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 ...
"A neutron has no overall electric charge, so its trajectory is not affected by uniform magnetic field, but it has magnetic moment, and this magnetic moment can interact with external field, resulting in changes in the direction of neutron's spin. And non-uniform field can also modify the trajectory of a neutron." [Quora]
Please add me to your Cold Fusion Ping List.
TIA
ADDED
Welcome to the club.
Who ever wrote this doesn’t understand nuclear fusion.
You don’t burn it you fuse it.🙄
“Cold Fusion Ping List”
LOL!
“I posted about the ecat for 2&half MONTHS, and you seagull @$$#0/es hounded me for 2&half YEARS. So it’s time to say get lost. You jerks never ONCE addressed the science.”
ROTFLMAO!
Magnets inside magnets inside magnets within a magnetic field. With a big ice bath to cool it down in case of emergency.
Just build it in Bayonne.
The “plasma ball” is a very high vacuum phenomenon. It’s density is like one millionth that of the atmosphere.
It’s temperature is high but its energy density is low.
It’s kind of like asking “what if the induced draft fans on a coal-fired boiler failed? Wouldn’t the burning gases inside get out and incinerate the surrounding county?”
Ah, no. And for a fusion plasma, the actual amount of heated material is far, far less.
“Please add me to your Cold Fusion Ping List.”
How about the 90% efficient Tesla Turbine?
“Ah, no. And for a fusion plasma, the actual amount of heated material is far, far less.”
True for magnetic confinement but not for inertial confinement.
Looks like I have fans everywhere. Like Trump.
Why are you going into aggressive seagull jerk mode? We intend to apply for the same level of caucus protection that the Qanon folks receive on FR.
JimRob doesn’t like all the invective, so it’s time for you guys to open your own threads and throw your snark around there rather than polluting ours.
FOADA
“JimRob doesn’t like all the invective, so it’s time for you guys to open your own threads and throw your snark around there rather than polluting ours.”
This is a science thread you are polluting ...
For inertial confinement, the amount of material being compressed is measured in milligrams at most. If you figure an energy density scale up of a factor of a million for fusion over chemical reactions, the amount of energy generated per shot is on the order of a few kilograms of gasoline. Like as much as is released in a typical Hollywood car-explodes-on-impact stunt.
In the NIF (National Ignition Facility) the target chamber is a sphere ten meters in diameter, made of four-inch-thick aluminum. It is evacuated to a high vacuum before each shot. Its total volume is about 15000 cubic feet. I'm guessing it can handle the power output of a shot.
“FOADA”
LOL!
In inertial-confinement fusion, the time involved is a few tenths of a billionth of a second and the density of the plasma has to reach 1031 nuclei per cubic meter—many times more dense than lead.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/mathematics/inertial-confinement
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