, and since the advent of modern computing, we can model it all readily (except for some edge cases, not applicable to e.g. tokamaks). And that's what's being discussed here: bog standard tokamak fusion. This isn't new ground. We know how tokamaks work. We know that if you build them big enough, you can get sufficiently net-energy-positive fusion. It's that "big enough" - and doing so economically - that's always been the barrier.
However, in recent decades - well after the start of ITER (and thus not employed in its design) - there was a massive change on the scene: the commercial bulk availability of room temperature superconducting films. These allow for magnets with double the field strength, which basically lets you scale down the size of a commercially viable reactor by an order of magnitude. And not only that, but they offer a whole host of other advantages, including easier / cheaper cooling, easier ability to open up the reactor to get inside to replace the liner, and so forth.
It's a complete game changer for the industry. That doesn't mean "viable nuclear power overnight". Heck, it doesn't even prove economic viability at all - you can't predict that really well in advance. But what it does mean is that, yes, at a reasonable scale, we can build productive electricity-genereating fusion reactors. This isn't some exotic, "This One Weird Trick Lets You Make A Great Fusion Reactor" thing - this is well established, well researched physics here. Just with better magnets. And those better magnets makes a *huge* difference.
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(To be fair, it's not JUST the magnets that have advanced - liners, cooling/breeding blankets, and basically everything have advanced over the years. But the magnets are the really big deal)
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However, in recent decades - well after the start of ITER (and thus not employed in its design) - there was a massive change on the scene: the commercial bulk availability of room temperature superconducting films. These allow for magnets with double the field strength, which basically lets you scale down the size of a commercially viable reactor by an order of magnitude. And not only that, but they offer a whole host of other advantages, including easier / cheaper cooling, easier ability to open up the reactor to get inside to replace the liner, and so forth.
It's a complete game changer for the industry. That doesn't mean "viable nuclear power overnight". Heck, it doesn't even prove economic viability at all - you can't predict that really well in advance. But what it does mean is that, yes, at a reasonable scale, we can build productive electricity-genereating fusion reactors. This isn't some exotic, "This One Weird Trick Lets You Make A Great Fusion Reactor" thing - this is well established, well researched physics here. Just with better magnets. And those better magnets makes a *huge* difference.
You meant to say "high-temperature" superconducting, not "room temperature" -- we're still talking 100 Kelvin, give or take. But being able to use cheap, easily-produced liquid nitrogen for cooling rather than liquid helium is a big deal, yes.
Re:Now only . . . (Score:4, Funny)
Ugh, yes. I shuold porfraed beter.
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At the time, there was literally no way anyone could hope to model fusion on a computer, and very little understanding of what they were doing in general beyond a basic particle physics standpoint.
That, in a nutshell, describes my father's career. He went from programming an IBM 704 in the 50s/60s simulating particles zipping around an accelerator at UW to simulating fusion machines at ORNL in the 60s/70s/80s.
Just around the corner (Score:2)
I look forward to my fusion powered jet pack and flying car.
Maybe another 10 years.
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Can it make 1.21 jigawatts in a car? Asking for a friend.
Not really (Score:2)
Fusion had "a chance" for quite some time. But this result here is based on simulation and theory and basically an educated guess, not much more. We will know when the first real-sized prototype has produced energy for 10 years or so. That is still quite some time (50 year or more) away.
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That is only because you are clueless and hence simply get _everything_ wrong. You are also too arrogant to ever notice and learn about actual reality.
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Fusion had "a chance" for quite some time. But this result here is based on simulation and theory and basically an educated guess, not much more.
if the tech being talked about is ReBCO high-temperature superconducting tape, and the person talking about it is from MIT? They're well beyond simulation and theory. They built a full-scale magnet back in 2021 and generated a 20 Tesla field - and kept it at that strength for over 5 hours.
Still 10 Years Away (Score:2)
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Several companies are claiming to have commercial fusion reactors on the way by 2030-2031. One company has already signed a contract to provide Microsoft with power from a fusion reactor by 2028.
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We are seeing it, right now. The magnets were always the limiting factor. Just like batteries are the limiting factor for EVs.
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Also keep in mind that one of the leaders in the fusion space - Commonwealth Fusion - collaborates with MIT. It is definitely something Commonwealth will use in the future, and it may well be an iteration on work that Commonwealth has already done in the recent past.
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We are seeing it, right now.
By seeing it we mean a working economically feasible reactor, not promises that will magically extend by 10 years and billions of dollars.
Bill gates was supposed to have some advanced reactor in Wyoming, now dead. Plenty of time for this Fusion project to get cancelled.
There are lots of issues beyond magnets.
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hahaha no. Having no means to contain a plasma of sufficient temperature for a sufficient time using less energy than the plasma produces continues to be the issue.
Re: Still 10 Years Away (Score:2)
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No, MIT magnets have done nothing of the sort. No fusion in plasma at temperature sustained producing net power has been done. All hand waving theorectical B.S.
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Next step.. (Score:2)
Shrink it until it can fit in a 17.5 meter tall bipedal robot, use it to power such robot and make sure it is green and mono-eyed, because having two eyes would be too expensive.
4 years to fusion-powered ChatGPT (Score:2)
A Step Back? (Score:2)
Not so sure about economical (Score:2)
The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) for solar and wind has been dropping for years and will continue to drop. Fusion using high tech devices and then thermal conversion of heat to electricity is never going to compete unless you can't use wind or solar.
About the only way fusion is going to compete economically against increasingly cheap solar and wind is if they use a fusion reaction that allows direct conversion of fusion to electricity.
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The cost of nuclear is cheaper and simpler in the long term
Sure, as long as you don't account for the impact of emissions, or the cost of cleaning them up. If you do a complete cradle to grave analysis, that isn't true at all, and that's the only kind of analysis that matters. IOW, nuclear is neither cheaper nor simpler and you're parroting lies.
I like it. (Score:1)
Proven...in theory (Score:2)
This research is fantastic...but it is still being done in a university lab.
To prove that it's practical and economically viable, it will be necessary to build actual fusion reactors and start generating electricity at a cost that can compete with existing methods. It's not enough to "prove" that it "could" be viable.
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The attribution is a bit squishy in this case. There's a significant component coming from MIT - academia. But that goes hand-in-hand with a private spin-off company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems [cfs.energy], who is actually building the demonstration reactor [cfs.energy].
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This is a common scenario. The "practicality" will be demonstrated *only* after this company moves past the startup phase and becomes self-sustaining financially, without funding from outside sources.
can't fuel a working power plant (Score:1)
To power the USA, we'd need 3.7 metric tons of tritium a year. Right now CANDU reactors all together make 100 grams a year rhat can be actually reclaimed though 8.5 kg produced.. There won't even be enough to power experimental reactors that can't and won't make breakeven in next 25 years. The world's 20 kg will be eaten up by ITER, NIF and all the rest... and then the fusion research opportunity is gone.
And then there are Helion who claim they won't need tritium because they'll do D-D at five times the t
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That idea of using a lithium blanket is starting to look like baloney with serious engineering analysis showing only 5 percent the yield of what was imagined.
Can't breed from lithium in our existing civilian power plants for a long list of reasons, not set up for it and tritium would be into the environment. The puny amount of tritium the nuclear weapon primaries need for boosting fission is met by reactors but nothing like the metric tons needed for plants.
The whole thing is an ill thought out fiasco, we
The actual breakthrough (Score:5, Informative)
1) it uses high-temperature (relatively speaking: 20 K) superconducting wire (tape [ieee.org], actually) that only recently became commercially available. Typically, such magnets would have used niobium-based alloys [iter.org] and required colder operating temperatures, and
2) they achieved a field strength of 20 T, which is pretty awesome on its own, but especially for a magnet this compact.
Demonstrating the toroidal is an enabler of the SPARC reactor design. Now they can build the rest of it [aip.org] (copies of this toroidal coil, plus about a dozen other superconducting magnets of other configurations, and another dozen copper-based coils), and see if any of their simulations bear out.
Not Energy Efficient (Score:2)
Last year, Scientific American reported that the "break through" did not really generate more power than it consumed. The surge of power lasted only seconds and destroyed the equipment that generated it. More important, the power released was far less than the power required to create that equipment.
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Different entity. You're thinking of the laser-based inertial confinement fusion being done at the National Ignition Facility. This article is about a milestone towards a magnetic-confinement device spun out