Nuclear Fusion With AI – New Plant To Open Soon

“Fusion is a reaction, and there’s a race right now to figure out the right machine to make that reaction happen here on Earth. The machine that would make the reaction would consume a fuel that everyone has access to - no need for uranium or plutonium and no nuclear waste - and would provide unlimited energy.”

Out of about 50 companies out there, CFS is the biggest. Mumgaard detailed advances that could lead to practical, production-level fusion processes. But challenges remain.

A reaction like this, he says, needs three things. It needs to be hot, dense and insulated.

Citing advances that outpace Moore’s law, Mumgaard suggested that a successful result in current research would lead to a plant that would outperform anything ever seen before. He explained that CFS purchased land on an inactive army base in Devens, Massachusetts, and created a commercially relevant demonstration facility called SPARC that uses high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets.

However, Mumgaard said his company announced the site on which CFS plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant outside of Richmond, Virginia, bolstered by a collaboration with the utility, Dominion Energy Virginia. The proposed plant is expected to connect to the grid in the early 2030s..

Specifically, a team at Princeton University has been able to figure out how to use AI to understand and forecast plasma instabilities as the magnets work on the plasma.

In some ways, this is the most important application of artificial intelligence that you can think of. If it ends up saving our world from climate Armageddon, everything else is going to seem secondary.

Global warming irrelevant, global resource Dr depletion is just cold hard mathematics. That math doesn’t work for 8 billion let alone ten billion, without fission or fusion. That fact is not even up for debate with real scientists and engineers who can do basic college level mathematics.

Humans have the technology today to harvest many times more energy than we could ever use. The resources needed to have 8+ billion at middle-class levels of living however are not there without synthetics. Those synthetic take huge amounts of primary energy to make. Fission reserves with fast reactors can sustain 10 billion for a couple thousand years, if we mine the oceans for uranium that goes to billions of years as the crust is 4 ppm uranium and the oceans get run off from the continent’s constantly replenishing the oceans uranium reserves.

Let me be clear in one thing there is not enough hydrocarbons even with coal to have ten billion humans all living at even EU standards of living it is mathematical and that math doesn’t care about politics, feelings or beliefs. There is a crash coming it’s inevitable unless we as a species move to fission, fusion , solar , wind, geothermal and biomass. Those are the only sources that are not by definition finite.

Humans have the technology today with the existing fusion designs to do fusion fission hybrids. You don’t even need breakeven which us fusion Q=1 to make them work. The blanket of depleted or natural uranium surrounding the fusion core multiples the energy by 80 to 200 times via 14MEV neutron induced fission. Humans since the 1990s have had Q=0.5 we recently got to Q=1 you need Q=10 or more for fusion power to be viable. You only need Q=0.5 for a hybrid to make gigawatt levels of net power.

The hybrid also makes 2000+ Kg of PU239 per year and that scares the crap out of nonproliferation types given that ten Kg makes a modern two stage weapon. That 2000 kg also fuels 20 heavy water reactors of a gigawatt each of 10 PWR types with out a single kg of enriched uranium it’s all depleted at that point plus PU from the hybird to make MOX fuel. A single hybrid of a gigawatt fuels 20 gigawatts of CANDU for the 80 year life of the hybrid and it’s daughter reactors using just the spent fuel already sitting at current reactor ponds actually a tiny fraction of the existing spent fuel. If you use all the spent fuel run through a fusion hybrid then to daughter reactors you have a thousand plus years of fuel just sitting in cooling ponds, then add in the huge stockpile of depleted uranium from enrichment plants sitting in waste piles get you another thousand years or so. This only works with breeding fuel via fast neutrons the 0.7% U235 on natural uranium if used in a once through cycle runs out in 50 years faster when China builds 200+ more reactors in the next decade they plan too.

We don’t need anything more than political will to move to a fission dominated energy system France proves in spades they can load follow with the right standardized design. We need either fusion hybrids or fast spectrum breed reactors to have anything more than 50 years of nuclear oower again the math is solid and doesn’t care about feelings or beliefs.

Fission reserves with fast reactors can sustain 10 billion for a couple thousand years, if we mine the oceans for uranium that goes to billions of years as the crust is 4 ppm uranium and the oceans get run off from the continent’s constantly replenishing the oceans uranium reserves.

Using the Thorium Cycle we don't need to mine the oceans or use breeder reactors and avoid the messy reprocessing.

With no more than the Thorium reserves sitting in the Uranium mining tailings piles around the world we could supply the Earth with electricity for a hundred years.

Thorium is 4 times more abundant than Uranium. Use of a mixed oxide or Thorium and natural or depleted Uranium and we could breed Plutonium in a Thorium reactor to extend the life of the Thorium fuel.

Thorium's daughter isotopes are shorter lived making the spent fuel less dangerous and easier to dispose of.

It is a well understood technology.

China has constructed an experimental thorium reactor at Wuwei, on the outskirts of the Gobi Desert1. Thorium has been tested as a fuel in other types of nuclear reactors in countries including the US, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK. It is also part of a nuclear programme in India because of the natural abundance of the element in that country. In France, studies are being carried out by the CNRS, which is developing a project called MSFR (for Molten Salt Fast Reactor), using thorium. Can thorium compete with uranium as a nuclear fuel?

Thorium has been ignored in nuclear power because of our country's obsession with nuclear weapons.

It is time to make use of this un-utilized energy resource.

You seem well informed. I eagerly await your opinion.

Thanks for the LiveScience link, which links to Chinese media. From the article:

"...scientists have been working on this technology for more than 70 years, and it's likely not progressing fast enough to be a practical solution to the climate crisis. Researchers expect us to have fusion power within decades, but it could take much longer."

That they seem to have kept the plasma in toroid intact for over 17 minutes suggests that the energy input still "cost" more than any output.

That was journalism's mix with "the climate crisis" made me chuckle. The real crisis for China seems to be energy to drive its industry and feed its population. Ergo all the news about coal plants being built.

The real crisis for China seems to be energy to drive its industry and feed its population. Ergo all the news about coal plants being built.

There are reports out of China that the country is near economic collapse.

Communist China like the USSR before them is spending money way faster than is sustainable.

In an effort to compete with the West China is spending lots of money on unproductive projects and abandoning projects before completion guaranteeing that the investment of materials and labor in those projects will be lost forever.

This is also impacting the moral of the citizens at large because hundreds maybe thousands of housing units which individuals have invested in have been abandoned unfinished.

China has permitted a little capitalism in to their system but seems to have left out the accountability part.

--- "...spending money way faster than is sustainable...."

There is much more in that phrase you penned. In this odd moment in time, it refers to most of this world.

I will agree with you again, by quoting "seems to have left out the accountability part."

One can look to our national debt, with the awareness that the debtclock.org folks run it for individual states as well, look at the debt problems evidencing themselves across the EU and the UK, alongside "the accountability part" being generally missing from the West in general, not to mention China and more of the third world, your words speak broadly.

Peering at this world with the proverbial "green eye-shade of an accountant," I imagine there are surprises which await us all. There. Here. And everywhere.

Best wishes.

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