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Page added on June 29, 2018
Nuclear Fusion Power Could Be Here by 2030
A private nuclear-fusion company has heated a plasma of hydrogen to 27 million degrees Fahrenheit (15 million degrees Celsius) in a new reactor for the first time — hotter than the core of the sun.
UK-based Tokamak Energy says the plasma test is a milestone on its quest to be the first in the world to produce commercial electricity from fusion power, possibly by 2030.
The company, which is named after the vacuum chamber that contains the fusion reaction inside powerful magnetic fields, announced the creation of the superhot plasma inside its experimental ST40 fusion reactor in early June.
The successful test – the highest plasma temperature achieved so far by Tokamak Energy – means the reactor will now be prepared next year for a test of an even hotter plasma, of more than 180 million degrees F (100 million degrees C).
That will put the ST40 reactor within the operating temperatures needed for controlled nuclear fusion; the company plans to build a further reactor by 2025 that will produce several megawatts of fusion power.
“It’s been really exciting,” Tokamak Energy co-founder David Kingham told Live Science. “It was very good to see the data coming through and being able to get the high-temperature plasmas — probably beyond what we were hoping for.” [Science Fact or Fiction? The Plausibility of 10 Sci-Fi Concepts]
Tokamak Energy is one of several privately funded companies racing to create a working fusion reactor that can supply electricity to the grid, perhaps years before the mid-2040s, when the ITER fusion reactor project in France is expected to even achieve its “first plasma.”
It could be another decade after that before the experimental ITER reactor is ready to create sustained nuclear fusion — and even then, the reaction will not be used to generate any electricity.
Star in a jar
The nuclear fusion of hydrogen into the heavier element helium is the main nuclear reaction that keeps our sun and other stars burning for billions of years — which is why a fusion reactor is sometimes likened to a “star in a jar.”
Nuclear fusion also takes place inside powerful thermonuclear weapons, also known as hydrogen bombs, where hydrogen is heated to fusion temperatures by plutonium fission devices, resulting in an explosion hundreds or thousands of times more powerful than a fission bomb.
Earthbound controlled fusion projects like ITER and the Tokamak Energy reactors will also fuse hydrogen fuel, but at much higher temperatures and lower pressures than exist inside the sun.
Proponents of nuclear fusion say it could make many other types of electricity generation obsolete, by producing large amounts of electricity from relatively small amounts of the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, which are relatively abundant in ordinary seawater.
“Fifty kilograms [110 lbs.] of tritium and 33 kilograms [73 lbs.] of deuterium would produce a gigawatt of electricity for a year,” while the amount of heavy hydrogen fuel in the reactor at any one time would be only a few grams, Kingham said.
That’s enough energy to power more than 700,000 average American homes, according to figures from the US Energy Information Administration.
Existing nuclear-fission plants generate electricity without producing greenhouse gas emissions, but they are fueled by radioactive heavy elements like uranium and plutonium, and create highly radioactive waste that must be carefully handled and stored. [5 Everyday Things That Are Radioactive]
In theory, fusion reactors could produce far less radioactive waste than fission reactors, while their relatively small fuel needs mean that nuclear meltdowns like the Chernobyl disaster or Fukushima accident would be impossible, according to the ITER project.
However, veteran fusion researcher Daniel Jassby, who was once a physicist at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, has warned that ITER and other proposed fusion reactors will still create significant amounts of radioactive waste.
Road to nuclear fusion
The ST40 reactor and future reactors planned by Tokamak Energy use a compact spherical tokamak design, with an almost round vacuum chamber instead of the wider donut shape being used in the ITER reactor, Kingham said.
A critical advance was the use of high-temperature superconducting magnets to create the powerful magnetic fields needed to keep the superhot plasma from damaging the reactor walls, he said.
The 7-foot-tall (2.1 meters) electromagnets around the Tokamak Energy reactor were cooled by liquid helium to operate at minus 423.67 degrees F (minus 253.15 degrees C).
The use of advanced magnetic materials gave the Tokamak Energy reactor a significant advantage over the ITER reactor design, which would use power-hungry electromagnets cooled to a few degrees above absolute zero, Kingham said.
Other investment-funded fusion projects include reactors being developed General Fusion, based in British Colombia and TAE Technologies, based in California.
A Washington-based company, Agni Energy, has also reported early experimental success with yet a different approach to controlled nuclear fusion, called “beam-target fusion,” Live Science reported earlier this week.
One of the most advanced privately funded fusion projects is the compact fusion reactor being developed by U.S.-based defense and aerospace giant Lockheed Martin at its Skunk Works engineering division in California.
The company says a 100-megawatt fusion reactor, capable of powering 100,000 homes, could be small enough to put on a truck trailer and be driven to wherever it is needed.
16 Comments on "Nuclear Fusion Power Could Be Here by 2030"
S M Sadat Kiai on Fri, 29th Jun 2018 11:41 am
Experience show that there are three factors to be considered before taking about any real achievement these factors are strong superconducting magnet, strong plasma microwave heating and finally fuel spin line up.
Sultan Naqis on Fri, 29th Jun 2018 12:14 pm
If it really happens the world is going to change not only economically but politically as well, the changing balance of power among nations will get faster and change the history. I can’t wait to see an operational fusion reactor as soon as possible.
Go Speed Racer on Fri, 29th Jun 2018 2:11 pm
LOL my backyard sofa & tire fire burns hotter than that.
If you want microwave heating,
I can put an old microwave oven
on top of the tires.
Outcast_Searcher on Fri, 29th Jun 2018 2:45 pm
When they pass breakeven power, AND have a highly reliable process AND demonstrate that they can scale it up to commercial production levels AND show that it is economically feasible vs. wind and solar, THEN they should be sure and let us know.
Until then, it’s all “trust us” with more $billions, and it’s always decades away.
Andy Holland on Fri, 29th Jun 2018 4:05 pm
About 83 Million degrees F short and not long enough. There is the first wall problem, and 14 MeV neutrons that will be irradiating all sorts of things and the fuel is expensive – not ordinary hydrogen. And Tritium is dangerous and Deuterium is also poisonous in D2O (kind of wild that an extra neutron makes heavy water poisonous).
Historically, we knew this could be done but the big problem with fusion was with a gigantic reactor and huge investment. Nobody could place or fund a 25,000 MWe power plant. With bulk the problems become somewhat tractable. So it is a problem making one of these things small – they actually have a low power density. So to make a profitable electric station, it is sort of like building Hoover Dam as your first hydro-electric project – not a great place to start. With better materials and much better magnets, its looking like smaller might be possible.
Bob on Fri, 29th Jun 2018 4:47 pm
Fusion is about the worst waste of resources I can imagine outside of the military. If by some miracle, this thing ever works, it will never be scalable or financially viable. For the price of this fusion nonsense, we could outfit the entire world with batch solar water heaters. Scalable, viable, robust, benign to the environment and fusion powered! Human society is seriously stupid.
Go Speed Racer on Fri, 29th Jun 2018 5:47 pm
Fusion offers us the perfect conversion
process, to convert IRS
taxpayer revenues, into welfare checks
for academic collegiate professors
living in brick houses with ivy.
The process is renewable and inexhaustible.
Their parents made a living that way,
and their children will go thru college
that way and become research physicists
In a virtuous never ending circular
inexhaustible process called fusion research.
onlooker on Fri, 29th Jun 2018 5:51 pm
GSR Now that’s funny !
Cloggie on Sat, 30th Jun 2018 12:58 am
This century, or at least 2 generations, will be renewable. But I would not exclude the possibility that they get fusion to work.
It would mean infinite energy. It would mean a world where human labor is just standing in the way as fully automated, autonomous machines will do all the work.
Somehow, deep inside I hope they don’t get it to work, but I fear they will.
Makati1 on Sat, 30th Jun 2018 1:42 am
Cloggie, they will never get it to work. Never. The laws of physics and human limits will see to that. They will keep sucking on the government teats for as long as they can, but the collapse will end all such ideas.
Makati1 on Sat, 30th Jun 2018 1:49 am
The ‘slippery’ words used in the article are:
Possibly
Probably
Perhaps
Could (used 4 times)
Never in a million years will it ever be practical or even successful.
Cloggie on Sat, 30th Jun 2018 3:06 am
“The laws of physics and human limits will see to that.”
Let me see, Holland = CET = 10:05
Current time in Manilla = 16:05 local
You can write that post using the light of the sun, meaning photons generated in a fusion process, courtesy “laws of physics”.
That’s no guarantee humans will ever master fusion, but you cannot bring up “laws of physics” to prove they never will.
Makati1 on Sat, 30th Jun 2018 3:16 am
Cloggie, I know the sun does it, as does about a trillion other “suns” in the known universe. I’m saying that man never will. The energy to do so and the energy to contain that energy and control it is out of human reach and always will be.
These articles and their so called “sucess” is sucker bait for dreamers. A huge money rat hole that will never be practical even if they can make one work for a few seconds and produce some electric from it, which I doubt will ever happen.
“Research into developing controlled thermonuclear fusion for civil purposes began in earnest in the 1940s, and it continues to this day.” WIKI
~70 years and they are maybe…10 years away, Or is it 30? Or…never? But keep sending money. LMAO
Dindo Ride on Sat, 30th Jun 2018 7:41 am
Its about time the Philippines will get rich, deuterium at Phil. Deep is replenishable, its not like fossil fuel that gets depleted.
Heinz McLay on Sat, 30th Jun 2018 10:45 am
Fusion is the energy of the future and always will be!
Antius on Sun, 1st Jul 2018 7:53 am
There is enough uranium and thorium in one tonne of common granite, to release the energy equivalent of 50 tonnes of coal in breeder reactors. We can extract these elements by grinding and acid leaching the granite. A lot of other trace elements could be extracted the same way.
https://www.nuenergy.org/theres-atomic-energy-in-granite/
We do not need fusion reactors. There are enough fissions fuels to power human civilisation for millions of years.