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
Just replace 'beer' with 'energy'!...............
Probably the same way neon lights work....................only huge anodes and cathodes made of unobtainium................
When P(out) > P(in)
These promises aren’t called a “bow wave” for nothing.
And if something goes wrong, the results will be the demand for energy drops to zero. :^)
Some countries are seeing results with Cold Fusion.
Got links?...................
If something goes wrong, they’ll never know...............
Scientists with the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced today that they have achieved a critical step in fusion research: For the first time, their hydrogen fuel has given off more energy than it took in.
http://www.wired.com/2014/02/fusion-power-not-yet/
02.12.14
It will never be built in the USA because it might just work.............
pheromak technology:
Laboratory spheromaks involve very large currents, typically 100’s of kiloamperes and high voltages, typically kilovolts. These currents and voltages are obtained using high energy capacitor banks which are switched in microseconds. The formation geometry is arranged such that magnetic flux cuts across the electrodes connected to the capacitor bank. This configurations generates helicity (twistedness) in the flux tube going from one electrode to the other. With enough helicity a spheromak is formed.
Click below to see the six steps involved in making a spheromak
http://ve4xm.caltech.edu/Bellan_plasma_page/How1.htm
They seem to be going from an idea to an actual working plant, without a pilot plant in the middle.
Nuts.
Who has 2.7 billion of beer money to throw at this -— Uncle Sugar, or if you like, Uncle Solyndra.
“The day that could be practicable may soon be drawing near.”
The day it is presented to the public will be after they
have total control over society. Do you really think they
are going to allow that kind of technology out? People
will either build their own generators or bombs in their
garage. The only reason they can keep a lid on nukes now
is because of the unavailability of fissionable material.
No way they are going to allow any Mr. Fusion home fusion
generators.
Probably inductive coupling, or maybe even microvave rf coupling. Inductively coupled, long life electrodeless fluorescent lamps have been on the market for a while, and work on the same principle.
Fusion power has been about 30 years away for my entire adult life, which is longer than 30 years.
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.
Nobody has reached break even yet, a little soon to be building power plants.
Well, somebody’s gotta be first!....................
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