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UW fusion reactor concept could be cheaper than coal
Phys.Org ^ | 10/10/2014 | by Michelle Ma & Provided by University of Washington

Posted on 10/10/2014 12:23:24 PM PDT by Red Badger

Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true – zero greenhouse gas emissions, no long-lived radioactive waste, a nearly unlimited fuel supply.

Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven't penciled out. Fusion power designs aren't cheap enough to outperform systems that use fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

University of Washington engineers hope to change that. They have designed a concept for a fusion reactor that, when scaled up to the size of a large electrical power plant, would rival costs for a new coal-fired plant with similar electrical output.

The team published its reactor design and cost-analysis findings last spring and will present results Oct. 17 at the International Atomic Energy Agency's Fusion Energy Conference in St. Petersburg, Russia.

"Right now, this design has the greatest potential of producing economical fusion power of any current concept," said Thomas Jarboe, a UW professor of aeronautics and astronautics and an adjunct professor in physics.

The UW's reactor, called the dynomak, started as a class project taught by Jarboe two years ago. After the class ended, Jarboe and doctoral student Derek Sutherland – who previously worked on a reactor design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – continued to develop and refine the concept.

The design builds on existing technology and creates a magnetic field within a closed space to hold plasma in place long enough for fusion to occur, allowing the hot plasma to react and burn. The reactor itself would be largely self-sustaining, meaning it would continuously heat the plasma to maintain thermonuclear conditions. Heat generated from the reactor would heat up a coolant that is used to spin a turbine and generate electricity, similar to how a typical power reactor works.

"This is a much more elegant solution because the medium in which you generate fusion is the medium in which you're also driving all the current required to confine it," Sutherland said.

There are several ways to create a magnetic field, which is crucial to keeping a fusion reactor going. The UW's design is known as a spheromak, meaning it generates the majority of magnetic fields by driving electrical currents into the plasma itself. This reduces the amount of required materials and actually allows researchers to shrink the overall size of the reactor.

Other designs, such as the experimental fusion reactor project that's currently being built in France – called Iter – have to be much larger than the UW's because they rely on superconducting coils that circle around the outside of the device to provide a similar magnetic field. When compared with the fusion reactor concept in France, the UW's is much less expensive – roughly one-tenth the cost of Iter – while producing five times the amount of energy.

The UW researchers factored the cost of building a fusion reactor power plant using their design and compared that with building a coal power plant. They used a metric called "overnight capital costs," which includes all costs, particularly startup infrastructure fees. A fusion power plant producing 1 gigawatt (1 billion watts) of power would cost $2.7 billion, while a coal plant of the same output would cost $2.8 billion, according to their analysis.

"If we do invest in this type of fusion, we could be rewarded because the commercial reactor unit already looks economical," Sutherland said. "It's very exciting."

Right now, the UW's concept is about one-tenth the size and power output of a final product, which is still years away. The researchers have successfully tested the prototype's ability to sustain a plasma efficiently, and as they further develop and expand the size of the device they can ramp up to higher-temperature plasma and get significant fusion power output.

The team has filed patents on the reactor concept with the UW's Center for Commercialization and plans to continue developing and scaling up its prototypes.

Explore further: Research team uses remote control to replace the fusion reactor cassette collecting impurities


TOPICS: Business/Economy; Culture/Society; US: Washington
KEYWORDS: coal; energy; fusion; nuclear; opec; stringtheory
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To: Slambat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Past


41 posted on 10/10/2014 2:15:29 PM PDT by Red Badger (If you compromise with evil, you just get more evil..........................)
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To: Red Badger

Don’t worry, it’s only 20 years away.


42 posted on 10/10/2014 2:20:42 PM PDT by dangerdoc ((this space for rent))
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To: Red Badger
I remember back in the 1970s when fission reactor nuclear power plants were going to be so cheap that they would not ever meter your electricity. Didn't quite work out that way.

Power plants are basically public works projects, whether they are owned directly by the government or by highly regulated "private" monopolies. In the history of mankind, no public works project has ever been built for what it was projected to cost.

I would love to see an alternative power source that costs less in real life than oil, gas or coal. So far, there are none and I do not expect to see any in my lifetime.

43 posted on 10/10/2014 2:22:13 PM PDT by Bubba_Leroy (The Obamanation Continues)
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To: dangerdoc

A mere eye blink of mortal time...............


44 posted on 10/10/2014 2:22:15 PM PDT by Red Badger (If you compromise with evil, you just get more evil..........................)
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To: Titus-Maximus

Uncle Xi Jinping, has all the dough necessary....................

45 posted on 10/10/2014 2:24:16 PM PDT by Red Badger (If you compromise with evil, you just get more evil..........................)
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To: Bubba_Leroy

“To cheap to meter”

Lewis Strauss, then Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, in 1954.

By the 70’s, we had built enough of them to know better. Most knew it then.


46 posted on 10/10/2014 2:25:46 PM PDT by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer.)
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To: Bubba_Leroy

Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima have effectively ended any new fission plants ever being built..................


47 posted on 10/10/2014 2:26:24 PM PDT by Red Badger (If you compromise with evil, you just get more evil..........................)
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To: thackney

Beat me to it!................


48 posted on 10/10/2014 2:27:02 PM PDT by Red Badger (If you compromise with evil, you just get more evil..........................)
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To: Red Badger

“They have designed a concept...”

A lot of those “concepts” out there, but the real test is translating a “concept” into real economic functioning item.


49 posted on 10/10/2014 2:37:19 PM PDT by RetiredTexasVet (Put lipstick on a Communist and call it a Progressive, but it's still a Communist with lipstick.)
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To: Red Badger
ended any new fission plants ever being built

Probably not here, but I'll bet they get built somewhere in the World. Even Saudi is still planning Nuke plants, IIRC.

50 posted on 10/10/2014 2:42:03 PM PDT by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer.)
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To: Red Badger

The magic is that is it always 20 years away.


51 posted on 10/10/2014 2:42:14 PM PDT by dangerdoc ((this space for rent))
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To: thackney

Well, they got the bucks, and lots of sand if something goes wrong.................


52 posted on 10/10/2014 2:43:37 PM PDT by Red Badger (If you compromise with evil, you just get more evil..........................)
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To: Red Badger

E.U. Approves Plan for New Nuclear Power Station in Britain
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/business/international/eu-approves-plan-for-new-nuclear-power-station-in-britain.html?_r=0
OCT. 8, 2014

Not everyone is as crazy as the current Germans.


53 posted on 10/10/2014 2:44:18 PM PDT by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer.)
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To: thackney

Bet it never sees the light of day................


54 posted on 10/10/2014 2:45:22 PM PDT by Red Badger (If you compromise with evil, you just get more evil..........................)
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To: thackney

In the early 1970s, the South Texas Nuclear Project was still being sold based on the “too cheap to meter” claim. The actual construction cost ended up being approximately six or seven times the projected cost. Operating costs have been several times projected costs too.

I am actually a supporter of nuclear power. Unlike wind, solar and every other alternative energy scheme, nuclear power can be economically feasible. Plus it is best not to put all of your energy generating eggs in one basket.

Without the incredible success we have had with fracking (which no one seriously predicted even 10 years ago), we would still be looking at having to import more and more oil from the Middle East, Venezuela and other third world hell holes to keep up with our energy needs.

Now if we can continue to expand fracking in the U.S., open up oil and gas development on federal land, and get the Keystone Pipeline built to bring in oil from Canada we have a real shot at keeping our economy going until fission and maybe someday fusion reactors can actually be built and operated economically.


55 posted on 10/10/2014 2:53:54 PM PDT by Bubba_Leroy (The Obamanation Continues)
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To: Red Badger

I think it will. They have kept progressing since Fukushima. They still have public support (not by everyone of course) and there is strong political support across all three main parties.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/United-Kingdom/

- - - - - - -

I think you will find others on this list that will continue to build Nuke Plants.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/


56 posted on 10/10/2014 2:55:54 PM PDT by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer.)
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To: Bubba_Leroy
In the early 1970s, the South Texas Nuclear Project was still being sold based on the “too cheap to meter” claim.

I don't agree.

The actual construction cost ended up being approximately six or seven times the projected cost.

Not quite that much, but 5.6 times is bad enough. Caused by several factors include multiple significant rule changes by the Fed during design and construction. Root&Scoot contributed to the problems.

57 posted on 10/10/2014 3:01:07 PM PDT by thackney (life is fragile, handle with prayer.)
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To: thackney
In the early 1970s, the South Texas Nuclear Project was still being sold based on the “too cheap to meter” claim.

I don't agree.

That's my recollection and I am sticking with it, but I was in high school at the time and I have lost a lot of grey cells since then.

58 posted on 10/10/2014 3:07:43 PM PDT by Bubba_Leroy (The Obamanation Continues)
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To: Red Badger
Yeah, I read this article. Its also helpful to post some of the comments in the comment section of the same article. As they give other competing fusion designs.

.................

Da Schneib Here's another "small fusion" concept that a private company is working on: http://lawrencevilleplasmaphysics.com/ The technique they're using is called "plasma focus fusion." They're currently rebuilding their experiment to eliminate arcing that was vaporizing their electrical connection and contaminating the plasma. They expect to have the new device up in a few months; they've already moved the connector outside the vacuum chamber, and have successfully used an indium ring and silver plating on the steel baseplate to reduce the resistance to 6 μΩ.

cantdrive85( Eric Lerner's focus fusion process involves creating electricity directly without the need for heating water to spin a turbine. The cost is but a fraction of coal power production, nearly inexhaustible fuel supplies, and totally clean.)

Da Schneib And another, unfortunately their website is being rebuilt, called "Polywell fusion" that's based on the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor, as extended by the late Dr. Robert Bussard. They have finished proving that their magnetic containment scheme will work for a net-power-output fusion device, and posted a paper on arXiv: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.0133v1.pdf

Also worthy of note are Electron Power Systems http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/central/ and General Fusion http://www.generalfusion.com/ both of which are less promising to my mind than either the Plasma Focus or the Polywell. LENR isn't dead, but it's going very slowly. Here's a blog post on the Polywell arXiv paper, which details what they've accomplished and announced, and what remains to be done: http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/06/bussard-emc2-fusion-project-publishes.html I hope fusion will be solved this decade; I think it's a virtual certainty that if it's not, it will be in the 2020s.
59 posted on 10/10/2014 3:33:33 PM PDT by ckilmer (q)
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To: bagman

Ever since the 1950’s we’ve been 30 years away from practical fusion power...


60 posted on 10/10/2014 4:14:24 PM PDT by Kozak ("It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal" Henry Kissinger)
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