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The National Fusion Research Institute (NFRI) announced on Jan. 13 that KSTAR maintained the plasma core temperature of 100 million degrees (9 keV) for 1.5 seconds in an experiment conducted from August to December last year.
A plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees is seven times higher than the temperature of the core of the sun (15 million degrees). The temperature is regarded as the most critical operating condition of a nuclear fusion reactor.
However, the NFRI argues that KSTAR's plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees is technically superior to China's since it increases the ion temperature by effectively heating the center of the plasma using the neutron particle beam heater (NBI-1). In 2017, KSTAR has succeeded in high-performance plasma mode (H-mode) operation in which plasma with an electron temperature of 70 million degrees was maintained for about 90 seconds.
KSTAR’s goal for this year is to use NBI-2 to maintain super-high-temperature plasma over 100 million degrees for more than 10 seconds. This will allow Korea to lead the high-performance plasma experiment at the international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER), which is under construction in Kadaracheu, France. Currently, seven countries, including China, the United States, South Korea, Japan, Russia, the European Union (EU) and India, are pushing to complete the ITER by 2025. ITER is working on enabling experimental verification of the maintenance of voluntary nuclear fusion at 150 million degrees without supplementary heating starting from 2035.
Lockheed Martin, with its decades of engineering experience and government connections, hopes to unlock fusion's power by creating a compact reactor that's 10 times smaller than existing reactors. It will be so small that it will fit on the back of a truck, it says on its website.
While the company declined an interview, it says online that it's trying to mimic the way sun creates fusion. Its cylindrical reactor, which it calls a small magnetic bottle, is similar to a tokamak, but it's much smaller and uses different magnetic technology.
"The project [SPARC] is enabled by the arrival of a breakthrough technology, high-temperature superconductors, which opens the ‘smaller, faster, cheaper’ path we are pursuing,” says MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center deputy director Martin Greenwald. “Our plan is to carry out R&D leading to a demonstration of a high-performance, high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnet at the scale required for fusion, followed by construction and operation of SPARC, which would be the world’s first net-energy fusion experiment. SPARC is – roughly – the smallest and least expensive fusion experiment that could achieve this goal.”
In the UK there is MAST, or the Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak, an alternative fusion project that is making big steps forward, and is also focusing on smaller reactors.
“Essentially, the whole genesis of the spherical tokamak is to look at whether there’s a way of doing fusion on a smaller and therefore we assume cheaper capital cost basis,” says UK Atomic Energy Authority CEO Ian Chapman. Elsewhere, Tokamak Energy is developing modular reactors, with the aim of having a grid-connected power plant by 2030.
“Tokamak Energy is working on the design of a small modular fusion reactor to produce 175MWe or 450MW of heat,” says Tokamak Energy executive vice chairman David Kingham. “We are confident that the technology will be commercially viable and that fusion will be an important part of the long-term solution for electricity generation. We also expect fusion to become an important source of industrial process heat, for example to produce hydrogen without any carbon emission.”
Speeding the development of fusion power to create unlimited energy on Earth
Date:
March 19, 2019
Source:
DOE/Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
Summary:
A detailed examination of the challenges and tradeoffs in the development of a compact fusion facility with high-temperature superconducting magnets.
Can tokamak fusion facilities, the most widely used devices for harvesting on Earth the fusion reactions that power the sun and stars, be developed more quickly to produce safe, clean, and virtually limitless energy for generating electricity? Physicist Jon Menard of the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has examined that question in a detailed look at the concept of a compact tokamak equipped with high temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets. Such magnets can produce higher magnetic fields -- necessary to produce and sustain fusion reactions -- than would otherwise be possible in a compact facility.
Menard first presented the paper, now published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, to a Royal Society workshop in London that explored accelerating the development of tokamak-produced fusion power with compact tokamaks. "This is the first paper that quantitatively documents how the new superconductors can interplay with the high pressure that compact tokamaks produce to influence how tokamaks are optimized in the future," Menard said. "What we tried to develop were some simple models that capture important aspects of an integrated design."
"Very significant" findings
The findings are "very significant," said Steve Cowley, director of PPPL. Cowley noted that "Jon's arguments in this and the previous paper have been very influential in the recent National Academies of Sciences report," which calls for a U.S. program to develop a compact fusion pilot plant to generate electricity at the lowest possible cost. "Jon has really outlined the technical aspects for much smaller tokamaks using high-temperature magnets," Cowley said.
Compact tokamaks, which can include spherical facilities such as the National Spherical Torus Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) that is under repair at PPPL and the Mega Ampere Spherical Tokamak (MAST) in Britain, provide some advantageous features. The devices, shaped like cored apples rather than doughnut-like conventional tokamaks, can produce high-pressure plasmas that are essential for fusion reactions with relatively low and cost-effective magnetic fields.
Such reactions fuse light elements in the form of plasma -- the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei -- to release energy. Scientists seek to replicate this process and essentially create a star on Earth to generate abundant electricity for homes, farms, and industries around the world. Fusion could last millions of years with little risk and without generating greenhouse gases.
200-to-300 megawatts of electric power
Sustaining the plasma to generate the 200-to-300 megawatts of electric power the paper examines would also require higher confinement than standard tokamak operating regimes typically achieve. Such power production could lead to challenging fluxes of fusion neutrons that would limit the estimated lifetime of the HTS magnets to one-to-two years of full-power operation. Thicker shielding could substantially increase that lifetime but would also lower the delivery of fusion power.
Major development will in fact be needed for HTS magnets, which have not yet been built to scale. "It will probably take years to put together a model of the essential elements of magnet size requirements and related factors as a function of aspect ratio," Menard said.
A new cable made by KIT, the High-temperature Superconductor Cross Conductor (HTS CroCo) can be used at minus 196 degrees Celsius already. "This is due to the special material we use," say Dr. Walter Fietz and Dr. Michael Wolf of KIT's Institute for Technical Physics (ITEP). The material is rare-earth barium-copper oxide (REBCO for short), whose superconductivity has been known since 1987. However, long lengths of the superconductor can only be manufactured in the form of thin tapes. "We have developed a method where several REBCO tapes are arranged such that they form a cross. The resulting cable can transport very high currents," Fietz says.
Last year this time, we discussed on the earnings call our decision to focus our Conductus wire product development efforts on superconducting magnet applications. In large part, due to the attractive revenue potential forecast by several key customers. One year later, we believe that the expected demand from potential customers and the related potential revenue clearly confirms the correctness of that decision.
The ever-increasing number of companies are now pursuing high field low temperature magnet applications such as next generation electrical machines, NMRs, proton and particle accelerators and fusion devices. For example, there are approximately two-dozen nuclear fusion participants, including start-ups, government initiatives, and commercial company projects such as Lockheed Martin's compact fusion reactor. All these entities are attempting to accomplish the goal of delivering energy in a clear environmentally friendly and cost-effective manner.
In 2018, we successfully developed enhanced conductors wire that delivered 1.5 times the critical current performance and more importantly doubled the in-field magnet performance.
-Jeff Quiram, CEO, STI
A contract extension for the world’s largest fusion research facility, Joint European Torus, has been signed by the UK and the European Commission
The contract extension will secure at least €100m in additional inward investment from the EU over the next two years.
The news brings reassurance for the more than 500 staff at site in Culham, near Oxford.
Staff at the Joint European Torus (JET) facility in Oxfordshire undertake research in the latest technologies aimed at providing clean, safe, inexhaustible energy. The new contract guarantees its operations until the end of 2020 regardless of the EU Exit situation, and secures at least €100m in additional inward investment from the EU over the next two years.
While there are many steps from here to a viable reactor, the demonstration points to the potential use of a Z pinch in future compact fusion-energy generators.
Super-H Mode, as the researchers dub the approach, allows tokamaks to achieve higher fusion performance than previously possible. In recent experiments operating in and near the Super H-mode regime, researchers have achieved record-breaking values of fusion gain for a device of DIII-D’s size. Fusion gain is the ratio of fusion power generated to heating power.
“Fusion energy research historically advances with steady and marked improvements over time,” said David Hill, the director of DIII-D. “It is not often you see a significant leap in results like we have seen with Super-H Mode. This discovery has significant ramifications for future fusion energy plants, and we’re excited to see how far it will carry the field forward.”
Researchers from the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego noted that the Super-H operating mode helped the laboratory’s tokamak, a device that converts fuel to fusion energy, reach ion temperatures of over 30M degrees and enabled the core plasma to achieve fusion levels of more than 150M degrees, resulting in “record-breaking” fusion gain, the company said Monday.
Scientists have started to build Britain’s largest privately-owned nuclear fusion facility.
The project near Bletchley – home to World War II’s codebreakers – is being developed by Pulsar Fusion, a company spearheaded by nuclear entrepreneur Richard Dinan.
Dinan and his team have shipped in state-of-the-art equipment from around the world to fit out the new ground-breaking 10,000 sq ft facility.
He is confident they will achieve the temperature target within the next three months which means they have created matter hot enough to replicate the temperature of the Sun.
[photo, dude standing in an empty warehouse]
Dinan is pictured inside the vacuum chamber which will form the heart of the reactor and will soon reach temperatures above 100 million degrees Celsius.
Once the facility is fully operational, the nuclear physicists plan to harness the technology to power a host of advanced clean energy innovations.
Although it would be easy to dismiss Dinan as a dreamer, his startup Applied Fusion Systems is one of a growing number of firms investing in the promise of fusion.
Dinan’s approach to cracking fusion draws on research conducted by scientists at Culham over the years. Dinan’s company is planning to build a spherical tokamak based on the design of an experimental reactor at Culham, the £40 million Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak (Mast).
“We want to build several of these and test out our ideas,” says James Lambert, head of operations at Applied Fusion Systems. “It is unlikely that our first reactor will produce a net energy gain, but we are aiming for an electrical output of 100 MW or just below.”
16 July 2019, London, England
Construction has started on a spherical tokamak nuclear fusion reactor near the famous Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, by former reality TV star, turned entrepreneur, Richard Dinan's company, Applied Fusion Systems. The 10,000 square foot facility will be filled the machinery necessary to create the conditions for nuclear fusion here on earth. At 100,000,000 C, hotter than the sun due to the fact the reactor does not have the assistance of gravity, the spherical tokamak, a squat, donut-shaped vessel, will use state-of-the-art technology like superconducting magnets to confine a heated gas, plasma, of hydrogen isotopes to the point of fusion.
The first few reactor are not expected to produce energy but prove that the technology behind building such a reactor is a viable path.
Project Innovation + Advantages:
MIFTI is developing a new version of the Staged Z-Pinch (SZP) fusion concept that reduces instabilities in the fusion plasma, allowing the plasma to persist for longer periods of time. The Z-Pinch is an approach for simultaneously heating, confining, and compressing plasma by applying an intense, pulsed electrical current which generates a magnetic field. While the simplicity of the Z-Pinch is attractive, it has been plagued by plasma instabilities. MIFTI's SZP plasma target consists of two components with different atomic numbers and is specifically configured to reduce instabilities. When the heavier component collapses around the lighter part, a shock front develops that travels faster than instabilities can grow, allowing the plasma to remain stable, long enough for fusion to occur. The approach also allows researchers to perform experiments in rapid succession, since it does not involve single-use components. MIFTI's design simplifies the engineering required for fusion through its efficiency and reduced number of components.
US Nuclear ($18 million market cap) partner's MIFTI (Magneto Inertial Fusion Technologies, Inc.) and MIFTEC Labs, are the first to crack the code of Thermonuclear Fusion Energy by using their patented Staged Z Pinch technology to generate history making neutron flux of 10 to the 10th power.
When asked what the biggest milestone achievements have been since they first announced their breakthrough technology last year, Jerry Simmons, CEO and co-founder of both MIFTI and MIFTEC said, "In the second half of last year we did what nobody else has ever been able to do. Not even the big government projects. We made history by generating Neutron Flux in excess of 10^10 from fusion power using an isotope of hydrogen from seawater instead of radioactive enriched uranium. This proves beyond any doubt that our machine can make the isotopes used in nuclear medicine (i.e. Mo-99, Tc-99m, cobalt 60, iodine, etc.). It is only a matter now of simply scaling the power or electric current flow of our machine up so we can achieve the greater Neutron Flux of 10^12+. Dr. Hafiz Rahman, President and Chief Scientist and his staff at MIFTEC Labs and the University of Nevada, Reno National Terawatt Facility, tells us that our scientific experimental predictions and the device will work as designed."