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New record for fusion

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posted on Aug, 15 2018 @ 06:28 PM
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Now, the analysis of measured data from the first round of experiments, carried out from December 2015 to March 2016, has confirmed that both requirements – good particle confinement and a small bootstrap current – have been successfully implemented in the optimized field geometry of Wendelstein 7-X. “The first experimental campaign has therefore already succeeded in verifying key aspects of the optimization,” says the paper’s first author, Dr. Andreas Dinklage. “This will be followed by a more precise and systematic evaluation in future experiments with a significantly higher heating power and plasma pressure.”

Max Plank Institute (IPP), Aug. 8, 2018 - Wendelstein 7-X makes the cover.

August 8, 2018 Vol. 14, No. 8... and that is a cool looking photo! The carbon tiles look like Samurai plating! The curving on the inside is just wild!

The Dept. of Energy announced its funding for the year:

US DOE grants $36.4m in funding for fusion energy sciences research.

Some of the money is going to Americans doing research on W7-X.

And, PPPL had a visitor: Energy Secretary Rick Perry cheers on fusion energy, science education at PPPL.

It seems that there other fusion fanboys out there! It is weird to look at then realize that I am about to type this, "ONLY 36.4 million"?? That is hardly nothing. I put up a thread where a beer company put up nearly 4 billion investment in Canadian weed!! OH well, I will take the news in stride!



posted on Aug, 16 2018 @ 07:03 PM
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Inside your home and office, low-voltage alternating current (AC) powers the lights, computers and electronic devices for everyday use. But when the electricity comes from remote long-distance sources such as hydro-power or solar generating plants, transporting it as direct current (DC) is more efficient — and converting it back to AC current requires bulky and expensive switches. Now the General Electric (GE) company, with assistance from scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), is developing an advanced switch that will convert high- voltage DC current to high-voltage AC current for consumers more efficiently, enabling reduced-cost transmission of long-distance power. As a final step, substations along the route reduce the high-voltage AC current to low-voltage current before it reaches consumers.

GE is testing a tube filled with plasma [...] that the company is developing as the conversion device. The switch must be able to operate for years with voltage as high as 300 kilovolts to enable a single unit to cost-effectively replace the assemblies of power semiconductor switches now required to convert between DC and AC power along transmission lines.

pppl.gov, August 16, 2018 - Protecting the power grid: Advanced plasma switch can make the grid more efficient for long-distance transmission.

A tube guitar amp work in a similar manner! (This is Unix! I know this!). Rectifier tubes do this: convert AC to DC within the guitar amp. What GE is thinking of doing is using a helium filled "guitar rectifier" tube to more efficiently handle this conversion. There are step down transformers, inverters, and power conditioners involved which are big, bulky, produce heat (which is loss of electricity), contain PCBs, basically all the stuff behind the fence and in the building at a sub station. In a guitar amp, the tubes are vacuum filled so they just glow red hot; GE's version has helium in it which means the electrons get blown off the surface just like in nuclear fusion. PPPL set up experiments to allow GE to measure what is happening with the plasma and their device to see if it really does work more efficiently that what is currently being used.

They ran a test at 100 kilovolts.


The results from the PPPL model are both scientifically interesting and favorable for high-voltage gas switch design.

-Timothy Sommerer, GE physicist


One of my beliefs is that power transmission has to get more efficient before fusion comes online. Looks like that it happening now!
edit on 16-8-2018 by TEOTWAWKIAIFF because: correction



posted on Aug, 17 2018 @ 02:12 PM
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The American Physical Society (APS) has recognized MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) principal research scientists John Wright and Stephen Wukitch [Alcator C-Mod], [...] Yevgen Kazakov and Jozef Ongena [JET] of the Laboratory for Plasma Physics in Brussels, Belgium, with the Landau-Spitzer Award for their collaborative work.

Given biennially to acknowledge outstanding plasma physics collaborations between scientists in the U.S. and the European Union, the prize this year is being awarded “for experimental verification, through collaborative experiments, of a novel and highly efficient ion cyclotron resonance heating scenario for plasma heating and generation of energetic ions in magnetic fusion devices.”

news.mit.edu, Aug. 17, 2018 - Stephen Wukitch, John Wright win Landau-Spitzer Award.

Last year a new formula for fusion plasma was announced out of MIT. They added 3He into the mix and were able to control those helium ions, essentially slow them down after they transferred their energy into the plasma. If you read the new release the say a couple times "alpha-like" and "energetic ions" using cyclotronic resonance heating (which they point out is what W7-X is using to heat their plasma). I wish they explained it a bit more because this was big news when announced last year (see the paper abstract for exact details).


One of the key fusion challenges is confining the very energetic fusion product ions that must transfer their energy to the core plasma before they escape confinement. This heating scenario efficiently generates energies comparable to that of those produced by fusion and can be used to study energetic ion behavior in present day devices such as JET and the stellarator Wendelstein 7-X (W-7X). It will also allow study in the non-nuclear phase of ITER, the next-generation fusion device being built in France.

“It will be the icing on the cake to use this scenario at W-7X,” says Wright. “Because stellarators have large volume and high-density plasmas, it is hard for current heating scenarios to achieve those fusion energies. With conventional techniques it has been difficult to show if stellarators can confine fast ions. Using this novel scenario will definitely allow researchers to demonstrate whether a stellarator will work for fusion plasmas.”

(same source)

Without pushing into actual fusion scenario they will be able to demonstrate that W7-X can operate at those conditions (ignition temperature regime).

I think that it is great to recognize, cross country collaborations like this! Congrats all around!

Actual paper at nature.com (abstract) - Efficient generation of energetic ions in multi-ion plasmas by radio-frequency heating.



posted on Aug, 18 2018 @ 04:25 AM
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a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Although i read your posts. I usually don't think i have anything useful to add.

I don't know if this is useful. But i'll add it anyway.


There's a sort of radio wave that bangs its way around Earth, knocking around electrons in the plasma fields of loose ions surrounding our planet and sending strange tones to radio detectors. It's called a "whistler." And now, scientists have observed bursts like this in more detail than ever before.


www.livescience.com...




posted on Aug, 20 2018 @ 01:26 PM
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a reply to: blackcrowe


Sometimes I post as I figure something out for myself! Or uncover more science behind what the "news story" is saying. Like here is some real good information and write up by a scientist that work at one of the labs that helped construct the 32 Tesla superconducting (SC) magnet.

A Tesla, T, is SI unit of measurement of magnetic flux density. It is equivalent to 10,000 gauss which is the old measurement system that is sometimes still used for low strength magnets (like your refrigerator has a strength of 100 gauss).

Low temperature SC (LTS, in article) plateau out at around 20 T. The thought was, that is it; we've reached the limit until the discovery of high temp SC (HTS) in late 1980s. The below article is about the National High Field Magnetic Laboratory creating the 32T magnet.


In December 2017 improvements in... LTS magnet technology, together with advances in... HTS materials, produced another change in magnet development. The successful demonstration of a 32 T all-superconducting magnet by the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) in Florida, US, was a significant milestone in the field. The new super-magnet is expected to become available to users in 2019, and its high, stable field will help scientists break new ground in studies of nuclear magnetic resonance, electron magnetic resonance, molecular solids and quantum oscillation studies of complex metals, among other areas.


NbTi was developed in the 1970s and has been the “workhorse” of [LTS] superconducting magnets ever since. However, NbTi material can only function as a superconductor at fields of up to 10 T at 4.2 K (and not more than 11.7 T at 2.2 K) for magnets with narrow bores of less than 60 mm. For larger-bore magnets, the maximum field is even lower, limiting the material’s usefulness in high-field magnets. Coils made from Nb3Sn material can remain superconducting at up to 23 T at 2.2 K, much higher than is possible for NbTi, but they also need to have a very fine filament-like structure to prevent a phenomenon known as flux jumping that dissipates energy in the superconductor and can cause the coil to quench prematurely. Hence, the manufacture of Nb3Sn wire has to be done with stringent quality-control procedures in place to ensure that it will perform stably at high fields.


The NHMFL 32 T magnet uses a second-generation HTS wire made from YBCO, a superconducting ceramic composed of yttrium, barium, copper and oxygen. Production of YBCO wires and tapes has increased during the last few years, and their mechanical properties are better than for Bi-2212, but they display anisotropic effects with respect to field orientation that need to be accounted for in magnet design. They also require more sophisticated quench-management systems. In short, both materials have their challenges, but also some advantages, and are strong candidates for high-field magnets.


A scant few μJ of additional energy – equivalent to the potential energy of a pin dropped from the height of just a few centimetres – would be enough to raise the temperature above the point where the coils become resistive, and the magnet undergoes a quench. When that happens, the helium boils off and all the energy stored in the magnet is released very quickly, risking damage to its structure if the quench process is not properly managed. The potential for damage is significant, too: at the maximum field of 32 T, the energy stored in the NHMFL magnet is more than 8.3 MJ, approximately equal to the energy in 2 kg of TNT.[!!!]


This is real interesting stuff! Niobium titanium is LTS and is what most 1980s designs use including LHC and ITER. This is important in nuclear fusion because as magnetic field strength increases the plasma pressure scales to the fourth power which means if you can go from 5T to 15T your reactor size shrinks between 50 and 70% original size for same power output (it does not usually work out to a full 1/4 original size due to all the equipment needed so they play it conservative).

Once you understand this concept, you can read something like nextbigfuture.com and their "Lockheed Design is 100 times worse..." article and just laugh. They double the power output, decrease the magnetic pressure (T) by more than half, then claim Lockheed CFR is 100x bigger! Well, duh, actually, if you build to original specs (they did it on a computer), then they'd realize LM is spot on!

The article is worth the read! The amount of forces at play in holding current at SC temperatures is staggering. All the quench mitigation going into SC is rather amazing. And then you get a nice historic overview of both and how both were combined together to make the 32 T magnet.

The NHMFL director said that there is no reason to stop at 32T and they said 100T should not be a limit either!




posted on Aug, 20 2018 @ 03:21 PM
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a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

Thanks for taking the time to reply TEOTWAWKIAIFF.

I won't pretend i understand it at all.

I do read the posts and links. And have a gist of it.

I'll keep reading.

Maybe i'll post something useful sometime.

Very interesting topic.




posted on Sep, 10 2018 @ 12:41 PM
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I thought I had a post on here about ELMs (edge localized modes) which are instabilities between inner and outer plasma layers. They had used magnetic disturbances, created on purpose, to smooth them out. This was PPPL and GA's D-III tokamak in San Diego that did that work (theory and demo).

Well, since then, they did more calculations and discovered that they did not have to calculate all possible ELM configurations which allowed them to simplify calculations which they simulated at PPPL. Then they handed it all over to South Korea for them to implement the simulation on KSTAR.


The result was a precedent-setting achievement. "We show for the first time the full 3-D field operating window in a tokamak to suppress ELMs without stirring up core instabilities or excessively degrading confinement," said Park, whose paper—written with 14 coauthors from the United States and South Korea—is published in Nature Physics. "For a long time we thought it would be too computationally difficult to identify all beneficial symmetry-breaking fields, but our work now demonstrates a simple procedure to identify the set of all such configurations."

Researchers reduced the complexity of the calculations when they realized that the number of ways the plasma can distort is actually far fewer than the range of possible 3-D fields that can be applied to the plasma. By working backwards, from distortions to 3-D fields, the authors calculated the most effective fields for eliminating ELMs. The KSTAR experiments confirmed the predictions with remarkable accuracy.

phys.org, Sept. 10, 2018 - Discovered: Optimal magnetic fields for suppressing instabilities in tokamaks.

Not only has this been demonstrated but done so twice! This is big news because of the earlier post where all the software for control and measurement readings are shared across facilities around the world. In other words, when one new method is discovered and demonstrated, other researchers have access to do the same.

Now, they know how to control plasma, optimally, using magnetic stirring to suppress ELMs. And they have a simpler method in simulating this level of control... even if there is not a functional tokamak creating fusion energy!




posted on Sep, 17 2018 @ 02:22 PM
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To heat the plasma we used an experimental technique called merging compression – joining two rings of plasma and then compressing it with an intense magnetic field. We didn’t have any external heating from things like neutral beams, which is an additional way to heat plasma. We’re now starting to upgrade to use neutral beams; we want to achieve 100 million °C in the next year or so.

newscientist.com, Sept. 15, 2018 - Recreating star fusion on Earth could solve our energy crisis.

This is Tokamak Energy and their ST-40 fusion reactor. They need to learn how to write press releases because the 15 million °C is not what is interesting. The using of two plasma torroids and magnetically compressing them together creating that temperature is the real news! It is kind of like inducing the plasma current at start up of a tokamak instead having a large solenoid to induce said current saves on energy put in. That is the name of the game, more energy out than put in. That also includes using next gen superconducting coils which have a higher magnetic field which means a smaller reactor.

The rest of the interview is more of the "fusion vs carbon" stuff but it also gives an idea what Tokamak Energy is doing, racing a head with reaching 100 - 150 M °C then deciding how they will extract the thermal energy. All the really cool kids will be using supercritical CO2 turbines, just saying!




posted on Sep, 17 2018 @ 03:18 PM
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A group of scientists at the University of Tokyo has recorded the largest magnetic field ever generated indoors—a whopping 1,200 tesla, as measured in the standard units of magnetic field strength.
...

The high magnetic field also has implications for nuclear fusion reactors, a tantalizing if unrealized potential future source of abundant clean energy. To reach the quantum limit or sustain nuclear fusion, scientists believe magnetic field strengths of 1,000 tesla or more may be needed.


The article "Record indoor magnetic field of 1200 T generated by electromagnetic flux-compression" by D. Nakamura, A. Ikeda, H. Sawabe, Y.H. Matsuda and S. Takeyama appears in the journal Review of Scientific Instruments (2018).


phys.org, Sept. 17, 2018 - New world record magnetic field.

Well Holy Sh#!!!! 1,200 T. Oh my!!

The "quantum limit" squeezes electrons to their lowest state and holds them there (instead of zipping around in their probability orbits). Kind of like a BEC but without having to super cool the atoms.

I will put it like this, NextBigFuture.com is claiming that Lockheed's fusion reactor cannot be made because they need 15 T superconducting coils. Then they fiddle with the numbers and make claims, "100 times worse..." and "twice as big..." but oh look! It is Mr Fusion on the desktop providing energy for a small town!!

It is stable and controllable. What happens now will be fun to watch!!




posted on Sep, 17 2018 @ 04:50 PM
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a reply to: TEOT's OP

So back on page 1, the news was about a record pressure reached for 2 seconds on the last day of operation at Alcator C-Mod


During the 23 years Alcator C-Mod has been in operation at MIT, it has repeatedly advanced the record for plasma pressure in a magnetic confinement device. The previous record of 1.77 atmospheres was set in 2005 (also at Alcator C-Mod). While setting the new record of 2.05 atmospheres, a 15 percent improvement, the temperature inside Alcator C-Mod reached over 35 million degrees Celsius, or approximately twice as hot as the center of the sun. The plasma produced 300 trillion fusion reactions per second and had a central magnetic field strength of 5.7 tesla. It carried 1.4 million amps of electrical current and was heated with over 4 million watts of power. The reaction occurred in a volume of approximately 1 cubic meter (not much larger than a coat closet) and the plasma lasted for two full seconds.

MIT.edu, news - link.

It is this quote I always lose...


Pressure, which is the product of density and temperature, accounts for about two-thirds of the challenge. The amount of power produced increases with the square of the pressure — so doubling the pressure leads to a fourfold increase in energy production.

(same source)

Alcator C-Mod can operate up to 8 T. We'll keep the math super easy and just say 10 T.

National MagLab out at Los Alamos, NM has a pulsed superconducting magnet at 100 T. Doubling 10 T to 20 T is only 1/5 of the way to 100 T, so 4x5 = 20, there is a 20 times increase in energy production when going up an order of magnitude.

Then to go up another order of magnitude from 100T to 1000T then tack on another 200T... well, they are different types of coils but it is the scale thing that is the point.

1,200 Tesla is YUGE!!



posted on Sep, 19 2018 @ 05:56 PM
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osti.gov - Magnetic Flux Compression in Plasmas.

There are a bunch of flux equations strewn about. I think I was looking for what levels they had reached using "electromagnetic flux compression" in nuclear fusion reactors. I was thumbing through this and finally have seen information on LINUS!! (That is the US Naval Research Laboratory's investigation into a type of fusion reactor using rotating metals and implosions which I have never seen "out there" in my searching. This was back in the 1970s and as Bedlam pointed out, went dark). Right there on page 10 (it looks like a historic overview of this technique with a quick comparison to tokamak size), "liquid lithium" wall (absorbs fast neutrons) with another rotating liquid "liner"!!

The very next page is General Fusion and how they have taken the NRL and LINUS idea and updated it to their design.

Then on page 15, MIF, "magneto inertial confinement" fusion! You can see that the size is not that big at all. "Lower plasma density" and "longer confinement time" being the major benefit of combining laser heating and electromagnetic compression. If I am reading this correctly, the total magnetic field strength is 1,000 T to get MIF working as drawn up. Which is what I was wondering about.

But it was finding the LINUS info that blew me away!



posted on Sep, 24 2018 @ 01:08 PM
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Using the device, they were able to produce a magnetic field of 1,200 teslas [... and] were able to sustain it for 100 microseconds, thousands of times longer than previous attempts. They could also control the magnetic field, so it didn’t destroy their equipment like some past attempts to create powerful fields.

As Takeyama noted in the press release, that means his team’s device can generate close to the minimum magnetic field strength and duration needed for stable nuclear fusion...

futurism.com - This Super Powerful Magnetic Field Puts Us One Step Closer to Nuclear Fusion.

This is about University of Tokyo's world record magnet. A few more numbers. For comparison, W7-X had a first plasma in December 2015 that lasted 50 milliseconds. (Scale of magnitudes: nano = 10^-9; micro = 10^-6; milli - 10^-3).

While it may be too soon to make a statement about "stable nuclear fusion" it may actually be closer for inertial confinement fusion where pulses of laser fire in the nanosecond (and now even lower, femtosecond, femto = 10^-15) range. I think one limiting factor using ICF is the length of time it takes for capacitor to recharge (same problem as rail guns). So you would need time to charge both the lasers and the 1,000 T magnets. If that step is overcome (graphene supercapictors), then it would be perfect for the Boron-proton reaction and convert the fuels directly over to electricity and helium!



posted on Sep, 26 2018 @ 11:41 AM
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In the fast ignition scheme, first, fusion fuel is compressed to a high density using nanosecond laser beams. Next, a high-intensity picosecond laser rapidly heats the compressed fuel, making the heated region a hot spark to trigger ignition.

The REB [elativistic electron beam], which is generated by a high-intensity short-pulse laser and accelerated to nearly the speed of light, travels through high-density nuclear fusion fuel plasma and deposits a portion of kinetic energy in the core, making the heated region the hot spark to trigger ignition. However, REB accelerated by high-intensity lasers has a large divergence angle (typically 100 degrees), so only a small portion of the REB collides with the core. (Figure 2)

A kilo-tesla level magnetic field [600 T] is necessary to guide high-energy electrons at the speed of light, so the researchers employed magnetic fields of several hundreds of tesla. Because electrons, which are charged and have a small mass, easily move along a magnetic field line, they guided the high energy REB of 1MeV along the magnetic field lines to the core (the fusion fuel of 100 microns or less), achieving efficient heating of high-density plasma. They called the scheme magnetized fast isochoric heating.

phys.org, Sept. 26, 2018 -Efficient generation of high-density plasma enabled by high magnetic field.

Then there is our future! When combined with the 1200 T magnetic field, we now have the power to create nuclear fusion using inertial confinement fusion (ICF) scheme. Compress the fuel with a nanosecond laser, pulse the fuel with REB guided with a 600 T magnetic fuel, nuclear fuel ignites!

Thank you Japan!!

Now to see if they get more energy out than the put in. All indications are they will.

Frikken' lasers!




posted on Sep, 26 2018 @ 03:09 PM
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FLF [First Light Fusion] - based in Oxford, England - announced today that the first test 'shot' was fired in late July. The company said it was able to repeat the test a few days later after all parts of Machine 3 had been checked and the data produced analysed, "proving the limb functions as designed".

Machine 3 will be capable of discharging up to 200,000 volts and in excess of 14 million ampere - the equivalent of nearly 500 simultaneous lightning strikes - within two microseconds, FLF said. The GBP3.6 million (USD4.6 million) machine will use some 3km of high voltage cables and another 10km of diagnostic cables.

world-nuclear-news.com, Aug. 29, 2018 - Initial tests at UK pulsed power device.

The Machine 3 device has six ICF "arms" pointed at the central target. The announcement comes only 5 months of being commissioned to go ahead and make the machine! I usually wait until after announcements like "we are going build this!" until further news comes along. So this is just crazy fast progress!

The one arm was tested from end-to-end, all the data generated and reviewed, and then they fired it again a few hours later! The other 5 arms are constructed exactly the same as the one tested! Usually, people are running around saying things like "our star in a jar works!" when generating first plasma with the typical, "using the same process as the sun, fusion is...." So it is kind of nice to be casual about "late July" news coming out in almost September.

I have not kept up and only found out by searching for other stories about what Japan has achieved with ICF! My bad!


Machine 3 "remains on schedule to be commissioned by the end of this year" (same source).

Previously, I would played it all cool ("I am not a 'loof'!! You're the loof! Stupid loof") and waited for results until after it was all together but knowing this... SWEET!!!

I like Christmas presents!



posted on Sep, 26 2018 @ 04:44 PM
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Even more nuclear fusion news! This article is about funding but for those who need a Fusion 101 refresher they have this in there:


So scientists use other forms of energy to bring hydrogen atoms as close as possible to each other. Heating the hydrogen gas using radio waves, for instance, forces the atoms to travel at incredible speeds, collide, and, on occasion, fuse. The easiest way to quantify the heat energy added to the system using radio waves is to measure the temperature of the gas. Experiments have shown that fusion can occur above temperatures of 100 million °C, many times higher than that at the center of the sun.

No known material can withstand (and thus contain) such an incredibly hot gas....

At temperatures over 100 million °C, atoms are stripped of their electrons, creating a soup of charged particles called plasma, which can interact with magnetic forces. By creating a strong magnetic force, you can direct the plasma along a specific pathway—and if the magnetic lines are set up in the right way, the movement of plasma particles can be confined so as to not come in contact with other non-plasma matter. This is magnetic confinement.

Another trick is to create mini bombs. If you take a frozen pellet of hydrogen (the fuel) and heat it extremely quickly using high-energy lasers, it creates an envelope of plasma on the surface of the pellet (step 1 in the diagram below). As the plasma blows off, it creates rocket-like forces that compress the fuel (step 2). The compression causes the pellet to heat up to 100 million °C (step 3) and the atoms inside the pellet to undergo fusion and explode as it releases lots of high-energy neutrons (step 4).

Quartz (qz.com) - In search of clean energy, investments in nuclear-fusion startups are heating up.

The article is about investment in various nuclear fusion startup companies. Their big announcement is about Boston's Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) (same source):


Though there are other companies pursuing fusion technology, CFS has a number of advantages over its competitors. One—which Quartz can now report for the first time—is that it’s funded, in part, by Breakthrough Energy Ventures led by a group of billionaires, including Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, Mukesh Ambani, and Richard Branson.


But they do give an overview of the two main techniques most companies are using in the quest of fusion energy: magnetic confinement and inertial confinement fusion (frikken' lasers!) (as posted above).

They also talk to the ARC reactor guys (Affordable, Robust, Compact) and mention different superconducting technologies (high temp and low temp superconductors). Then throw this out there about HTS magnets and the SPARC reactor; it stands for "Smallest Possible ARC" reactor. I always forget that and have to search around!

The article is well done but the pay-off is the quote at the end from one of the Breakthrough Energy Venture guys about investing in CFS:


We didn’t compare the different types of nuclear-fusion reactors in a bake-off competition before deciding on investing in CFS. We knew the team; they had a promising idea; they needed our help.

Carmichael Roberts, head of investing at Breakthrough Energy Ventures (same source)


Only thing missing from the article, as always, is any news from Lockheed CFR! *grumble, grumble, grumble*



posted on Sep, 26 2018 @ 06:31 PM
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Remember this post: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

That was the announcement of a 1,200 T magnetic field. Here is what they were/are researching:


The point of building a magnet in the 1,000-plus tesla range, Takeyama said, is to study hidden physical properties of electrons that are invisible under normal circumstances. He and his team will put different materials inside their magnet to study how their electrons behave.

Under those extreme conditions, he said, conventional models of electrons break down. Takeyama doesn't know exactly what happens to electrons in such extreme situations, but said that studying them in the moments before the coil's self-destruction should reveal properties of electrons normally invisible to science.


LiveScience.com has an article up about the lab and their work (as well as other approaches to large magnetic fields). One thing to note, it is destructive to the coil used to generate the field! I would embed the video but it is part of the story and is not out on u-tube yet. To see the video you will have to check out the following link!

Livesience.com - This Super-Strong Magnet Literally Blew the Doors Off a Tokyo Laboratory.

And there are sparks too! They have to pump 3.2 megajoules of power through it to get to 1,200 T. He thinks his set up can take 5 MJ and reach 1,800 T!!

And they had to replace the lab doors!

It will be of interest to follow this crazy lab and see if they can reach their goal of 1,800 T. I think a 600 T coil would be nice enough.

Crazy
!

edit on 26-9-2018 by TEOTWAWKIAIFF because: fix formatting (not mine!)



posted on Sep, 27 2018 @ 01:00 PM
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a reply to: TEOT


Instead of using TNT to generate their magnetic field, the Japanese researchers dumped a massive amount of energy—3.2 megajoules—into the generator to cause a weak magnetic field produced by a small coil to rapidly compress at a speed of about 20,000 miles per hour. This involves feeding 4 million amps of current through the generator, which is several thousand times more than a lightning bolt. When this coil is compressed as small as it will go, it bounces back. This produces a powerful shockwave that destroyed the coil and much of the generator.

To protect themselves from the shockwave, the Japanese researchers built an iron cage for the generator. However they only built it to withstand about 700 Teslas, so the shockwave from the 1,200 Teslas ended up blowing out the door to the enclosure.

“I didn’t expect it to be so high,” Shojiro Takeyama, a physicist at the University of Tokyo, told IEEE Spectrum. “Next time, I’ll make [the enclosure] stronger.”

motherboard.vice.com (source of u-tube vid too) - W atch Scientists Accidentally Blow Up Their Lab With The Strongest Indoor Magnetic Field Ever.

Blowing things up is cool. Huh-huh, huh-huh.

Magnetic Field Record Set With a Bang: 1200 Tesla - You-tube



posted on Oct, 9 2018 @ 06:31 PM
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In conventional fusion reactor designs, the secondary magnetic coils that create the divertor lie outside the primary ones, because there is simply no way to put these coils inside the solid primary coils. That means the secondary coils need to be large and powerful, to make their fields penetrate the chamber, and as a result they are not very precise in how they control the plasma shape.

But the new MIT-originated design, known as ARC (for advanced, robust, and compact) features magnets built in sections so they can be removed for service. This makes it possible to access the entire interior and place the secondary magnets inside the main coils instead of outside. With this new arrangement, “just by moving them closer [to the plasma] they can be significantly reduced in size,” says Kuang.

In the one-semester graduate class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering), students were divided into teams to address different aspects of the heat rejection challenge. Each team began by doing a thorough literature search to see what concepts had already been tried, then they brainstormed to come up with multiple concepts and gradually eliminated those that didn’t pan out. Those that had promise were subjected to detailed calculations and simulations, based, in part, on data from decades of research on research fusion devices such as MIT’s Alcator C-Mod, which was retired two years ago. C-Mod scientist Brian LaBombard also shared insights on new kinds of divertors, and two engineers from Mitsubishi worked with the team as well. Several of the students continued working on the project after the class ended, ultimately leading to the solution described in this new paper. The simulations demonstrated the effectiveness of the new design they settled on.

“It was really exciting, what we discovered,” Whyte says. The result is divertors that are longer and larger, and that keep the plasma more precisely controlled. As a result, they can handle the expected intense heat loads.

news.mit.edu, Oct. 9, 2018 - A new path to solving a longstanding fusion challenge.

The ARC design (and by extension, SPARC) and the UK's ST-40 have all been criticized for being "too small" with no way to handle excess heat. I guess if you turn the problem into a semester project at MIT you can come up with some new ideas!

First off, ARC is not small! It is some 45 feet tall and is built in sections (on paper). Instead of sticking with conventional design they thought, "Hey! If we put the coils inside, the magnetic fields become additive which makes the secondary coils smaller in size since they do not have to "blast" through the primary coils" (or at least this is what I would have said if asked why they were moved!)

Next, this is still drawing board design stuff! The cheapest they can do it. The fastest they can do it. The safest. The most sensible design. This "news" is just an extension of the original goal of ARC. A little trial and error. Some modelling using real tokamak data... and they put to rest any critic's notion that the plasma will get too hot and out of control because it confined to too small a space!

This was not just MIT students but had Mitsubishi's help along with Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Sounds like a fun class! I bet you would have to be wicked smahrt to get in...




posted on Oct, 18 2018 @ 12:33 PM
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The Duke of Cambridge said "it's incredible, it really is" after being shown an experimental fusion reactor which the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) believes could help make the power source commercially viable.

Standing in the shadow of the Mast (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade fusion experiment - a large cylindrical machine covered in wires and pipes - the duke joked with senior staff, saying: "It's very exciting, no pressure."


After the tour, William was taken to the nearby control room at the UKAEA's Culham Science Centre near Oxford and asked to press a large red button to start up the machine to mark the end of its five-year construction.

When William pushed the button, everyone turned towards a screen which showed the inside of the reactor, and when a purple plasma cloud was seen after a long wait, there was a spontaneous round of applause.

theherald.com.au, Oct. 19, 2018 - William 'amazed' on fusion reactor visit.
.

This is more of a Royal story (as in, "what they did today") but in reality it is a "first plasma" in a fusion reactor story.

MAST, first plasma!



PS - Nice write up in physicsworld.com of the history of nuclear fusion research:
Oct. 16, 2018 - Ignition Pending.
edit on 18-10-2018 by TEOTWAWKIAIFF because: clarification

edit on 18-10-2018 by TEOTWAWKIAIFF because: fix link



posted on Oct, 25 2018 @ 01:20 PM
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The three legs of the tripod for nuclear fusion (according to TEOT):

1. Energy Storage

Why? If a steady state fusion reactor is created all the energy needs to be stored somewhere. Thermal (molten salt, molten silicon, SCO2), chemical (RFBs), kinetic (superconductor flywheels, hydro?, railcars?), there is a tremendous amount of heat energy created in neutronic nuclear fusion. Even the experimental reactors take over a month to cool down. And they are not even at ignition temperature!

2. Energy Transmission

Again, this is kind of a no-brainer. Right now, natural gas energy generation is ~30% percent efficient (might be higher but the point is the efficiency is not that high). Here is what I am talking about...


At present one-tenth of generated electricity is lost in the grid because of the cables we use.

Better cables require better materials, and mixing copper (Cu) with carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can help to solve the problem.

Large research investments are made world-wide to develop Cu-CNTs ultra- conductive wires able to transport electricity with improved energy efficiency.

ESRI Director Prof Andrew Barron is leading research in advanced ultra-conductive wires, and Dr Ewa Kazimierska is working alongside him to achieve this goal.

Professor Andrew Barron said:

"Making a good mix from carbon nanotubes and copper is challenging. There have been several reports that a combination of copper and carbon nanotubes has significantly higher ampacity than copper alone, which makes it very promising for future power distribution for the grid, automotive and aerospace applications."

The successful Royal Society Research Grant, entitled "Tuneable plasma oxidation of CNTs and its effect on dispersion and metal integration", aims to solve the CNT-Cu incompatibility problem.

Plasma is an ionised gas that can be used to modify CNTs and improve their dispersion in water. With both CNTs and dissolved copper salt in water it should be easier to combine the two in a working ultra-conductive wire.

eurekalert.org, Oct. 18, 2018 - Better electrical cables can save energy.

Things like this or high temperature superconducting power cables need to be installed before...

3. Nuclear Fusion Reactor

The last leg of the tripod!

:fusionfanboy:




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