Nuclear Fusion News & Discussions

[caltrek]

Newly Developed Material Gulps Down Hydrogen, Spits It Out, Protects Fusion Reactor Walls
December 14, 2023

Introduction:

(Eurekalert) MADISON – University of Wisconsin–Madison engineers have used a spray coating technology to produce a new workhorse material that can withstand the harsh conditions inside a fusion reactor.

The advance, detailed in a paper published recently in the journal Physica Scripta, could enable more efficient compact fusion reactors that are easier to repair and maintain.

“The fusion community is urgently looking for new manufacturing approaches to economically produce large plasma-facing components in fusion reactors,” says Mykola Ialovega, a postdoctoral researcher in nuclear engineering and engineering physics at UW–Madison and lead author on the paper. “Our technology shows considerable improvements over current approaches. With this research, we are the first to demonstrate the benefits of using cold spray coating technology for fusion applications.”

The researchers used a cold spray process to deposit a coating of tantalum, a metal that can withstand high temperatures, on stainless steel. They tested their cold spray tantalum coating in the extreme conditions relevant to a fusion reactor and found that it performed very well. Importantly, they discovered the material is exceptionally good at trapping hydrogen particles, which is beneficial for compact fusion devices.

“We discovered that the cold spray tantalum coating absorbs much more hydrogen than bulk tantalum because of the unique microstructure of the coating,” says Kumar Sridharan, a professor of nuclear engineering and engineering physics and materials science and engineering. Over the last decade, Sridharan’s research group has introduced cold spray technology to the nuclear energy community by implementing it for multiple applications related to fission reactors.

Read more of the Eurekalert article here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1011296


Read a presentation of study results as presented in Physica Scripta here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1 ... 96/ad0009

[weatheriscool]

Scientists successfully replicate historic nuclear fusion breakthrough three times


Updated 1:14 AM EST, Thu December 21, 2023

CNN — Scientists in California shooting nearly 200 lasers at a cylinder holding a fuel capsule the size of a peppercorn have taken another step in the quest for fusion energy, which, if mastered, could provide the world with a near-limitless source of clean power.

Last year on a December morning, scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California (LLNL) managed, in a world first, to produce a nuclear fusion reaction that released more energy than it used, in a process called “ignition.”

Now they say they have successfully replicated ignition at least three times this year, according to a December report from the LLNL. This marks another significant step in what could one day be an important solution to the global climate crisis, driven primarily by the burning of fossil fuels.

For decades, scientists have attempted to harness fusion energy, essentially recreating the power of the sun on Earth. After making their historic net energy gain last year, the next important step was to prove the process could be replicated.

Read more: https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/20/climate/ ... index.html


Link to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory report (PDF) - https://lasers.llnl.gov/content/assets/ ... n_book.pdf

[firestar464]

Weird dystopia idea: A fusion company monopolizes the world's source of energy

[wjfox]

Fusion energy industry anticipates electric power breakthrough by summer

05 Jan 2024 | 18:17 UTC

The new year is expected to bring major progress toward the commercialization of fusion-based power plants by, or even before, 2030, with one company saying it will begin producing electricity by mid-2024.

Fusion energy offers the prospect of creating an effectively unlimited source of zero-carbon baseload power derived from the same thermonuclear reaction that powers the sun. And it can do it without many of the drawbacks of conventional fissile-fueled nuclear reactors that require layers of safety protocols while producing highly radioactive waste.

The Washington-based company Helion, considered a frontrunner in the race to develop a cost-effective commercial fusion power plant, said it plans to be the first fusion energy company in the world to produce electricity from its prototype Polaris reactor in 2024.

This means the company is poised to demonstrate that it can generate a sustained, net-energy fusion reaction, where the energy it generates would be greater than the energy it took to create the reaction. This is the goal of any would-be fusion energy developer.

Helion said it is ready to meet that goal while simultaneously demonstrating that it can produce electricity for the grid, an achievement that no other company has been able to reach.

https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsig ... -by-summer

[wjfox]

Scientists just set a nuclear fusion record in a step toward unleashing the limitless, clean energy source

Thu February 8, 2024

London CNN — Scientists and engineers near the English city of Oxford have set a nuclear fusion energy record, they announced Thursday, bringing the clean, futuristic power source another step closer to reality.

Using the Joint European Torus (JET) — a huge, donut-shaped machine known as a tokamak — the scientists sustained a record 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds, using just 0.2 milligrams of fuel.

Nuclear fusion is the same process that powers the sun and other stars, and is widely seen as the holy grail of clean energy. Experts have worked for decades to master the highly complex process on Earth, and if they do, fusion could generate enormous amounts of energy with tiny inputs of fuel and emit zero planet-warming carbon in the process.

The scientists fed the tokamak deuterium and tritium, which are hydrogen variants that future commercial fusion plants are most likely to use.

To generate fusion energy, the team raised temperatures in the machine to 150 million degrees Celsius — around 10 times hotter than the core of the sun. That extreme heat forces the deuterium and tritium to fuse together and form helium, a process that in turn releases enormous amounts of heat.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/08/clim ... index.html



The inside of the JET tokamak, which has carried it out it last major nuclear fusion experiment. Credit: United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority

[weatheriscool]

JET Fusion Reactor Sets World Record for Generating Energy
The JET reactor produced 69 megajoules of fusion energy for five seconds.
By Ryan Whitwam February 12, 2024
https://www.extremetech.com/science/jet ... ing-energy

The world runs on fossil fuels, but the omnipresent specter of climate change has spurred research into cleaner forms of energy like wind and solar. For decades, scientists have tinkered with nuclear fusion to generate limitless clean power. It's been slow going, but a new experiment at the Joint European Torus (JET) offers some hope. The team says the UK-based JET successfully maintained fusion for five seconds, generating enough power for thousands of homes and consuming just a speck of fuel.

Fusion is the same process that powers the Sun and, indirectly, all life on Earth. Humanity learned how to generate power from splitting the atom long ago, but harnessing fusion is much more elusive. Stars like the Sun sustain fusion for eons thanks to their enormous mass and gravity, but the best we can do on Earth is a couple of seconds, often with negative power generation. And yet, JET's five seconds of fusion is a big deal.

[weatheriscool]

Historic fusion ignition in a lab experiment confirmed
By David Szondy
February 12, 2024

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has published an extensive paper confirming the validity of its 2022 fusion experiment where multiple lasers focused on a sphere of deuterium and tritium to achieve the first fusion ignition in a laboratory.

Creating nuclear fusion is relatively easy to produce. All you need are the conditions that place hydrogen isotope ions under the right conditions of heat and pressure to cause them to fuse into helium. In fact, it's so easy that it was the centerpiece of a General Electric exhibit that ran for 10 hours a day at the 1964 World's Fair.

The tricky bit is to achieve nuclear fusion while getting more energy out than you put in, which is called fusion ignition. Until December 5, 2022, this had only been accomplished on Earth inside a hydrogen bomb.

On that day at the Lawrence Livermore facility, 192 laser beams focused on a deuterium/tritium cryogenic target, delivering 2.05 megajoules (MJ) of ultraviolet light. The target fused and generated 3.15 MJ of energy output.

In other words, fusion ignition.

https://newatlas.com/energy/historic-fu ... confirmed/

[weatheriscool]

Scientists Design AI That Can Stabilize Fusion Reactors
Fusion reactors can't run for very long, but this AI could change that.
By Ryan Whitwam February 27, 2024

https://www.extremetech.com/science/sci ... n-reactors

Scientists have been chasing the dream of limitless, environmentally friendly fusion power for decades, but these experimental reactors are still far from supplanting fossil fuels. The unpredictability of superheated plasma has been a major stumbling block in producing consistent power from fusion, but we might be one step closer to crossing that off the list. A team from the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) has devised an AI that can predict the behavior of plasma and smooth over irregularities that could otherwise reset the reactor.

[weatheriscool]

Tests show high-temperature superconducting magnets are ready for fusion
https://phys.org/news/2024-03-high-temp ... ready.html
by David L. Chandler, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In the predawn hours of Sept. 5, 2021, engineers achieved a major milestone in the labs of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), when a new type of magnet, made from high-temperature superconducting material, achieved a world-record magnetic field strength of 20 tesla for a large-scale magnet. That's the intensity needed to build a fusion power plant that is expected to produce a net output of power and potentially usher in an era of virtually limitless power production.

The test was immediately declared a success, having met all the criteria established for the design of the new fusion device, dubbed SPARC, for which the magnets are the key enabling technology. Champagne corks popped as the weary team of experimenters, who had labored long and hard to make the achievement possible, celebrated their accomplishment.

But that was far from the end of the process. Over the ensuing months, the team tore apart and inspected the components of the magnet, pored over and analyzed the data from hundreds of instruments that recorded details of the tests, and performed two additional test runs on the same magnet, ultimately pushing it to its breaking point in order to learn the details of any possible failure modes.

[weatheriscool]

Superconducting Magnet Reduces the Cost for a Fusion Reactor by a Factor of 40
March 26, 2024 by Brian Wang

A new 20 Tesla Superconducting magnet reduces the cost per watt of a fusion reactor by a factor of almost 40. MIT worked with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a startup with over $2 billion in funding. The funders of CFS include Temasek Holdings (Singpore), the U.S. Department of Energy, Tiger Global Management, Bill Gates, Google and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Commercial nuclear fusion now has a chance of being economical.

In the last few years, a newer material nicknamed REBCO, for rare-earth barium copper oxide, was added to fusion magnets, and allows them to operate at 20 kelvins, a temperature that despite being only 16 kelvins warmer, brings significant advantages in terms of material properties and practical engineering.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/03/s ... of-40.html