Uncle Xi Jinping, has all the dough necessary....................
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
Don’t worry, it’s only 20 years away.
Power plants are basically public works projects, whether they are owned directly by the government or by highly regulated "private" monopolies. In the history of mankind, no public works project has ever been built for what it was projected to cost.
I would love to see an alternative power source that costs less in real life than oil, gas or coal. So far, there are none and I do not expect to see any in my lifetime.
A mere eye blink of mortal time...............
Uncle Xi Jinping, has all the dough necessary....................
“To cheap to meter”
Lewis Strauss, then Chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission, in 1954.
By the 70’s, we had built enough of them to know better. Most knew it then.
Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and now Fukushima have effectively ended any new fission plants ever being built..................
Beat me to it!................
“They have designed a concept...”
A lot of those “concepts” out there, but the real test is translating a “concept” into real economic functioning item.
Probably not here, but I'll bet they get built somewhere in the World. Even Saudi is still planning Nuke plants, IIRC.
The magic is that is it always 20 years away.
Well, they got the bucks, and lots of sand if something goes wrong.................
E.U. Approves Plan for New Nuclear Power Station in Britain
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/09/business/international/eu-approves-plan-for-new-nuclear-power-station-in-britain.html?_r=0
OCT. 8, 2014
Not everyone is as crazy as the current Germans.
Bet it never sees the light of day................
In the early 1970s, the South Texas Nuclear Project was still being sold based on the “too cheap to meter” claim. The actual construction cost ended up being approximately six or seven times the projected cost. Operating costs have been several times projected costs too.
I am actually a supporter of nuclear power. Unlike wind, solar and every other alternative energy scheme, nuclear power can be economically feasible. Plus it is best not to put all of your energy generating eggs in one basket.
Without the incredible success we have had with fracking (which no one seriously predicted even 10 years ago), we would still be looking at having to import more and more oil from the Middle East, Venezuela and other third world hell holes to keep up with our energy needs.
Now if we can continue to expand fracking in the U.S., open up oil and gas development on federal land, and get the Keystone Pipeline built to bring in oil from Canada we have a real shot at keeping our economy going until fission and maybe someday fusion reactors can actually be built and operated economically.
I think it will. They have kept progressing since Fukushima. They still have public support (not by everyone of course) and there is strong political support across all three main parties.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/Countries-T-Z/United-Kingdom/
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I think you will find others on this list that will continue to build Nuke Plants.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Country-Profiles/
I don't agree.
The actual construction cost ended up being approximately six or seven times the projected cost.
Not quite that much, but 5.6 times is bad enough. Caused by several factors include multiple significant rule changes by the Fed during design and construction. Root&Scoot contributed to the problems.
That's my recollection and I am sticking with it, but I was in high school at the time and I have lost a lot of grey cells since then.
Ever since the 1950’s we’ve been 30 years away from practical fusion power...
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