Nuclear Fusion News & Discussions

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Time_Traveller
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Nuclear fusion scheme in Gloucestershire loses out to competitor but hope remains for former plant
4 OCT 2022

Leaders of the Western Gateway Partnership bid to bring the UK’s STEP programme to Severn Edge say "this is not the end of the road” for the site despite the Government deciding that the UK’s first fusion plant will be built in Nottinghamshire.

The Severn Edge bid received support from the wide South West region, industry, four of the most research intensive universities in the UK, businesses, political leaders and the community. During the process the profile of both Oldbury and Berkeley sites in Gloucestershire have boosted into the spotlight, gaining a wide range of interest within Westminster, across the Western Gateway, and the wider UK.

Despite being shortlisted as one of the last five sites being considered to be home to the £220 million programme and receiving positive feedback in assessments, the government has announced today that will be developed at the West Burton A site in Nottinghamshire.

The Spherical Tokamak for Energy Production programme (STEP) is the national project to develop a prototype energy plant to prove the commercial viability of the futuristic energy source. Fusion has been described as having the potential to become the “ultimate low carbon energy” source, recreating the reaction that takes place within the sun.

Following the decision the UK Atomic Energy Authority, who are responsible for delivering the programme, said that “the site has many attractive features and would likely be an outstanding candidate for a wide range of developments”, adding that the decision was “testimony to the highly competitive nature of the process”.
https://www.gloucestershirelive.co.uk/n ... es-7663750
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A new solution to one of the major problems of fusion research
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-solution- ... usion.html
by Frank Fleschner, Max Planck Society

Type-I ELM plasma instabilities can melt the walls of fusion devices. A team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) and the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) found a way to get them under control. Their work is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Nuclear fusion power plants could one day provide a sustainable solution to our energy problems. That is why research is being carried out worldwide on this method of energy generation, which imitates processes on the sun. For the principle to work on Earth, plasmas must be heated to at least 100 million degrees Celsius in reactors. Magnetic fields enclose the plasma so that the wall of the reactor does not melt. This only works because the outermost centimeters in the magnetically formed plasma edge are extremely well insulated. In this region, however, plasma instabilities, so-called edge localized modes (ELMs), occur frequently. During such an event, energetic particles from the plasma may hit the wall of the reactor, potentially damaging it.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Garching and from the Vienna University of Technology have now been able to show: There is an operating mode for fusion reactors that avoids this problem. Instead of large, potentially destructive instabilities, one intentionally accepts many small instabilities that do not pose a problem for the reactor's wall.

"Our work represents a breakthrough in understanding the occurrence and prevention of large Type I ELMs," says Elisabeth Wolfrum, research group leader at IPP in Garching, Germany, and professor at TU Wien. "The operation regime we propose is probably the most promising scenario for future fusion power plant plasmas." The results have now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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I think graphene would do wonders for nuclear fusion.
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Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory Awarded More than $12 Million to Speed Development of a Fusion Pilot Plant
November 15, 2022

Introduction:
(EurekAlert) The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) funding of more than $12 million to work with laboratories around the world to accelerate the development of a pilot plant powered by the carbon-free fusion energy that drives the sun and stars and can counter climate change.

The three-year PPPL awards — with several more pending — cover research to speed the development of both doughnut-shaped tokamak fusion facilities and compact cored apple-shaped spherical tokamaks akin to the flagship National Spherical Tokamak Experiment-Upgrade (NSTX-U) at the DOE national Laboratory. The work is managed in the new Tokamak Experimental Sciences Department led by Rajesh Maingi and Joseph Snipes and may be subject to revision in future years as federal budgets evolve.

Fusion combines light elements in the form of plasma — the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei, or ions, that makes up 99 percent of the visible universe — to release vast amounts of energy. PPPL and scientists around the world are seeking to reproduce and control fusion on Earth for a virtually inexhaustible supply of safe and clean power to generate electricity.

The PPPL awards are part of the $47 million of DOE funding to speed closing the remaining science and technology gaps to enable the construction of a power plant to produce net electricity from fusion at low capital cost. “We must continue to provide innovative solutions to the most urgent challenges facing fusion energy and advance the state of the art across fusion and plasma sciences,” said Harriet Kung, acting associate director of science for fusion energy sciences. The $47 million, she said, will empower “moving us closer to fusion energy as a clean and abundant energy source.”
Read more here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/971409
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Covering a cylinder with a magnetic coil triples its energy output in nuclear fusion test
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-cylinder- ... utput.html
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

A team of researchers working at the National Ignition Facility, part of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has found that covering a cylinder containing a small amount of hydrogen fuel with a magnetic coil and firing lasers at it triples its energy output—another step toward the development of nuclear fusion as a power source.

In their paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, the team, which has members from several facilities in the U.S., one in the U.K. and one in Japan, describes upgrading their setup to allow for the introduction of the magnetic coil.

Last year, a team working at the same facility announced that they had come closer to achieving ignition in a nuclear fusion test than anyone has so far. Unfortunately, the were unable to repeat their results. Since that time, the team has been reviewing their original design, looking for ways to make it better.

The original design involved firing 192 laser beams at a tiny cylinder containing a tiny sphere of hydrogen at its center. This created X-rays that heated the sphere until its atoms began to fuse. Some of the design improvements have involved changing the size of the holes through which the lasers pass, but they have only led to minor changes.

Looking for a better solution, the team studied prior research and found several studies that had shown, via simulation, that encasing a cylinder in a magnetic field should significantly increase the energy output.
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Defects found in two key components of ITER's tokamak
22 November 2022

The director general of ITER, Pietro Barabaschi, said: "If there is one good thing about this situation, it is that it is happening at a moment we can fix it. The know-how we are acquiring in dealing with ITER's first-of-a-kind components will serve others when they launch their own fusion ventures. It is in ITER's nature and mission, as a unique and ambitious research infrastructure, to go through a whole range of challenges and setbacks during construction. And it is therefore our task and duty to promptly inform the engaged scientific community so that they will take precautions when dealing with the same type of assemblies."

ITER is a major international project to build a tokamak fusion device in Cadarache, France, designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy. The goal of ITER is to operate at 500 MW (for at least 400 seconds continuously) with 50 MW of plasma heating power input. It appears that an additional 300 MWe of electricity input may be required in operation. No electricity will be generated at ITER.

Thirty-five nations are collaborating to build ITER - the European Union is contributing almost half of the cost of its construction, while the other six members (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the USA) are contributing equally to the rest. Construction began in 2010 and the original 2018 first plasma target date was put back to 2025 by the ITER council in 2016.

The vacuum vessel thermal shields are about 20 mm thick and contribute to insulating the superconducting magnet system operating at 4K, or minus 269°C. ITER said that in November 2021 helium tests detected a leak on an element of the vacuum vessel thermal shield that had been delivered in 2020. The cause was found to be stress caused by the bending and welding of the cooling fluid pipes to the thermal shield panels "compounded by a slow chemical reaction due to the presence of chlorine residues in some small areas near the pipe welds".

This had caused "stress corrosion cracking", ITER said, "and over time, cracks up to 2.2 mm deep had developed in the pipes".
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Arti ... ?feed=feed
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US scientists boost clean power hopes with fusion energy breakthrough
Net energy gain indicates technology could provide an abundant zero-carbon alternative to fossil fuels
https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66e ... c345589dc7

US government scientists have made a breakthrough in the pursuit of limitless, zero-carbon power by achieving a net energy gain in a fusion reaction for the first time, according to three people with knowledge of preliminary results from a recent experiment.

Physicists have since the 1950s sought to harness the fusion reaction that powers the sun, but no group had been able to produce more energy from the reaction than it consumes — a milestone known as net energy gain or target gain, which would help prove the process could provide a reliable, abundant alternative to fossil fuels and conventional nuclear energy.

The federal Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which uses a process called inertial confinement fusion that involves bombarding a tiny pellet of hydrogen plasma with the world’s biggest laser, had achieved net energy gain in a fusion experiment in the past two weeks, the people said.
Wow!
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Scientists Achieve Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough With Blast of 192 Lasers
Source: New York Times
Scientists studying fusion energy at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California announced on Tuesday that they had crossed a major milestone in reproducing the power of the sun in a laboratory.

Scientists for decades have said that fusion, the nuclear reaction that makes stars shine, could provide a future source of bountiful energy.

The result announced on Tuesday is the first fusion reaction in a laboratory setting that actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction.

“This is such a wonderful example of a possibility realized, a scientific milestone achieved, and a road ahead to the possibilities for clean energy,” Arati Prabhakar, the White House science adviser, said during a news conference on Tuesday morning at the Department of Energy’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. “And even deeper understanding of the scientific principles that are applied here.”
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/13/scie ... rough.html
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The U.S. government has exaggerated the importance of the recent advance in fusion power. Commercial fusion reactors remain many decades distant, and in fact, may never be possible to build.
The strong force is attractive, not repulsive. So it pulls the protons and neutrons of the parent nuclei together to form a new, heavier, daughter nucleus. And because that daughter requires less energy to bind it than do the parents, the surplus is released—80% of it as kinetic energy of the departing neutron and 20% as kinetic energy of the helium. With appropriate engineering, this kinetic energy might be captured and used to generate electricity.

What the researchers at NIF have done is to release more energy from the imploded pellet than was inserted by the incident laser beams. They have, in other words, lit a nuclear spark that has burned for a while through the pellet in a self-sustaining way—something never before achieved, and which might be scaled up to release a far bigger fraction of the potential energy in the pellet’s contents.

Neat, in principle. And important for understanding hydrogen bombs. But this approach can be a power source only if the energy released exceeds that employed to generate the laser beams, rather than merely exceeding that incident upon the pellet. Unfortunately, the huge inefficiencies involved in creating those beams mean that only a tiny fraction of that generative energy does arrive at the pellet. Not really the basis for a workable reactor.

It thus seems unlikely that the future of civil fusion power (if it has one) lies with inertial-confinement by laser. The technology is fiddly. And even with lasers more modern than that used by NIF (which opened in 2009) the process of “pumping” the device to create the beam is inherently inefficient. None of the increasingly numerous attempts to commercialise fusion employs inertial-confinement by laser. Most are based on tokamaks, which heat the deuterium-tritium mixture into a plasma, rather than freezing it into a pellet, and do the compressing magnetically.
https://news.yahoo.com/controlled-fusio ... 42667.html
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