Posted on 11/16/2023 6:12:53 PM PST by FarCenter
Southeastern China’s Jiangxi province is going to build a fusion-fission power plant for more than 20 billion yuan (US$2.7 billion), with a target of continuously generating 100 megawatts (MW) of electricity.
Jiangxi Electronic Group, a state-owned enterprise, said in a statement on Tuesday that Lianovation Superconductor and CNNC Fusion (Chengdu) Design and Research Institute signed a cooperation framework agreement on November 12 to jointly build a fusion-fission reactor in the province.
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In a fusion-fission hybrid reactor, the high-energy neutrons produced by the fusion reactions are absorbed in a “blanket” of fissionable material, where they trigger fission reactions. The favored blanket fuels are the plentiful isotopes uranium-238 or thorium-232.
A major advantage of the hybrid reactor is that each fusion neutron can trigger several fission events, multiplying the energy released by each fusion reaction by many times. This drastically reduces the demands placed on the fusion reactor, which no longer has to produce net energy.
This makes a hybrid fusion-fission power plant in principle much easier to realize than a “pure” fusion power plant – and thus possibly deliverable much faster.
The Chinese government had included a fusion-fission hybrid project in its 863 program, a high-technology development plan launched in 1987, but terminated the project in 2000.
In 2008, Peng Xianjue from the China Academy of Engineering Physics and his team pointed out that traditional fusion-fission hybrid research had faced a bottleneck due to problems in breeding and transmutation of chemical elements.
These problems can be resolved by using a Z-pinch-driven fusion-fission hybrid reactor (Z-FFR), Peng said.
A Z-pinch, or zeta-pinch, reactor uses a gigantic pulse of electric current to generate a magnetic field that compresses the plasma.
Peng said in September 2022 that China planned to build a 50-million-ampere Z-pinch machine, which would be ready for experimental use by 2025. He said this Chengdu-based machine would be the largest in the world. A comparable machine at the Sandia National Laboratory in the US can produce only 26 million amperes. Peng said then that the country would be able to generate fusion power around 2028 and build a fusion-fission reactor for commercial use in around 2035.
Not much more than vaporware...
In the Sun a proton proton collision is the first step in the production of Helium. It is also the limiting step because this collision has to happen a trillion billion times before a single particle in the next step is successful. Clearly this reactor won’t be using ordinary Hydrogen.
Just like Doc Ock.
You can go fusion, I’m goin’ fission
Typically deuterium or tritium is used in fusion experiments. Deuterium is extracted from water. Tritium is made in fission reactors by neutron activation of lithium 6.
I imagine that they have stolen enough technology from us to make it quite a successful project.
100 megawatts? A conventional fission reactor typically produces ten times that amount.
100 Megawatts is about what nuclear subs have. Our Carriers generate about 500 Megawatts per reactor.
Windmills are a very lucrative r&d business?
Most of the 60 under construction are over 1000 MWe. However, there are a number of small ones. They are probably prototypes or research reactors.
What could possibly go wrong? By the way it’s only thirty years off.
Propaganda vaporware, or some official's pet project to put money in a place he can access it.
Jiangxi province has a population of 45 million. That’s a little more than California.
That’s an interesting plan. Just make sure that you are a long-long way away from it when they first try it out.
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