Re: Nuclear Fusion News & Discussions
Posted: Fri Dec 16, 2022 5:19 am
Thanks for the info funkervogt, tokamak reactors are still probably the most viable path and hopefully ITER will yield results over the next 15 years.
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Nuclear fusion could be powering British homes in just 15 years, making it the first country in the world to make energy from the process, ministers have said.
Currently, nuclear fusion has only been achieved in labs and requires far more energy to make it happen than it produces.
However, George Freeman, the science minister, believes the 15-year timeline could be enough to solve fusion and make a plant capable of working at a large scale and making more power for the grid that it needs to be operational.
Speaking on Monday at the West Burton power station in Nottinghamshire, Mr Freeman unveiled a new company which will be in charge of the nation’s drive to build the world’s first functioning nuclear fusion power station.
UK Industrial Fusion Solutions Ltd (UKIFS) will sit inside the Government’s UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and be tasked with supercharging the creation of Britain’s, and the world’s, first and only commercially-viable fusion plant.
Germany's Wendelstein-7X fusion reactor has reached a milestone in fusion plasma energy turnover. Wendelstein-7X ran at 1.3 gigajoules for eight minutes. This is a new record for discharge duration and heating capacity.
Greifswald (Germany). Various nuclear fusion reactors are currently being tested, including a laser fusion system from the National Ignition Facility (NIF), with whose laser-induced nuclear fusion the burning plasma state was recently achieved for the first time. In addition, laser-induced nuclear fusion resulted in an unexpected excess of energy in the fusion plasma, which according to the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution should not exist. Other institutes are also testing fusion reactors in which the plasma is confined by strong magnetic fields. These are divided into tokamak plants, such as the ITER large reactor, and stellarator reactors, such as the Wendelstein 7-X.
The Wendelstein 7-X fusion reactor in Greifswald is the world's largest stellarator reactor. A study by the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) recently showed that his concept is suitable for the construction of power plants. In the Wendelstein-7X, a ring of 50 superconducting magnetic coils forms a complex magnetic field that keeps the ultra-hot fusion plasma in place. In contrast to tokamak systems, in which plasma can only be fused for a short time, a stellarator reactor can theoretically run continuously. Wendelstein-7X should prove this in reality.
Modification of the Wendelstein-7X fusion reactor
The first experiments with the Wendelstein fusion reactor started in 2015. In 2016 Wendelstein-7X generated its first hydrogen plasma and in 2018 the
A magnetic cage keeps the more than 100 million degree Celsius hot plasmas in nuclear fusion devices at a distance from the vessel wall so that they do not melt. Now researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) have found a way to significantly reduce this distance. This could make it possible to build smaller and cheaper fusion reactors for energy production. The work was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
The international experimental reactor ITER, which is currently being built in southern France, represents the most advanced way to generate energy in a fusion power plant. The design follows the tokamak principle, i.e., a fusion plasma at more than 100 million degrees is confined in a magnetic field shaped like a donut. This concept prevents the hot plasma from coming into contact with the enclosing wall and damaging it. The ASDEX Upgrade tokamak experiment at IPP in Garching near Munich serves as a blueprint for ITER and later fusion power plants. Important elements for ITER were developed here. And plasma operating conditions and components for later power plants can already be tested today.
Tokamak Energy has released the first images of what its commercial fusion power plant, which it says would safely generate enough electricity to power 50,000 homes in the 2030s, would look like.
The company, based near Oxford in the UK, plans to build a fusion pilot plant around its upcoming ST-E1 tokamak, which it says will be ready for rollout in the early 2030s to demonstrate the ability to deliver electricity to the grid, opening the potential for 500-megawatt commercial plants to be deployed worldwide.
When a mix of deuterium and tritium, two forms of hydrogen, is heated at temperatures hotter than the sun’s core, they fuse to create helium and release energy that can be harnessed to produce electricity and heat. The plasma created by the heating process is confined using strong magnets arranged in a ring-shaped device called a tokamak.
Fusion is extremely efficient, creating far more energy per kilogram of fuel than the burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, or gas produces. One kilogram (2.2 lb) of fusion fuel releases the same energy as burning about 10,000 tonnes (11,023 ton) of coal. Tokamak Energy says that fusion offers other advantages that other renewable energy sources lack.