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Power Science

MIT-Designed Project Achieves Major Advance Toward Fusion Energy (mit.edu) 148

Posted by BeauHD from the watershed-moment dept.
David Chandler writes via MIT News: It was a moment three years in the making, based on intensive research and design work: On Sept. 5, for the first time, a large high-temperature superconducting electromagnet was ramped up to a field strength of 20 tesla, the most powerful magnetic field of its kind ever created on Earth. That successful demonstration helps resolve the greatest uncertainty in the quest to build the world's first fusion power plant that can produce more power than it consumes, according to the project's leaders at MIT and startup company Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS). That advance paves the way, they say, for the long-sought creation of practical, inexpensive, carbon-free power plants that could make a major contribution to limiting the effects of global climate change.

Developing the new magnet is seen as the greatest technological hurdle to making that happen; its successful operation now opens the door to demonstrating fusion in a lab on Earth, which has been pursued for decades with limited progress. With the magnet technology now successfully demonstrated, the MIT-CFS collaboration is on track to build the world's first fusion device that can create and confine a plasma that produces more energy than it consumes. That demonstration device, called SPARC, is targeted for completion in 2025.
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MIT-Designed Project Achieves Major Advance Toward Fusion Energy More

MIT-Designed Project Achieves Major Advance Toward Fusion Energy

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  • Progress happens.

    • In the case of fusion, at a rate measured on the Planck scale.

    • Re:Progress (Score:5, Interesting)

      by MacMann ( 7518492 ) on Thursday September 09, 2021 @12:42AM (#61778135)

      Progress happens.

      Progress happens when people are putting an effort into making progress. I'm seeing far too many people assume that progress happens only because time has passed.

  • Fusion! (Score:3, Funny)

    by TechyImmigrant ( 175943 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @09:10PM (#61777743) Homepage Journal

    John McLaughlin has been producing fusion for decades.

  • Advanced fission reactors are still a much more plausible solution, but keep chipping away at fusion, maybe it'll actually happen at some point.

    • That corner does keep getting closer. That they have a plausible path to a demonstration in 5 years is a big improvement from the "maybe in 30 years" that fusion was stuck in for decades! Mega-projects like ITER have the problem that by the time it's built the design will be 30 years out of date. This project takes advantage of more modern technology to allow faster development at a smaller scale. This has of course been the story with every fusion startup that's made a splash in the news over the last few

  • What exactly did they do with these 'high temperature superconductor' magnets? Which material is being used? What was the breakthrough? These pop-science articles are fun and all, but if someone doesn't know what a fusion reactor is, they can look it up on Wikipedia.

    • There is a review set of papers at https://www.cambridge.org/core... [cambridge.org] (that I'm too lazy to read right now, but they look like good review articles on the project)

    • Re:technical details? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @10:33PM (#61777909)

      Without even looking it up I can tell you it is a hybrid of a Bitter and superconducting electromagnets.

      From the headline and summary it is also clear that there is no "breakthrough," this is an "advance" that was a matter of engineering and implementing something that is difficult and expensive to realize.

      Superconducting electromagnets usually are limited to 10-20T. A Bitter electromagnet is limited to about 2T. But the biggest hybrid in the world is 45T. This is basically the only game in town for a 20T+ electromagnet.

      The point is certainly that it is shaped correctly for some known fusion reactor design.

      • There is a competing fusion startup called "Tokamak Energy", aiming to produce a similar high-temperature superconductor small Tokamak (but using a spherical tokamak geometry). The company is a de-facto spin-off from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (Oxfordshire, UK).

        Tokamak Energy announced a 24.4T field at 21K with a REBCO HTS engineering test magnet during September 2019.

        They have some technical detail available in various videos on their YouTube channel.

        Announcement video was titled "HTS progress an

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by ElGuapo2872 ( 1183509 )
        This is not a hybrid, there is a 32T all superconducting magnet, which I worked on, that made field back in 2017. With the advances in conductor technology in the past 15 years we have moved far away from your 10-20T threshold. This magnet makes a very high field in a non-solenoid shape (HARD) and operates at temperatures the conductors you mentioned are even superconductors. These are NOT hybrid magnets.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Whibla ( 210729 )

      What exactly did they do with these 'high temperature superconductor' magnets? Which material is being used? What was the breakthrough?

      If memory serves they're using ReBCO Tape [fusionenergybase.com] wound / layered back on itself many times over.

  • I'm not a nuclear physicist but for say a Tokamak fusion reactor doesn't the field have to be shaped in a torus? Or is this what they managed to do, create a 20 Tesla magnetic field in the shape of a torus? Or was it a magnetic field of 20 Teslas? What I'm curious about is how much work they will have to shape a field that powerful. If that is the next step I wonder if they are minimizing it.

    • Re:Don't they also have to shape the magnetic fiel (Score:5, Funny)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @10:06PM (#61777869)

      Or was it a magnetic field of 20 Teslas?

      Sheesh. Some people are just hellbent to work Elon Musk into any story

    • there's a video, with title that starts with "Unlocking SPARC" near the bottom of the article's linked page that answers your question, 18 such 20 Telsla magnets will be arranged around a toroid

    • Though the magnetics I work with fit on a tabletop, I can tell you, the only way to shape a strong magnetic field is with an array of magnets. It doesn't matter how your generate the field. Each field has 2 poles, you can you can only shape the field from each source in minor ways by making it lopsided. Think ellipses. To make another shape, you need an array of sources.

      See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
      A torus is just a cylinder wrapped into a circle.

  • What is it? 20 tesla is high, but it's not like it's groundbreaking. Hell, Bruker's been selling 21.2 tesla systems for NMR use for over a decade. So I am guessing it's the size and the material: this ain't your grandpappy's niobium-titanium superconducting wire. High-Tc SCs are pretty broad, would be helpful to know what and what Tc is. Are we talking MgB2 or something fancy-schmancy that gets Cooper pairs above 77K?

    • My understanding it is the physical size that is the break through. Basically toroids are used because it was not possible to get magnets to do something spherical which has long been known to be more efficient, simpler and compact. Put simply it got too crowded in the centre for it to work. More compact magnets make that a real possibility and its a huge leap forward as you could get the same power output as ITER from something a fraction of its size.

  • The Sun (Score:3)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Wednesday September 08, 2021 @11:01PM (#61777965) Homepage

    But we already have a SPARC, it comes from The Sun!

  • Researchers said that they have experienced one minor problem. Whenever they turn on the magnet, they hear the song "Come Together."

  • One Day... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Thursday September 09, 2021 @02:02AM (#61778183)
    ... we might be lucky enough to get an article where the author actually lays out a map of the plan to achieve fusion, with known future milestones laid out and described.

    Many [if not most] slashdot readers are either professional technologists or people who spend a lot of their time working with technology - most of us have come across project plans and understand not only how they work, but how they allow us to estimate delivery times.

    Where's the project plan for fusion power?

    Some of it we hear about as researchers make related breakthroughs - here, for example, is an achievement related to magnetic field strength. We've seen other attempts achieve plasma, if only for brief periods. Seems to me that there should be some sort of basic checklist involved here:-

    1. Achieve plasma - recreate conditions needed for fusion to occur
    2. Develop containment - produce a magnetic field capable of safely holding fusing nuclei
    3. Energy transfer - develop the means to extract the heat energy to be used for electricity generation
    4. Fueling - Build a mechanism to allow more fuel to be added to the fusion chamber while it is running
    5. Exhaust - Design a way to get fused nuclei out of the fusion chamber while it is running
    6. Control - Figure out how to control the rate of fusion [see 4] like the control rods of a fission reactor
    7. etc.

    I'm sure the above is largely wrong, but hopefully it is close enough to illustrate my point. I'm also not suggesting that the research teams currently working on fusion don't have all this very clearly mapped out.

    My issue lies mainly with the reporting on developments in this field, which all tend to be breathtaking, gushing, puff pieces telling us what wonderful progress is happening... and while that may be true, the needle on the dial doesn't even blip.

    This is just a wild guess, but do you suppose that articles like this are necessary to the projects, which rely so heavily on public funding for their funds? Do you suppose that in order to get lawmakers to agree to budgets, they have to come up with creative ways to demonstrate progress?

    If so, I'd worry that pieces like this might end up having the opposite effect - lots of talk, no measurable progress.

    • Welcome to the world, it is messy and things often happen out of order.

      FWIW on your chart we are working on step 2, it doesn't matter if the other steps are out of order because 1 and 2 aren't

      • Could you explain or maybe link to explanation of how they plan to/do extract energy from the fusion reaction? This has always seemed like a big question mark to me.

        • Re:One Day... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by ytene ( 4376651 ) on Thursday September 09, 2021 @09:57AM (#61779241)
          The best explanation I came across was unfortunately not in documentation, but from comments made by physicist formerly working on ITER [iter.org].

          Approximated, his explanation was something along these lines: "First we need to achieve sustainable, containable fusion. Those are two very significant milestones to reach, but once we accomplish this, we hope and believe that we will be able to run a thin fluid jacket between the inner walls of the toroid and the actual plasma chamber, one that is physically connected via a thermally conductive compound. We will then simply circulate a thermal transfer fluid through the jacket - pump it in cold and pump it out hot, transferring that thermal energy to generators."

          I asked if their calculations had given any insight as to things like operational temperatures or estimates of energy transfer. Apparently they had, but this individual was not at liberty to discuss that publicly. However, it's probably also important that I point out the conversation took place just under 35 years ago, so I'm guessing that designs will have been adjusted since then, perhaps in several key ways. For one, it is starting to look as though the largely uniform original toroid design [researchgate.net] is now being challenged, using results from practical experiments and calculations, with more exotic designs such as the Stellerator [wikipedia.org].

          Trying to compare the original ITER toroid and the Stellerator from the perspective of understanding thermal transfer is difficult - especially as the entire reason for looking at the Stellerator over the original toroid was the concern that the toroid model would be insufficient to raise the temperature of the fuel to fusion temperatures - 100 million degrees - and then safely maintain it there.

          Not least among the challenges just lining up to be tackled... how do you keep all your superconducting magnets cooled to operationally efficient temperatures when the plasma you're trying to contain needs to exist at 100 million centigrade? Perhaps - and I'm guessing here - the temperature gradient is *so* intense that the energy transfer process doesn't really have to be remotely efficient, it just needs to be able to 1) survive; and 2) function.

          Part of the challenge is that a workable fusion reactor looks like it is going to need a successive chain of "moonshot results" to be viable.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pascoea ( 968200 )
          They turn it off, take the new energy out, then turn it back on for a bit.

    • Re:One Day... (Score:4, Informative)

      by JustinOpinion ( 1246824 ) on Thursday September 09, 2021 @07:48AM (#61778789)
      There isn't a single project plan for fusion (that I'm aware of), mostly because this is a challenging problem being attacked by a host of different organizations (some publicly funded, some commercial) across many different countries. However, there is communication and coordination among these efforts, and they do have concrete plans that are moving steadily towards viable fusion power.

      For example, the US fusion community has produced several reports (2018 [nap.edu], 2019 [nationalacademies.org], 2020 [arxiv.org]). The US Department of Energy is one key player in this space (here are the reports for various sub-topics [osti.gov]). A key aspect of the current fusion strategy is ITER [wikipedia.org], which has a set of concrete milestones [iter.org].

      If you glance through those reports, you will see they are more focused on fundamental science aspects, rather than the more practical milestones you mentioned. This is in part because these public reports are issued by organizations whose mission is to pursue fundamental research (and then pass those results onto industry for commercialization), and partly because there are indeed many fundamental science and engineering questions that need to be resolved.

      The EUROfusion roadmap [euro-fusion.org] (2018 [euro-fusion.org]) provides a plan for successive projects (ITER and beyond) in a transition to viable power plants.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by ytene ( 4376651 )
        That's entirely fair... and it's also entirely reasonable for us to point out that attempting a project as complex and daunting as this using a waterfall methodology [i.e. start with "step 1" and keep at it until you succeed] is potentially detrimental to the overall program, because we could easily waste time, money and effort on "hard problems" when we could have been solving easier parts of the overall program which would then in turn have given us insights to the more difficult bits.

        So I do understan
  • What they have done is to take a small stack of 16 layers of coils, cooled it down to below 20 Kelvin, sent current and produced a magnetic field of 20 tesla at the peak.

    They plan to arrange 16 or 32 of these coils to form a torus.

    Then cool all of them and energize all the coils.

    At the center line they will get 20 tesla magnetic field.

    From there they hope that is enough to contain a plasma, which will be introduced somehow into the center line without disrupting the toroidal field

    Then the plasma will undergo fusion, release energy. They hope.

    Then they will extract the energy, without disrupting the field, and without heating the coils above 20 K.

    What happens if the cooling is disrupted?

    Coils carrying several kilo amperes of current will suddenly have a non-zero resistance. The joule heating will melt all the coils in an instant. That much of heat could vaporize the cooling fluid, and the containment vessel can explode.

    So most likely they will have material already in the ring, run the fusion reaction, show some calculations and estimates that it produced more energy than consumed for a few milli seconds. Thats the best you can expect in 2025.

    What else could be happening in 2025 in power sector?

    In 2025 the lithium ion battery is likely to be cheaper than 100 $ / kWh. Even in 2018 price of 150 $/kWh many retiring peaker power plants were being replaced by battery packs. At 100 $/kWh existing gas powered peaker plants will start being moth balled and replaced by battery packs. With 30 minutes of emergency power available in the batteries, all surge pricing will be gone from the power generation market.

    Its like the solid state drive vs spinning magnets. SSD never beat magnetic discs in price ever. Eventually some features of SSD made it worth while to pay the higher price. Fusion is unlikely to beat solar/wind + batteries in price ever. May be it will have features and applications that solar+wind+batteries can't do. May be some time in the next century.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Pascoea ( 968200 )

      At 100 $/kWh existing gas powered peaker plants will start being moth balled and replaced by battery packs. With 30 minutes of emergency power available in the batteries, all surge pricing will be gone from the power generation market.

      Good thing peaker plants only need to run for 30 minutes at a time. /s

      How it ACTUALLY works is that the big baseline (coal/nuclear/hydro*) plants operate at essentially a steady state, with very little headroom to increase capacity, and can't/don't change their output that much. Smaller (generally coal or gas boilers) plants are able to be brought online and offline as-needed, but this still takes hours to days to accomplish, and is generally planned well in advance. They can vary their output, but this s

      • The planned battery packs are not millisecond microsecond grid stabilization batteries

        Solid 350 MW x 4 hours. That is the size. New peaker plant permit application backlog/pipeline is gone. Existing approved and funded plants nearing completion will be finished. Some will be finished and kept as reserve. Plants that have not reached point of no return are likely to be put on hold. Plants with permits but without actual investment are likely to be canceled.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Pascoea ( 968200 )

          New peaker plant permit application backlog/pipeline is gone. Existing approved and funded plants nearing completion will be finished. Some will be finished and kept as reserve. Plants that have not reached point of no return are likely to be put on hold. Plants with permits but without actual investment are likely to be canceled.

          Would love to see sources on that. I'm not saying you're wrong, but I can't find any reliable information.

          Solid 350 MW x 4 hours.

          Good, now build 50 of them, that'll handle California's current peaker needs. Like I said in a different comment, I'm not saying it can't be done, but that just seems like a tremendous waste of resources. And it neglects the environmental damage done by the mining and processing of the raw materials needed. I'm on board with getting rid of fossil fuels, I just don't think mega-batteries is a drop-in

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sfcat ( 872532 )
          CA alone uses 7GW of peaker capacity on a normal day. It can be 10GW on a big day. And CA is 1% of the world's energy usage. And that battery is 4% of the world's current battery output by itself. I think your understanding of the grid and how it works is perhaps missing a few zeros.
          • The solar output goes up along with demand. The short fall is in the late afternoon after solar goes away but the air conditioning load persists. The proverbial "neck of the duck curve" [nuscalepower.com]. To handle the neck using solar, we need 69 GWh of storage. The current projects underway in CA, two 350 MW x 4hr and one 175 MW x 4hr come to around 4 GWh.

            Worldwide battery production capacity is at around 300 GWh. We need 700 GWh for USA, and 3.5 TWh for the whole world to retire all the peaker plants. That is 12 years

    • What they have done is to take a small stack of 16 layers of coils, cooled it down to below 20 Kelvin, sent current and produced a magnetic field of 20 tesla at the peak.

      Incorrect. They cooled the coils down to 92 K. These are YBCO high temperature superconducting coils, which can operate well above liquid nitrogen temperatures. That was the whole point of this construction effort. ITER uses liquid helium. SPARC uses liquid nitrogen, making the coils far more compact for the same magnetic field strength.

      What happens if the cooling is disrupted?

      Coils carrying several kilo amperes of current will suddenly have a non-zero resistance. The joule heating will melt all the coils in an instant.

      It is considerably easier to maintain liquid nitrogen temperatures than it is to maintain liquid helium temperatures. Overclocker kids on YouTube do it routinely on th

  • I'm pretty sure the major advance is a general delusion. We have been 99% of the way to practical fusion 99% of the time.

  • SPARC? Really?

    That's just asking for a litigious organization known for suing the shit out of anyone and everyone that gets remotely close to anything they own, and also known for having very deep pockets, to file "injunctive relief" against you.

  • 20 teslas is impressive, but neutrons will not be impressed and will still hammer the device to death.

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