Fusion Power - mostly via Tokamak Reactors - has been "just around the corner" since I was in college 40 years ago. MIT-designed project achieves major advance toward fusion energy | MIT News.
It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth. That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world’s first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project’s leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS).
The tokamak reactors that have been designed to date have relied on super-cooled, superconducting magnets. They have a problem. Every once in a while, the cooling system will enable the temperature to rise slightly, causing the magnets to loose their superconductivity. If that happens when million degree plasma is in the bottle, the results will be... well, spectacular might be a good word. Though awful wouldn't be far off.
Until now, the only way to achieve the colossally powerful magnetic fields needed to create a magnetic “bottle” capable of containing plasma heated up to hundreds of millions of degrees was to make them larger and larger. But the new high-temperature superconductor material, made in the form of a flat, ribbon-like tape, makes it possible to achieve a higher magnetic field in a smaller device, equaling the performance that would be achieved in an apparatus 40 times larger in volume using conventional low-temperature superconducting magnets. That leap in power versus size is the key element in ARC’s revolutionary design.
Before you start thinking that you will have a Mr. Fusion powering your car, anytime soon, you should consider that we use nuclear power, both fission and fusion, to create heat, boil water, create high pressure steam, and drive steam turbines to turn generators. It will still be a fairly large-scale utility operation. Medium-scale, anyway. (Hat tip to Blazing Cat Fur.)
This might add a little info.
ReplyDeletehttps://arstechnica.com/science/2021/09/mit-backed-fusion-startup-hits-key-milestone-big-superconducting-magnets/
I must be a bit older than you. I recall reading about fusion reactors being the next big thing in high school 50 years ago.
ALL super conductive magnets are created by SUPER COOLING....using liquid cryogens to get the magnet to REALLY REALLY cold temperatures. And ALL super cooled systems WILL eventually have a leak of coolant....or even a 'quench' where ALL the coolant is vented rapidly. When that happens if said magnets are part of a fusion system the result will be nasty. Till we can get superconductivity without the need for large volumes of cryogens fusion via this method will ALWAYS BE risky...at best.
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