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Power Science

Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is 'Very Likely To Work,' Studies Suggest (nytimes.com) 118

JoshuaZ writes: Recent research into the Sparc fusion reactor design make it seem likely to work. Unlike some other fusion reactor designs, Sparc uses high-temperature superconductors which are capable of much stronger magnetic fields in a more closely-confined location. Sparc will be much smaller than large-scale international project ITER, which after multiple delays is now not scheduled to even start fusion reactions by 2035 at the earliest. The Sparc researchers hope that their reactor design will be completed soon enough to have an impact on climate change. The new research on Sparc consists of seven different papers, all of which have favorable estimates for the likelihood of the project succeeding. Some physicists, including Cary Forest, at the University of Wisconsin, were more skeptical. Forest told the New York Times that Sparc's estimates for when their reactor would be ready were probably off by at least a factor of two. "Reading these papers gives me the sense that they're going to have the controlled thermonuclear fusion plasma that we all dream about," said Cary Forest, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who is not involved in the project. "But if I were to estimate where they're going to be, I'd give them a factor of two that I give to all my grad students when they say how long something is going to take."
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Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is 'Very Likely To Work,' Studies Suggest

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  • The real question is, "how likely is it to go kaboom"?
    • by JoshuaZ ( 1134087 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @07:24PM (#60555696) Homepage
      Pretty unlikely. In general fusion reactors don't really go boom when they have a problem, but sort of fizzle out. Without a sustaining magnetic field, the reaction ceases very quickly.
      • It depends (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Roger W Moore ( 538166 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @08:26PM (#60555810) Journal

        Pretty unlikely.

        It depends. It's never going to go boom in a nuclear sense because there is so little fuel in there at any one time and the instant anything goes wrong it hits something, cools and stops fusing. However, there is quite a lot of energy stored in the strong magnetic fields used for containment plus the vacuum in the vessel itself so it could certainly go boom in a conventional, non-nuclear sense if something goes badly wrong.

        • by Gilmoure ( 18428 )

          Where's that picture of the old Z-Machine with the capacitors' discharge in the cooling tank?

      • Without a sustaining magnetic field, the reaction ceases very quickly.

        Jean Michel Jarre [wikipedia.org] is going to get rich.

      • Pretty unlikely. In general fusion reactors don't really go boom when they have a problem, but sort of fizzle out. Without a sustaining magnetic field, the reaction ceases very quickly.

        In fact that has been the main problem with fusion power. Until now they have required more power to keep them going than they output. This is one way of solving it, scaling the plant up like ITER is another attempt.

      • Common folk are often very imaginative when it comes to what could go wrong. It is however often not the main concept that goes wrong, but usually the smaller things on the side, i.e. the cooling or storage of something due to a cheap design or human neglect.

        The problem I see with fusion reactors is that these first need fuel and the fuel needs to be refined, transported and held in a sophisticated containment field. The energy itself, which is heat turned into steam into electrical power is rather mundane

        • by thereddaikon ( 5795246 ) on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @07:59AM (#60556890)

          The problem I see with fusion reactors is that these first need fuel and the fuel needs to be refined, transported and held in a sophisticated containment field.

          Imma stop you right there. You are confusing fusion with matter-antimatter reactions. There is nothing difficult about storing Deuterium. It has a fancy name but its water for the most part. The two common reactions being investigated are Deuterium - Tritium and Deuterium - Deuterium. Tritium is finnicky. It's created in fission reactors, is technically radioactive but safe enough to put on consumer products and does have a half life measured in years. The difficulty in storing it has more to do with it having a shelf life than anything else. I'm sure there are regulations about its transport but that's more a regulatory issue than an engineering one.

          • Since you mentioned it, I wonder if it would be possible to figure out how to produce nontrivial amounts of antimatter without expending more energy than the harvestable portion of its inevitable reaction with matter would produce. I'm no physicist, and maybe we're talking about the equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, but in my mind at least it seems like an intriguing possibility. Can anyone who actually knows what they're talking about weigh in on this, even it is only to tell me that I've smoked
            • You can't reverse entropy so it will always take more energy to make antimatter than you will get from it. That's just physics. But nowhere does it say you have to be the one to pay that cost. Small amounts of antimatter are created as byproducts of energetic natural phenomena in space. It may be possible to collect that antimatter for later use.

              That's the principle behind the Sci-Fi Bussard ramjet except with hydrogen as the collected fuel and fusion as the power source. Is that something that could ever b

              • Yeah, I guess I wasn't thinking through the fact that this would have to violate the 2nd Rule, unless we found a large source of it elsewhere that we could somehow harvest. And even that would likely involve a much greater technical challenge than getting the rest of the way toward economically viable fusion.
                • Finding a large deposit of it somewhere in space would really interesting but also terrifying. Improperly interacting with it would amount to a bomb many times more powerful than humanity has ever made. Antimatter and matter do not get along well.

          • Imma stop you right there. ...

            You're thinking of cold fusion. It require a complex containment field to hold the "hot" fusion reaction. When you there think it isn't difficult then maybe tell them, because they're thinking it is.

            • No I'm not. He said transporting fuel. Fuel for fusion is deuterium aka heavy water which has the same transport considerations as normal water. Cold fusion is sci-fi BS and isn't real.

      • by necro81 ( 917438 )

        fusion reactors don't really go boom when they have a problem, but sort of fizzle out.

        But a sudden quench of the superconductors will definitely ruin your day. It's not H-bomb scale destruction - not even A-bomb - but still plenty bad for folks nearby.

        • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          It will ruin your day if you're the one who has to pay to repair it, but someone nearby enough to not get nuked by neutrons when it's running would probably get a good video on their smartphone.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • That's pretty simple to answer, it can't. There is nothing in there which could go boom.
    • by necro81 ( 917438 )
      Well, the design lacks an Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator, so pretty unlikely. Marvin the Martian is unimpressed [youtube.com].
    • The bigger problem with fusion reactors is, "How much crap is it going to transmute into radioactive waste via high energy neutrons?". It's probably something that we can solve, or perhaps even take advantage of by lining the reactor with precursors of desirable isotopes. First things first though. We need to get "20 years from now" to become "now".

  • Another article (Score:3, Informative)

    by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @07:23PM (#60555692)
  • by karlandtanya ( 601084 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @07:30PM (#60555704)

    Sounds too good to be true, but progress does happen. And this is from MIT, not some free-energy crank.
    If it pans out, it will be world-changing, in ways that in the long term could be very positive, but in the short term will be very disruptive.

    If this is what some of us hope it is...
    A post-scarcity economy is visible on the horizon, but this also means that those who hold power by controlling scarce resources are threatened.
    I suspect there will be a great deal more upheavel in the next decade or two.
    I suspect we will remember with nostalgia the peace, stability, and trust in our leaders that we enjoy today in 2020.

    • I suspect we will remember with nostalgia the peace, stability, and trust in our leaders that we enjoy today in 2020.

      That's a joke, right?

    • Sounds too good to be true, but progress does happen. And this is from MIT, not some free-energy crank.

      I would find it more credible if fusion researchers had not been saying that fusion power was less than 40 years away for the past ~70 years.

      I really hope that they succeed but at this point, I'm not going to believe it is "almost here" until they actually make a prototype work in real life.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        It seems to be a problem with nuclear projects in general, fusion or fission. A breakthrough is always just around the corner, the next version will finally be perfect. Give us a few more billion just to finish it off.

        As much as I'd love for fusion to happen right now we have a climate emergency and need solutions and investment today.

    • by DavenH ( 1065780 )
      I don't know what sounds too good to be true here -- all that's coming out of MIT, as of today, is a plan to perform R&D. Research that needs to be funded and executed, and very lucky, to keep on schedule. There have been dozens of such plans, and research labs, and prototypes. So, it's good news, but "too good to be true" would be more like Lockheed Martin's assertion that they'd have a working compact fusion prototype in 5 years, a claim made in 2014. https://www.universetoday.com/... [universetoday.com]

      Journalism's r

      • by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @09:13PM (#60555898) Homepage

        There actually is a legitimate tech improvement here. Normally in projects like ITER magnets would use Ni-Ti or Ni-Sn alloy wire windings. But I remember reading years back (over a decade ago) about promising work on the use of high-temperature superconducting tapes for magnet windings. Using high-temperature superconductors is much more challenging because they're brittle ceramics, but they've managed to get workable windings out of them. It's taken a while for production to mature, but REBCO tapes are starting to make their way into real projects now. They allow for higher magnetic field densities, easier cooling, lower cost, and much easier disassembly (for maintenance, a real issue in fusion). The really important factor however is the higher magnetic field density. ITER's magnets top out at under 12T, but REBCO magnets in pure superconducting designs have been built for up to 32T, and in partial superconducting designs the record is 45T.

        These "it's always 10 years in the future, so we should just ignore it" phrases are great fun and always work until they suddenly don't. Don't get me wrong, nothing moves quickly in fusion research, but..

        • by DavenH ( 1065780 )
          That's some much needed context. Thanks! Those specifics about the superconducting improvements should have been in the article summary.
        • by necro81 ( 917438 )

          Normally in projects like ITER magnets would use Ni-Ti or Ni-Sn alloy wire windings.

          Correction: they use superconductors made from alloys of niobium (Nb), not nickel (Ni). See NbTi [wikipedia.org] and Nb3Sn.

      • If the only thing that exists is a plan, then this is still a long way off even with funding. I've done basic research though large demonstration programs in aerospace, and it still takes a while to go from working prototype to a fielded system. And we don't even have a working prototype here.
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @09:02PM (#60555886)

      And this is from MIT, not some free-energy crank.

      If university professors say something is possible, they are likely correct.

      If they say it will be commercialized in five years, they are almost certainly wrong.

    • by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @09:13PM (#60555900) Journal
      Not sure, we already have a fusion reactor its doing well, no more payments to make, needs no maintenance, quite safe far from population centers, no nimbyism, thank you. Only problem is, its energy is quite diffused and varies a lot, depending on the time of the day, and the day of the year. But we are beginning to understand how to collect it, concentrate it and store it. The energy is practically free and the cost is basically interest payments on the initial investment. The way the economics work out, even if the spark thing is viable and is producing energy, there might not be enough profits in it for it to see wide spread adaptation.

      Borrowing a line form Bill Gates, " one fusion reactor [wikipedia.org] should be enough for every one".

      • Why is it off topic?

        Solar energy is getting cheaper by the day. Storage too getting cheaper. There might not be enough investments to make fusion reactor for energy. If it can be used to create exotic materials or for space missions there is some R&D cash. But purely as an energy source for the masses, fusion's time has gone.

    • Problem is, we could long since have a "post-scarcity economy" with the technological level we have reached and with the sun as an infinite energy source. But it does not emerge by itself, not within the confines of the currently installed economic system. Within them, what would happen would simply be an massive acceleration of the exploitation of earth and man to produce even more unnecessary goods for profit and economic growth, with the inevitable implosion coming even earlier.

      • by Compuser ( 14899 )

        I am aware of no evidence to substantiate the claims you make. There has never been a society without exploitation as a core feature of the economic system, post-scarcity is entirely impossible in general (although we can defeat hunger and a few other cases of scarcity) and the sun is absolutely not an infinite source of energy (hint - nothing is infinite). Good luck with your day dreaming.

    • by Bongo ( 13261 )

      It is hard to imagine. But that's the point, a new form of culture can't be imagined ahead of time. But an issue isn't the new, it is the old, reactionary moves. When we face something new, there can be a tendency to go backwards instead.

      We do have a lot of daemons, metaphorically speaking, and I tend to think that our 5000 year old religions are still here, even amongst non religious people, with notions of sin and revenge by gods. A lot of people believe we are overpopulated and destroying nature, not bec

      • Speaking exclusively of human to human relationships, and leaving aside for now the more important one which is between man and God:

        Most if not all of what the Bible teaches about sin can be observed all around us, and that has always been true, but it is even more obvious, to me at least, during the end of a dying civilization such as our own. Absent some form of restraint, whether by religious beliefs, cultural/societal norms, rule of law, or some combination of the above, it's pretty awful. And the U.S

    • Your grandparents' generation had a house half the size of your house, on average. And a family car for the six of them. Your great great grandparents were likely pretty much subsistence farmers, and knew what it's like to go hungry at times because they simply don't have any food. Typing in your smartphone, you are living in the post-scarcity world.

      Technology has been expanding greatly for the last 300 years and as it does those of who make stuff have been making more and more cool stuff. You've been pl

    • "the peace, stability, and trust in our leaders that we enjoy today ..." under the Trump administration.
  • I know! Let's build the one that our studies say is likely to work.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @07:55PM (#60555740)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I was going to say the same thing, except this time they are saying 15 years. So much like projects I've been on before, only 15 years away for the next 30 years now. Progress! After that it will be 10 years away for 20 years, 5 years for 10, but then as you near the end of the project, it will be 1 year away for 100. Its that last 1% that takes forever.
      • So, extrapolating... around 2260 we should have working fusion then.

      • The thing is, progress is being made, but this is difficult to explain without all the physics. As far as I know, we have longer sustained fusion reactions, and fusion reactions delivering net energy (on some measure).

        As an engineer, I get some projects that just do not settle down; there is just one problem after another. But you keep at it, dealing with the problems one by one, until you have a working product.

        This compact magnetic confinement might be one of those little steps getting you closer to the g

        • Regrettably, we also seem to have constantly accelerating costs to pursue "mainstream" fusion. As the world plunges toward total war once again, that is unlikely to be sustainable. I think our hope of cheap energy lies in alternative, innovative, "outside the box" thinking. I could be wrong, but no matter how promising the mainstream research may be, if it doesn't get funded, then it isn't going to happen.
          • My "outside the box" thinking is that we just use much less energy. So called advanced societies continue to use more and more resources per capita. I do not have the detailed statistics to hand, but population growth has largely leveled off in wealthier nations, but resource consumption continues to grow exponentially.

            When I was growing up in the sixties, there were many things I did not have, that today's youngsters take for granted. My father did not even have a car for years, and I remember when we got

            • Most energy is used to sustain life (farming, heating/cooling in places where decent quality of life isn't otherwise possible, transportation, and such). Using less isn't an option when we already have much better solutions in the here and now, even leaving fusion aside. It's a great thing that a lot more of it is renewable than it used to be. But for the time being we have to rely on fossil fuels for transportation and chemical production, and on fission as well if we want to wean ourselves off of fossi
    • Not this again. What scientists actually said is that fusion is about $30B away (in current dollars). In the 1970â(TM)s the DOE put out a forecast as to when fusion power would be available. Ranging from an Apollo/Manhattan Project style program to develop fusion by the mid 80â(TM)s, a more restrained program that would lead to fusion in the 90â(TM)s. There was a third option called âoefusion neverâ where there just wasnâ(TM)t enough money being spent to actually drive the prog
      • $30B, or even $300B, does not seem like a lot of money to me, in light of the costs of relatively much less important things like subway lines or airplane factories - both of which would become vastly cheaper if we had vastly cheaper energy, because the energy involved in constructing these things, never mind operating them, turns out to be a pretty big component of their cost.
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • Can an orbital power solution be made safe? How?

            Obviously collectors would be placed some distance from populated places; however, I would not want to vaporize a major population center if something went wrong.

  • What? (Score:2, Offtopic)

    No SPARC [wikipedia.org] logo? But you do it for everything Digital [wikipedia.org]!

  • Going to stronger magnetic fields is expected to allow a smaller reactor to reach break even, so this doesn't seem crazy. The key question is whether the the large high field magnets can be fabricated.

    (I don't have the expertise on this type of magnet to know how realistic the plans are)

    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      They already have been.

      The hard part is making a superconducting tape that's workable enough to wind coils. That's been done; high temperature superconducting magnets with fields considerably higher than what MIT is proposing have already been made.

  • The plasma physics it is based on mostly comes from the other fusion projects. For example, the Wendelstein X7 is not even targeted at sustainable fusion in its current form, but it produces a ton of valuable plasma physics. Hence the idea that this thing bypasses the slowness of the others is flawed. Without the other projects, it would not be possible. That is, if it works. It is _very_ easy to be off here enough to have things not work and it is very easy to select the wrong materials and lose the machin

    • by DCFusor ( 1763438 ) on Tuesday September 29, 2020 @10:15PM (#60555968) Homepage

      If it works, the neutron flux it makes will destroy the magnets via dislocations in the lattices. Fusion creates many more neutrons per joule of generated energy than fission. If DT is used as fuel instead of DD, the neutrons are higher energy yet.
      Basically, the thing will take itself apart if it does work.
      MIT and a few others noticed the b^4 relation and how smaller could be better. When you ask them about this, they say they'll just put a feet thick lithium blanket in there to absorb most of the neutrons.
      Which negates any possible advantage of size, since now the magnets have to be big again to be outside that blanket. Clever hand-waving indeed.

      You might google things like Wigner energy, hydrogen embrittlement, neutron dislocation effects, and the suspicion that this kind of thing contributed to the Windscale disaster.

      Very roughly - 1 fission yields around 200 MeV of energy. 1 fusion yields 3.5 MeV if DD, or ~ 16 MeV if DT. So, lots more neutrons per output joule, and FWIW, most of them are going faster than the spectrum of ones from fission.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Interesting. So the graphite fire (where they had filters in the chimney purely because one guy insisted in them, otherwise they wold now still have a large uninhabitable area there...) was due to this effect? They probably did not even know about it back then. Children with nuclear reactors as toys...

        As to the story at hand, this thing is an experiment and it is pretty clear they are vastly over-promising at least in the press-release. Still interesting and things will be learned from it.

  • for the last 50 years.

  • So close! (Score:2, Redundant)

    by kwerle ( 39371 )

    Wow - to think we're just about 20 years away from real fusion energy!

  • Perhaps it's better to spend money on things that will work, rather than spend money on things that might or should work. Even if there's fusion, there will be nuclear waste to deal with; Nevada doesn't seem to want it anymore.
    • by Jeremi ( 14640 )

      Perhaps it's better to spend money on things that will work, rather than spend money on things that might or should work.

      That's a false choice, of course. It's better to pursue all promising avenues simultaneously, given that we have the manpower and resources to do so (which we do).

      Even if there's fusion, there will be nuclear waste to deal with; Nevada doesn't seem to want it anymore.

      You must be thinking of nuclear fission. Nuclear fusion generates only a trivial amount of nuclear waste.

    • Electricity generation is only one of the applications of self sustaining fusion reactors. There is some very interesting plasma physics there to explore, there are some interesting space propulsion prospects there, a reactor of any sort is has all sorts of medical and technological side uses. Even if the world didn't have an energy problem to solve, it would still be worth it to demonstrate technical feasibility of fusion reactors. We know it's doable from physics perspective, actually doing the engineerin
    • Given that nuclear power (all forms) is more expensive than solar and wind, a logical plan would be to convert to solar and wind (with batteries). Why gamble on nuclear power when we already have a viable solution to climate change?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The Future (Score:2, Redundant)

    by mrfantasy ( 63690 )

    We've been ten years away from economically viable nuclear fusion for the last fifty years.

  • but then it all had to be 10~50 times as big to make it even more efficient.
    Scaling up working designs introduced a lot of unforseen complexities.

    • I read some papers about thermal runaway in scaled up chemical processes. A process that is safe in a test tube in the lab becomes a potential bomb in the chemical factory. The problem is with exothermic (heat generating) reactions. In the test tube, the reactants can easily get rid of heat. In the big industrial reaction vessel, you have to have active cooling, and if the cooling fails, you have a major problem. Just like nuclear fission, thinking about it.

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Wednesday September 30, 2020 @06:05AM (#60556636)

    ...after you convinced _one_ insurance company to cover it.

  • Just use Joseph Papp's Noble Gas Engine.
  • So if this solves all the climate problems the media insists is going on, can our politicians stop signaling about it all time?

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