Posted on 03/04/2021 5:34:00 PM PST by MtnClimber
SPARC could be the first fusion reactor to produce net energy—10 years before ITER and in a machine 10 times smaller.
A startup chasing the dream of plentiful, safe, carbon-free electricity from fusion, the energy source of the Sun, has settled on a site, timetable, and key technology for building its compact reactor. Flush with more than $200 million from investors, including Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy, 3-year-old Commonwealth Fusion Systems announced today that later this year it will start to build its first test reactor, dubbed SPARC, in a new facility in Devens, Massachusetts, not far from its current base in Cambridge. The company says the reactor, which would be the first in the world to produce more energy than is needed to run the reaction, could fire up as soon as 2025.
Commonwealth and a rival U.K. company have also chosen the technology they think will let them leap ahead of the giant, publicly funded ITER reactor under construction in France
SNIP
Fusion reactors burn an ionized gas of hydrogen isotopes at more than 100 million degrees Celsius—so hot that the plasma must be contained by a mesh of magnetic fields so it doesn’t melt the reactor walls. At ITER, sufficiently powerful fields are achieved using niobium alloy superconducting wires that can carry huge currents without resistance through magnet coils. But such low-temperature superconductors must be chilled to 4° above absolute zero, which requires bulky and expensive liquid helium cooling. And there’s a limit to the amount of current the niobium wires can carry, forcing ITER to adopt huge magnets with many wire turns to generate the needed fields. ITER’s largest magnets are 24 meters across, contributing to the reactor’s $20 billion price tag.
(Excerpt) Read more at sciencemag.org ...
Ping!....................
Is that Mr. Fusion less than $20 Billion dollars?
How can the energy density be low while the heat is high?
When such a structure collapses, the air will rush in and the heat will create a raging fireball storm, would it not?
One thing we know for sure about the location: it won’t be built near any places where the elites live and play.
Yeah, I saw this one... I think it Spiderman II, it does not end well....
We all would power our homes and vehicles on miniature suns.
***************
Miniature suns right here on earth. What could go wrong?
Beat me to it.
James Prescott Joule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Prescott_Joule
James Prescott Joule FRS FRSE (/dʒaʊl, dʒuːl/;[1][2][a] 24 December 1818 – 11 October 1889) was an English physicist, mathematician and brewer, born in Salford, Lancashire. Joule studied the nature of heat, and discovered its relationship to mechanical work (see energy). This led to the law of conservation of energy, which in turn led to the development of the first law of thermodynamics. The SI derived unit of energy, the joule, is named after him.
James Watt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Watt
James Watt FRS FRSE (/wɒt/; 30 January 1736 (19 January 1736 OS) – 25 August 1819)[1] was a Scottish inventor, mechanical engineer, and chemist who improved on Thomas Newcomen’s 1712 Newcomen steam engine with his Watt steam engine in 1776, which was fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world.
He developed the concept of horsepower,[2] and the SI unit of power, the watt, was named after him.
Not sure what you're referring to.
If you're referring to the earlier discussion of "what would happen if the plasma got out," which I was addressing, the temperature in the plasma (that is, the velocity of the ion cores that are flying around in the plasma) is quite high, a hundred million degrees C worth. But their density is low, much lower than that of the ambient atmosphere.
The total amount of matter involved is small, just a few milligrams. If the plasma could "get out," it would immediately encounter ordinary cold matter (the air, or the walls of the fusion chamber) and be cooled down to ordinary temperatures. Any nuclear reactions would immediately cease.
That's one of the appealing differences between thermonuclear energy sources and ordinary nuclear power reactors.
In an ordinary nuclear reactor, the amount of fuel present is measured in pounds, or even in tons, in the case of commercial, utility reactor plants. The amount of energy in the reactor vessel is enormous, and it requires careful control and monitoring to make sure that it is only released in a (comparative) trickle.
But in a "hot fusion" reactor (like a tokamak, for example) the amount of fuel present in the reaction chamber is a tiny amount of gas (deuterium, tritium, etc.) at a fairly high vacuum. The amount of energy that can be released on any one "shot" is not that much; as I said, on the order of that which would be released by a few pounds of gasoline. A large explosion, but the containment vessels are also large and very well built.
I have seen pictures of serious (like melting) damage to the inner surfaces of tokamak reactors, but I'm not sure if those were caused by the plasma "getting away" (which I doubt) or by a sudden "quench" of the superconducting solenoid coils, which can cause a violent (explosive) release of energy. But that would be energy from a collapsing magnetic field (the plasma confinement field), not from any sort of thermonuclear plasma escape.
“Any nuclear reactions would immediately cease.”
That’s the beauty of fusion versus fission.
But a superheated plasma of millions of degrees Farenheit is still a concern. It will light the surrounding atmosphere, the air will catch fire.
I think that’s still an acceptable risk but there is no indication of how expansive such a ball of fire would be. If it is several miles wide, it is not gonna work.
Miniature suns right here on earth. What could go wrong?>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Failure of containment: Crispy Critters? ( grin)
Or maybe it will be small enough that it will just go “pffft”
If antimatter is used, then it would be a tragedy of a different order.
“Let the chips fall where they may.”
And we know that the e-cat was a total scam!
Like I said elsewhere... I posted pro-ecat articles for 2&half MONTHS but you seagulls polluted legitimate cold fusion threads for 2&half years.
Congratulations. You extended your a$$#o/eness to 8 years. Kiss off, jerkwad. You aint interested in science, your agenda is to drop what seagulls drop.
I'm not sure what you mean by "catch fire." Do you mean burn (oxidize), in the chemical sense?
Yes. The microparticles in the air will be the fuel, the oxygen and heat generating those 3 elements of fire. Since the temperature is 5 orders of magnitude greater than ordinary fires, I expect perhaps 3-4 orders of magnitude more damage.
That’s a lot of damage.
forgot to ping you
“I posted pro-ecat articles for 2&half MONTHS but you seagulls polluted legitimate cold fusion threads for 2&half years.”
How much time and money have you lost on this scam?
“The microparticles in the air will be the fuel, the oxygen and heat generating those 3 elements of fire.”
Not much fuel, not much fire!
Fire is a tricky beast. It’s enough fuel to enable the fire to reach the next target with PLENTY of fuel.
What I’m trying to determine is the diameter of damage. Does 100 million degrees correlate to a 10 mile diameter? 100 milw diameter?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.