Thanks RACPE.
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Posted on 04/09/2021 2:49:53 PM PDT by Wonder Warthog
TAE Technologies, the world’s largest private fusion company, has announced it will have a commercially viable nuclear fusion power plant by 2030, which puts it years—or even decades—ahead of other fusion technology companies.
The California-based company has raised $880 million in funding for its hydrogen-boron reactor. This reactor isn’t a traditional tokamak or stellarator; instead, it uses a confined particle acceleration mechanism that produces and confines plasma.
All fusion technology has plasma, which mimics the extreme reactions that power all the stars—it’s what we’re emulating when we make fusion energy experiments. “Plasma is an oozy substance; the challenge of containing it is akin to holding Jell-O together using rubber bands,” TAE says on its website.
TAE TECHNOLOGIES What is TAE doing differently than the industry’s perhaps higher-profile projects, like the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER)? TAE’s tech, which is called advanced beam-driven field-reversed configuration (FRC), uses non-radioactive hydrogen-boron to generate plasma in a carefully contained area. The tech can also work for hydrogen isotope fuels like deuterium-tritium, TAE says. The particle-accelerating beam heats the molecules to plasma status, then the field-reversed configuration keeps it all together.
The entire system has a totally different shape and form factor than tokamaks and stellarators. In fact, it’s closer to medical applications, like cancer-zapping proton beams you may have seen pop up at places like Cancer Treatment Centers of America and other hospitals. That’s because the targeted beam can work in the body the same way it works to heat and disrupt the particulate inside TAE’s reactor.
TAE TECHNOLOGIES TAE’s current working reactor is nicknamed Norman, after the scientist who cofounded TAE in 1998. The reactor is 80 feet long, 22 feet wide, and 60,000 pounds. This still makes it far smaller than almost any existing nuclear power plant reactor, on par with something like a small modular reactor.
Today, TAE has announced that Norman has consistently reached the 50 million degrees Celsius required to become a sustaining plasma reactor.
There are two colloquial terms for what fusion net energy requires: “hot enough” and “long enough” to end up fruitfully producing energy. TAE says Norman has been running over 600 experiments each month, which is 20 tests each day or about 30 each weekday—reaching the plasma “ignition,” or self sustaining for energy, temperature each time.
This means 6 years after TAE began to reach “long enough,” Norman has finally reached “hot enough” frequently enough that it can begin to scale up for commercial power plants. And this is why the company says it feels it can build that kind of power plant by the end of the decade in 2030.
With the central fusion technology well in hand, there’s still a lot of work to get a fusion plant off (and on) the ground in reality. Everything about the whole structure must be designed, studied, tested, and regulated by the government. Still, TAE is confident about the 2030 time frame because of the proliferation of tools and knowledge in recent years.
I'm waiting on my Jetsons flying car, they said it would be here by now.
It’s outmoded, now we have the miracle battery, LOL.
U-235 proved too time-consuming to create. Not only was the process slow, the K-25 plant at Oak Ridge had so many centrifuges separating out the 235 from the 238 that it was consuming 1/7th of all the electricity created in the entire country. So they had to switch to Plutonium.
P-239 was even more unstable than U-235 so they knew they could get the same yield from a much smaller mass of plutonium, and the plutonium promised to be faster to produce. The hitch was that you had to have a functioning nuclear reactor to create it. Use a reactive pile to bombard U-238 with neutrons released from a fission reaction and, Bada-Bing, you got P-239.
So they sent Leslie Groves looking for real estate. He spent a couple of weeks in Washington scouting for locations, found what he wanted, and within six months they had two new fission reactors up and running, producing P-239.
Then the numbers guys at Los Alamos discovered a problem. The plutonium they were producing wasn't pure enough to use in the gun-design bomb. Too many U-238 atoms were picking up a second extra neutron, making P-240. And the impurity made the material unsuitable for the much simpler design. The U-235 was too slow coming so there was no alternative. They had to switch to the implosion design for the plutonium bombs.
But that design was fraught with technical problems. It used 32 separate detonators and all 32 had to go off within one one-millionth of a second of each other or the implosion wouldn't be sufficiently uniform to achieve fission.
In fact there were so many uncertainties that they decided they had to have a test detonation to prove that it would work. Which is why the Trinity bomb was a plutonium-implosion design. Because there was never any doubt that the gun design U-235 bomb would work. Plutonium-implosion ... not so much.
When they conducted the Trinity test, the USS Indianapolis was waiting in San Diego harbor with the bomb assembly and installation team and the components of Little Boy already on board. Because they didn't want to use the first bomb unless the second one was at the ready, just in case the Japanese were really that pig-headed. So there the Indy sat, without knowing why, waiting on the Trinity test.
Within hours of when Trinity went Ka-Boom!, Indianapolis was making flank speed for Tinnian.
“So they sent Leslie Groves looking for real estate. He spent a couple of weeks in Washington”
Was at Leslie Groves Park on the Columbia this morning.
Biden would insist government could do it better using Black-owned research firms...and put Fauci in charge of the project. :)
Great stuff if true, but a functional power plant in nine years? It takes about that long for planning, approval, and construction of a gas plant and we’ve built hundreds of those.
Brand new tech we’ve never done before? I would double that time estimate and more likely triple it even if the tech works great.
I think the Little Boy Bomb was a more elegant design because it had greater tolerances for errors and was likely to work even if you don't meet exacting design tolerances. Exactly the type of engineering needed for the first fusion reactors where they don't know what the hell they're doing yet.
Perfect is the enemy of done.
Got mine last week...after my xray glssses came.
I DEMAND the flying car I was promised!
cold fusion ping list, as requested
The little boy design never went away once the problem of centrifuges was mastered during the cold war both sides used gun type devices to make miniature artillery sized shells an implosion device has a physics limited minimum diameter which is too large to fit into a 155mm shell casing. Using uranium one can set up a double ended gun type device with two guns and a central target with nearly three critical masses total which puts it in the 50_100 it range or go small and use 1.2 crucial mass and get into the low KT range perfect for tactical use. Switching to U233 instead of 235 and using tritium boosting in the central target allows for shells smaller than 155mm the acknowledged smallest is 120mm and small enough to fit in a 25kg shell. While not movie plot device light that is small enough to fit in the average sized back pack. The Russians used the double gun with a central boosted design for thousands of tactical shells, mines and missiles in the cold war as while not as efficient with fissile materials they has gobs of it from the mines in their central Asian possessions.
Great background story. Thanks.
Ping me when Elon Musk puts money into the plan...
Ping me when Elon Musk puts money into the plan... The 'wall' has always been the key. If tis works on a large scale it might be the answer.
Miracle battery=humans. Ever saw the Matrix? We are getting there soon. Just a few more updates to those injectable operating systems.
Why a big plant - if this works make one for each town/city to operate their own
"IF" it works....yes, that is a possibility.
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