The UW's current fusion experiment, HIT-SI3. It is about one-tenth the size of the power-producing dynomak concept. Credit: U of Washington
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-uw-fusion-reactor-concept-cheaper.html#jCp
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
The UW's current fusion experiment, HIT-SI3. It is about one-tenth the size of the power-producing dynomak concept. Credit: U of Washington
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-10-uw-fusion-reactor-concept-cheaper.html#jCp
Being able to harness the power that drives the sun is the holy grail of physics and engineering.
So far nuclear fusion power has remained theoretical because of the costs of building a nuclear fusion reactor reliable and cheap enough to operate.
The day that could be practicable may soon be drawing near.
The article does not make it clear, but I think that this is unproven technology at best.
So was the nuclear bomb - people scoffed that could ever be built.
The hydrogen bomb is uncontrolled fusion. The difficulty lies in controlling the process to produce safe and clean power.
Well, with the Chinese working on a Thorium solution, maybe finally something will get developed that is an improvement over the current design.
They simply need 2.7 Billion dollars to find out.............
Uh, so far no fusion design has even come close to break even in power, or been able to sustain a fusion reaction for a couple of seconds.
I wish we could have fusion soon but I don’t see it happening short of some huge engineering breakthrough.
We’ve been able to use thermonuclear fusion for a while. Just not constructively. Well, with this new system, I guess a working fusion reactor is only 10 years away. Just like it has been for the past 50 years.
Don’t worry. If this becomes feasible, the enviro-nazis will quickly put an end to it.
Fusion energy almost sounds too good to be true
...
If I only had a dollar for every article I’ve seen that starts with a similar statement.
Leap Frog!!!
I’m waiting for the 3D printable version.
Back in the 1970s, my grad school advisor, whose PhD thesis was, at that time, the second most-widely cited paper on a particular aspect of fusion (tokamak blankets), said that one had to have 20-20 vision before we saw a viable fusion plant, by which he meant it would be the year 2020.
While I have not been following developments in fusion technology closely, I don’t think that we are any closer to solving the engineering problems now than we were then.
I don’t see how this design addresses some imposing engineering problems.
Controlled fusion ...”still years away”.
And we have been hearing that for years now.
Thank you! That’s what I thought when I read this:
“Perhaps the biggest roadblock to adopting fusion energy is that the economics haven’t penciled out.”
Well...that and the fact that it’s never been done.
It’s sort of the Obama concept of “leadership.” Just say something and it will happen.
By combining dilithium crystals WITH the flux capacitor they can exponentially increase efficiencies not seen before.
How are they getting the electric currents to the plasma? Seems like the conductor would burn up. If it doesnt burn up how are they dealing with degradation from neutrinos?
Not enough info to say whether it will work or not.
Yep.
Fusion has been “thirty years away” ... for how long???
Magnetically contained plasma fusion is a well proven technology. What this article is talking about is really just engineering innovation, not any new theoretical science.
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