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."
Ok, so it's "likely to work"... (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Ok, so it's "likely to work"... (Score:5, Informative)
It depends (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Where's that picture of the old Z-Machine with the capacitors' discharge in the cooling tank?
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Jean Michel Jarre [wikipedia.org] is going to get rich.
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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.
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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
Re:Ok, so it's "likely to work"... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Re:Ok, so it's "likely to work"... (Score:5, Informative)
they are an explosion held in place by magnetic fields
That is a poor description of what is happening. If the magnetic field collapses, the plasma is extinguished in (literally) a few nanoseconds.
A better analogy is that fusion is like trying to keep a match lit in a category-5 hurricane.
There is no risk whatsoever of an explosion. There is no physical mechanism for that to happen.
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There is no risk whatsoever of an explosion. There is no physical mechanism for that to happen.
There is also no chance of runaway heat generation, reactor melt down, generation of explosive hydrogen gas from reaction of fuel rods with steam. etc.
I am not sure where things are with nuclear waste. There are no part-reacted fission products that have to be stored for thousands of years. However, the materials surrounding the fusion reaction chamber may be subject to massive neutron flux, and this could make the materials radioactive.
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| There is also no chance of runaway heat generation, blah, blah, blah
who said these things? citations please.
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who said these things? citations please.
I should not have to cite references. Slashdot is for informal discussions. I am not trying to write a peer-reviewed paper.
If the magnetic containment is shut down, the fusion reaction stops. One of the current problems with practical nuclear fusion is sustaining the reaction; it needs active intervention to keep it going. Read any articles about fusion power you like to confirm that. That is why I said "no meltdown".
In the case of nuclear fission, the concentrated nuclear material continues generating heat
Did you think they were being sarcastic? (Score:2)
They were explaining things, making true statements.
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The second part was reasonable. The first paragraph was content free. There wasn't even a statement to be true or false.
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Re-read the GP... I did think they were being sarcastic. The "also" in the sentence suggests they were not. My apologies.
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... they are an explosion held in place by magnetic fields, seeking nothing more than wanting to expand their presence.
Perhaps you were thinking of some other reality with a different set of physics.
Re: Ok, so it's "likely to work"... (Score:2)
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they are an explosion held in place by magnetic fields
Completely false. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about and should educate yourself (a lot) before making any further statements about this topic.
Re:Ok, so it's "likely to work"... (Score:5, Funny)
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Still not as hot as a 7-11 Patio frozen burrito set to 7 minutes, 11 seconds in the microwave.
Rocket vs. candle in the wind (Score:2)
Nuclear fission is like a rocket: a huge pile of fissile material controlled by a lot of tech
Nuclear fusion is like a candle in the wind: every thing you do is to keep it going
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"Lumee-OH-sah"
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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)
Well, this is beyond me, but hopeful? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That's a joke, right?
Re: Well, this is beyond me, but hopeful? (Score:1)
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I don't live in the USA either, you know. And the pandemic still happened everywhere, so...
Believe it when you see it (Score:3)
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.
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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.
A Dose of Reality (Score:5, Informative)
You're misleading best, 100% false at reality. Fusion energy kept getting its budget cut daramatically for the past 40 years.
Trying educating yourself before making yourself look like a fool with silly accusations. Claims of fusion being ~20 years away started in the 1950s [wikipedia.org]. The reason why fusion is still not a reality is that controlling the high energy plasma with magnetic fields proved far, far harder than anyone thought it would and any escape added high atomic number contaminants to the plasma which were extremely effective at radiating away heat energy causing the plasma to rapidly cool.
It was these unexpected challenges with the physics that made building a reactor much harder than anyone had foreseen and, as a consequence, funding was reduced because it became clear that we lacked the understanding required to have a decent chance at making a fusion reactor work.
While money can pay for more research it cannot guarantee results because, by its very nature, research means we are doing things that nobody has ever done before so nobody can be sure what the outcome will be. Building a moon base is an engineering problem: we know how to get to the moon and support people there because we have done it and with enough money we know for certain that we can do it again. The only uncertainty is how much it will cost.
Scientific research is the opposite way around: the costs are fixed by the size of your research grant but the outcome is very uncertain. More money means that you can do more research and learn more but sometimes what you learn is that what you want is impossible or, as was the case with fusion, much, much harder than you realized.
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Some good points, but the JET tokamak (Culham, Oxfordshire, UK) achieved near to break-even fusion back in 1997 (with non-superconducting magnets).
(The BBC documentary series Horizon covered JET with their "Hot Jam in the Doughnut" episode first broadcast 16 March 1992) - parts of which can be found on Youtube.
The performance of JET prompted the building of the ITER reactor (to achieve break-even) by scaling up the size, and using "conventional" superconducting magnets. That effort however is a massive int
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ITER Q>=5 for eight minutes minimum, Q>10 for bursts. SPARC Q=2 for 10 seconds.
What that tells me is that SPARC is a baby step on from JET and nowhere near power generation of any sort whatsoever.
However the problem remains that fusion research has been starved of funding.
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Journalism's r
Re:Well, this is beyond me, but hopeful? (Score:5, Informative)
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..
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Correction: they use superconductors made from alloys of niobium (Nb), not nickel (Ni). See NbTi [wikipedia.org] and Nb3Sn.
Re: Well, this is beyond me, but hopeful? (Score:1)
Re:Well, this is beyond me, but hopeful? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Well, this is beyond me, but hopeful? (Score:4, Insightful)
Borrowing a line form Bill Gates, " one fusion reactor [wikipedia.org] should be enough for every one".
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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.
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Solar is already cheaper than coal, cheaper than peak load gas plants, already. The peaker plants going out of service are being replaced by battery packs. Not minutes or seconds, 350 MW for 4 hours. Wind is getting cheaper too. Solar with storage is becoming viable. The amount of area devoted to public roads is more than area needed for solar. Add to it water bodies that would bene
Re: Well, this is beyond me, but hopeful? (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a Moore's law for solar panels and storage batteries. Instead of 18 months, it is 7 years. Every 7 years cost / kWh of solar panels and storage batteries halve. It has already reached a point, the cost of labor and other infrastructure is more expensive than the actual solar panels. So the 100% renewable energy future is not going to be as dire to the world. It would be, of course, devastating to oil companies and natural gas. Utilities will survive the switch.
People, industries, political parties and other allied services that depend on oil companies need to find an alternative source of sustenance soon. Else they go the way the coal companies are going now.
BS meter going off (Score:2)
The savings in snow removal costs alone is enough to pay for the roofs and the solar panels.
If that's true, why haven't highways been designed with roofs for decades? Especially considering that decades ago, the cost of snow removal was higher than it is today (because in inflation-adjusted currency, energy cost more back then; the snow-removal equipment cost more back then, etc).
Re: Well, this is beyond me, but hopeful? (Score:1)
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.
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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.
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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
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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
We'll just keep making more cool stuff (Score:2)
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
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If you think it can't possibly get any worse, just wait...
Which one should we build? (Score:2)
I know! Let's build the one that our studies say is likely to work.
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So, extrapolating... around 2260 we should have working fusion then.
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Preposterous!!! We won't last that long.
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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
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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
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Re: Fusion Power! (Score:2)
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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]!
High B field - smaller fusion reactor (Score:2)
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)
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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.
Even if that thing works (Score:2)
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
Re:Even if that thing works (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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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.
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Fallacy much?
Just 15 years away... (Score:2, Redundant)
for the last 50 years.
So close! (Score:2, Redundant)
Wow - to think we're just about 20 years away from real fusion energy!
Solar and Wind Power Works (Score:2, Offtopic)
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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.
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The Future (Score:2, Redundant)
We've been ten years away from economically viable nuclear fusion for the last fifty years.
Small nuclear fission reactors also worked fine (Score:2)
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.
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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.
Come back... (Score:3)
...after you convinced _one_ insurance company to cover it.
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meh (Score:2)
if solves climate change, stop climate tax? (Score:2)
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