A Garage-Sized Reactor Could Provide Limitless Energy With Magnet-Free Technology (interestingengineering.com) 75
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Interesting Engineering: Seattle-based Zap Energy is using a lesser-known approach to nuclear fusion to build modular, garage-sized reactors. They are cheaper and don't require the large, incredibly powerful magnets used in traditional fusion experiments. Ultimately, they may also provide a quicker route to achieving commercially viable nuclear fusion, a press statement reveals.
Nuclear fusion has the potential to remove our reliance on fossil fuels by providing a practically limitless energy source that produces power in a similar way to the Sun and the stars. Fusion experiments, such as Europe's ITER, typically rely on large donut-shaped tokamak reactors using extremely powerful magnets to control the plasma generated during the fusion reaction. Zap Energy has developed a different approach with its Z-pinch technology. The company uses an electromagnetic field instead of the expensive magnetic coils and shielding materials used in tokamaks. This, they say, pins the plasma inside a relatively small space and "pinches" it until it becomes hot and dense enough for the required reaction to take place.
Z-pinch technology was first thought up in the 1950s, but until recently, instability problems meant that research had been largely focused on the more stable tokamak technology. In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Washington proposed the use of sheared axial flow to smooth the plasma streams, preventing distortions that previously led to instability. One of the authors of that study, Uri Shumlak, co-founded Zap Energy in 2017 in a bid to leverage the sheared axial flow technique to make Z-pinch technology commercially viable. Just last week, Zap Energy reached a key milestone by creating the first plasmas inside its prototype reactor, called the FuZE-Q. The Zap Energy team also just closed a $160-million Series C funding round, which will help it to further develop its Z-pinch technology and hopefully bring it to the market. The company says its reactors could be small enough to fit inside a garage, meaning it could give both micro nuclear reactor and nuclear fusion firms a run for their money.
Nuclear fusion has the potential to remove our reliance on fossil fuels by providing a practically limitless energy source that produces power in a similar way to the Sun and the stars. Fusion experiments, such as Europe's ITER, typically rely on large donut-shaped tokamak reactors using extremely powerful magnets to control the plasma generated during the fusion reaction. Zap Energy has developed a different approach with its Z-pinch technology. The company uses an electromagnetic field instead of the expensive magnetic coils and shielding materials used in tokamaks. This, they say, pins the plasma inside a relatively small space and "pinches" it until it becomes hot and dense enough for the required reaction to take place.
Z-pinch technology was first thought up in the 1950s, but until recently, instability problems meant that research had been largely focused on the more stable tokamak technology. In 2019, a group of researchers from the University of Washington proposed the use of sheared axial flow to smooth the plasma streams, preventing distortions that previously led to instability. One of the authors of that study, Uri Shumlak, co-founded Zap Energy in 2017 in a bid to leverage the sheared axial flow technique to make Z-pinch technology commercially viable. Just last week, Zap Energy reached a key milestone by creating the first plasmas inside its prototype reactor, called the FuZE-Q. The Zap Energy team also just closed a $160-million Series C funding round, which will help it to further develop its Z-pinch technology and hopefully bring it to the market. The company says its reactors could be small enough to fit inside a garage, meaning it could give both micro nuclear reactor and nuclear fusion firms a run for their money.
Say Palladium in the name and you got it (Score:5, Insightful)
Buzz-word compliant nuclear fussion that you can promote on indiegogo, Kickstarter, or a SPAC.
Winning! Ka-shing!
"Say Palladium in the name and you got it" (Score:3, Funny)
That sounds like a line from a future Broadway play.
If it's not, it should be.
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It reads like total bullshit from the outset - They are implying that Z-pinch hasn't been pursued in a long time when in reality Z-pinch has similar funding to Tokamak, albeit mostly within USA.
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Re: Say Palladium in the name and you got it (Score:2)
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Re:Say Palladium in the name and you got it (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike the ITER Tokomak design, which is still predicting first plasma some time around 2025 break-even some time mid 2025, these guys reckon that at 650KA current levels they will see scientific breakeven (ie. when the plasma makes more energy than that put into it to fuse) by mid 2023, so only a year to wait on that one - and engineering breakeven (when the whole device makes more energy that was put into it) by 2026, and commercial breakeven somewhere at the 1.5MA to 2 MA power level.
Their latest completed device is presently generating 500A currents.
If they can get this to work, it's also got another big advantage - because of how it operates, if they leave one end of the device open, you basically have a fusion rocket so it could be used for spaceflight applications.
Back in Dec 2021, they said they would have their demo FuZE-Q reactor by mid 2022, which they have now achieved, so so far they are on track. They are at 500KA now and recon with 650KA
I really hope they can get this to work. I don't think it will happen fast enough to be a fix for global warming and short term need to replace fossil fuels, but long term it will allow for much greater growth in our use of energy compared to renewables which will hit a limit or at least tradeoffs in land and resource use eventually, as well as offer better power options for space exploration than what we currently have.
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Looks a lot more promising than Tokamok fusion though, which 60yrs and tens of billions of dollars later has yet to produce sustained, reliable outputs required for commercial viability.
The reality is that it looks far, far less promising than the tokamak.
Z-pinch systems are not new, They were invented before the tokamak and have been around for 70 years now. The technology has been worked on many, many times over the years. Tokamak technology has reached the stage - in peer reviewed work, not start-up press releases - that performance can be reliably scaled, and systems operating in the break-even regime actually exist. ITER is an engineering system to develop the technology to commercial
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I skimmed but didn't see the part where they explain how this is cold fusion and not hot fusion. I did see the part where they got $160m in funding for their concept, however.
Re: Say Palladium in the name and you got it (Score:2)
People have been building these things for years. The are several small designs in the running. We have six minutes of power.
Reads like an advertorial (Score:1)
Interesting topic, but I'd rather see something that doesn't sound like it was a warmed-over press release made to look like a scientific news article.
No thank you (Score:3)
14 MeV neutrons in my garage? No offense but I decline.
Re:No thank you (Score:4, Funny)
1.21 jiggawatts ought to be enough for anybody!
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IIUC it's the size of your garage. This means it probably won't fit into it. Of course, the summary is fluffy enough that your reading could be correct.
It's interesting, and I'm glad that someone is exploring it. But as an uninformed bystander, I'm glad it isn't with my money.
Re:No thank you (Score:4, Funny)
Could this be scaled down (Score:2)
"Limitless Energy" (Score:5, Insightful)
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Limitless Energy. You keep using that term. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Indeed. It was the first Big Lie of the nuclear industry and it seems some scummy wannabe fusion people have started to use it too now.
Re: "Limitless Energy" (Score:3)
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I've seen people claim that the "too cheap to meter" claim which goes along with it was about fusion, but it wasn't. To be fair, many people at the time said it was BS, but it has unfortunately been remembered as something to use as a pejorative. Ironically, wind power is sometimes too cheap, but we know that because it is metered. :)
This leads us to the obvious question: If the hydrogen used for nuclear fusion comes from steam reforming, is it still green energy?
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Lewis Strausss' "too cheap to meter" was referring to fission, not fusion.
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Lewis Strausss' "too cheap to meter" was referring to fission, not fusion.
Indeed.
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"too cheap to be metered, just as we have water today that's too cheap to be metered." That day, he said, might be "close at hand. I hope to live to see it."
Um, sorry bub, but we pay quite a bit for water.
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And it's something one guy said.
You could make an impressive list of stupid things said by solar power advocates, for example, we don't typically do rotten cherry picking of things like this to evaluate what a technology can do.
Z-Machine (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Skeptical (Score:2)
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Please let us know your physics credentials so we can ascertain whether your skepticism is informed or you merely running off at the fingers.
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It doesn't take physics credentials. What were the physics credentials of the moron journalists who bought this PR hook line and sinker? The only credentials needed are a BS detector, though that credential seems to be in decline these days.
And the best part (Score:2)
Wat? (Score:5, Interesting)
The company uses an electromagnetic field instead of the expensive magnetic coils and shielding materials used in tokamaks.
So... translating from the original Idiot: The machine will, instead of using electromagnetic coils for containment, use... electromagnetic coils for containment.
Brilliant!
Personally I suspect Germany's W7-X Stellerator is going to steal their thunder as tokamak alternative.
Using modern computing power to control the electromagnetic fields to deal with plasma instabilities isn't a terrible idea, but the sensing problem to make it actually work is difficult, to say the least. Tokomaks try to dodge the problem by just having a big honking volume of vacuum for the plasma to wobble around in. The Stellerator design attempts to eliminate the instability by putting a twist into the magnetic field. (A series of twists, to be precise.) The plasma behaves better when it has magnetic field lines to follow which turn it back onto itself. Z-pinch tries to prevent the instabilities with a somewhat different arrangement of the magnetic field lines. It remains to be seen if either method can actually work. They both depend on a closed feedback loop between the electromagnetic coil controllers and the plasma sensors, and unlike Z-pinch with their thirsty press release, the German team has admitted that is a hard problem to solve.
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Based on recent action, I think that unless it puts out a steady stream of carbon, neither Germany nor California is going to want it.
Bonus points if it funds an authoritarian regime, of course.
Re:Wat? (Score:5, Interesting)
The difference is instead of using electromagnetic coils to create a magnetic field to confine the plasma like a tokomak or stellarator uses, with Z-Pinch, they run a massive current through the conductive column of plasma itself, which acts like a wire, and the resulting magnetic field causes the plasma to be compressed - hence the name.
The problem with this approach in the past is that the resulting field was not sufficiently stable and the plasma was not sufficiently well confined.
The "magic sauce" of these guys is that they have a column of plasma which has a laminar flow with an outer sheath of plasma with an inner core moving at a different speed. This keeps the plasma stable 5000 times longer than the previous methods, and all their simulations and experiments so far seem to indicate that it stays stable even as they scale up the process.
They are at 500KA of current so far, claim they will reach physics breakeven at 650KA next year, Engineering break even at 750KA and commercial break even at the 1000-1500 KA
so about 1/3 of the way there.
The biggest challenge is getting a big enough current pulse, which needs huge capacitor banks charged to about 10kV voltage levels and some serious power switching gear that can release it in a short massive pulse of current.
Re: Wat? (Score:2)
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They are at 500KA of current so far, claim they will reach physics breakeven at 650KA next year, Engineering break even at 750KA and commercial break even at the 1000-1500 KA
Currents are not measured in KelvinAmperes. Yes, case matters.
Zed P M (Score:1)
The Z-Pinch Machine, "providing virtually limitless energy". Rodney McKay must be proud! ... anyone?
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How to think about fusion projects (Score:4)
Sabine Hossenfelder has a very informative video on how to understand a fusion system. [youtube.com] I learned the following from that:
In fusion, Q = (energy out) / (energy in)
There are two key questions:
1) What's the Q_plasma (Q_plasma = (energy into the plasma) / (energy coming out of the plasma))
The plasma is the core "goo" that generates the work-producing heat.
2) What's the Q_total (Q_total = (energy into the reactor) / (energy coming out of the reactor))
Q_total is the money shot, more energy out than energy in, from the entire system.
Problem: Fusion reactors require a lot of energy to run. Q_plasma measures a small subsystem of that total energy. And that's what's typically reported. Add to that the efficiency of converting the heat to electrical energy, optimistically at 50%. So, ITER reports a Q_plasma of 10, but a Q_total of .67. That's before the conversion of heat to electrical energy.
Also, it was noted here in a previous discussion, fusion is actually unremarkable. A university lab or a suitably equipped maker lab is able to create an apparatus that creates fusion, a Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor [makezine.com]. It creates fusion. But it again uses up more energy than it generates. But of course, that is the holy grail of fusion - creating more energy out than goes in.
Re:How to think about fusion projects (Score:4)
Sorry - one major edit: The Q's in my numbered questions are wrong - they should be (energy out) / (energy in).
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Sorry - one major edit: The Q's in my numbered questions are wrong - they should be (energy out) / (energy in).
Roger that. And the energy out is still a lot less than the energy in. The Q claimed breathlessy was .78, and the previous record of .76 was quite a few years ago.
What's worse, the parasitic losses weren't taken into effect. What it was was only the power in to the fusion capsule to the Power out.
Not the magnets, the cooling, and all the other stuff required to keep the thing in one piece.
I'd have to look it up - but I think when all that is taken into account, the Q is something like .01. But it's
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Wut... We harness gravity all the time - it's what makes hydro dams work.
Re: How to think about fusion projects (Score:2)
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I have this sneaky feeling that if viable, commercial fusion is ever achieved, it will be because of some unexpected breakthrough with 'small scale' fusion like the fusor. Not that I'm holding my breath for that to happen either. It's just that if a reliable crystal ball predicted it would happen, but not how, then I would bet it would be happening because of something like the fusor.
why aren't fusion systems dynamic (Score:2)
in spite of the fact that i hate these, generate excitement so we can raise more money press releases, i'm actually going to give this method the benefit of the doubt. why ? because it doesn't really try to do inertial confinement. it takes the fact that the plasma wants to get out of whatever bottle you try to put it in and uses that to make it work. or at least i think it does.
i've often wondered why fusion systems try to put the plasma in a bottle. it wants to escape, so let it.
let the plasma run down
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in spite of the fact that i hate these, generate excitement so we can raise more money press releases, i'm actually going to give this method the benefit of the doubt. why ? because it doesn't really try to do inertial confinement. it takes the fact that the plasma wants to get out of whatever bottle you try to put it in and uses that to make it work.
Ready to do the neutron dance? Remember , fusion power is sold as having almost no radiation. Assuming that you could run one with no containment, the nearby area would become intensely radioactive. This is already an issue with contained systems.
Re: why aren't fusion systems dynamic (Score:2)
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Containment is advantageous because it means you can do fusion at a lower temperature. The sun isn't actually hot enough for much fusion to occur normally, but it keeps enough nuclei bouncing around together indefinitely that they fuse mostly via tunnelling.
The other issue with letting the plasma escape is that you spent all that energy heating it up and compressing it. Inertia confinement and z-pinch fusion is attractive because it usually works okay at small scales and would make a nifty spacecraft drive,
(Batteries not included) (Score:2)
(Some assembly required)
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"Too Cheap To Meter" (circa 1954) (Score:2)
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Not with all that TetraEthyl lead [hackaday.com] in their bones.
Just keep in mind limitless energy = cinder earth (Score:1)
Ignoring climate change, if humans merely continue to increase energy at the same rate they have since 1600, the earth will pass the boiling point of water within 400 years.
The earth can only radiate so much heat from the surface. All energy use produces waste heat.
Of course, I think global warming is going to severely mess things up within 30 years, I guess it's moot.
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you're hilarious, a pregnant woman would be the size of the solar system in 400 years too. New York would be covered in 10 miles of horse manure (but wait we went to automobiles).
What if we went to solar arrays or wind and energy storage, then there would be zero net heating of Earth even with waste heat.
The foolish them Biden administration is doing is ignoring the absolute fact that we need massive fossil fuel use in present to bootstrap any green energy infrastructure at a scale that would make any diff
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Two completely different systems.
The average energy consumed per human being has been increasing at a low exponential rate since 1600. It continues to increase close to that rate per day. And when we talk about *UNLIMITED* energy, we are also talking about *UNLIMITED* waste heat.
You just can't get around that hard physical fact of thermo dynamics by playing word games.
It has nothing to do with being green or global warming.
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You're confused and wrong, if our energy came from solar or wind there would be zero net heating, that is absolute thermodynamic truth. Back to school for you, you missed important concept.
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I'm not sure about wind-- haven't dug into it. But would *absolutely* apply to solar. Energy that was being reflected back to space as light will be converted to additional waste heat.
You are worse than confused and wrong- you are in denial of reality. And that has lead to massive problems many times in history- including climate change which is going to royally mess up life for anyone under 40, definitely cause forced mass migration, and move the rain off of current croplands into areas that will take
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You don't know energy from Sun causes wind to blow? Absolute fact, if there were no sun, there would be no wind.
I'm not in denial of any reality, I was speaking *if* all our energy came from solar (and solar derived sources like wind) then there could never be any net heating of earth by our use of energy. Basic thermodynamics.
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Of course I know that... but other than saying extracting energy from wind will definitely create extra waste heat, I'm not well versed on the figures in that area. It seems not many people have considered it.
I did find this.
[the 2008 study]..." states that 20-50% of the energy consumed during industrial manufacturing processes is lost as waste heat with about 60% being released as low-grade waste heat at a temperature below 230 ÂC (450 ÂF) "
And this on energy losses by generators
https://www.link [linkedin.com]
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Energy in must equal all energies out including waste heat, there is no source for any extra or long stored energy (e.g. fossil fuel burned) in your scenario. So a generator with wind energy input, must equal generator power out plus waste heat out. Pure conservation of energy.
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I think there was a movie recently about this. Yeah, some guy had like a glove and snapped his fingers and a whole bunch of people disappeared. I can't remember the title of it though.
Yet another Fusion story. (Score:1)
Wake me up when they manage to get it to work on a scale that's practical.
We are one step closer to NNS (Score:2)
Yes, I've waited decades for NNS [youtube.com] and it looks like it will be finally achievable in my lifetime!!
ITER is more than European (Score:2)
ITER is an international project with the EU but also many countries like India, China, USA and others. The experimental reactor is indeed in France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Fusion? Sure, but... (Score:2)
I'm not sure we should be putting so many resources into nuclear fusion when after 60-plus years it's still always "just around the corner". Instead I think we should be pushing for thorium-based molten salt reactors [wikipedia.org], one of which ran critical for 15K hours almost 60 years ago and basically demonstrated a strong likelihood of viability for electrical power generation.
Three-minute thorium reactor bullet points video [youtube.com]
TEDx talk by a thorium reactor evangelist [youtube.com]
Debunking a misguided criticism of these reactor [daretothink.org]
Thorium (Score:1)